TUMEN, CHINA -Set on the northern bank of the muddy Tumen River, this Chinese border town has one of the saddest backdrops in the world. Just across the river lies North Korea. It is so close that from a room in a local hotel, you can sit by a window and watch North Koreans trudging around the scrawny town of Namyang below the rugged hills on the far side of the river.
Officially, this is a friendly border. Two bridges span the river here, one rail and one road. But there is little traffic across them, and a vast difference between the two sides. On the North Korean shore, the most noticeable landmark among a huddle of dreary concrete buildings is a big portrait of the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, gazing into China. At night, like the famous satellite pictures of North Korea (which shows up as a near-blank surrounded by a blaze of lights), the space below him is almost dark.
And while China by most comparisons is no free country, next to North Korea it is a land of liberty and wealth. On the Chinese side, there are bright street lamps along a river promenade, neon signs in the town of 136,000; restaurants and shops, pedicabs and cars.
The Chinese guard tower that straddles the entry to the road-bridge across the border has become a tourist site. Buses of South Korean and Chinese tourists roll up daily. They park in front of souvenir stands selling cosmetic cases, Russian chocolates, fur hats, tinned sardines, North Korean liquor, ginseng and photo albums of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. For a fee amounting to about $3, the sight-seers are allowed to walk past the Chinese guard gate and out onto the bridge until they reach a painted white line that marks the border no-go zone. There, they turn around and with North Korea in the background they smile for the camera.
If you have binoculars, which the Chinese souvenir stands also sell, you can zoom in on the guard huts placed every few hundred yards along the North Korean side of the riverbank, half-hidden by the thick foliage edging the water. These provide shelter for North Korean armed sentries, who emerge periodically to patrol along the river. Their main chore is not to keep intruders out, but to keep North Koreans in. The river in these parts runs so shallow in many places that it's possible to wade across.
On a recent afternoon, I watched a group of South Korean tourists descend the riverbank on the Chinese side, don orange life preservers and board bamboo punts to be poled across the river. They came so close to the North Korean shore that the passengers could have stepped off onto the turf of Kim Jong Il (none did).
Without life preservers, and within range of the armed guards, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans over the last decade have braved this crossing in the other direction. Some have died trying.
Others have made it into China only to fall foul of a state policy that refuses to recognize any of them as refugees. They are all deemed illegal immigrants, to be captured and sent back. On the far side of Tumen, surrounded by a high wall, stands a big white building with a faded red roof and round guard tower. Local residents say that this is the detention center where North Koreans, when they are caught in this area, are held before being sent back to North Korea. There, they can face retaliation as extreme as imprisonment in slave labor camps or, in some cases, public execution.
In many parts of the world, it would be normal near such a border to have a United Nations refugee camp ready to receive such escapees and at least provide haven until they could gain entry to a third country. In China, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, has a spacious office in Beijing. But in deference to the Chinese government's wishes, the UNHCR does not operate near the border and provides no systematic help for North Koreans trying to flee via China. The only real help comes from an underground railroad of private benefactors whom China also treats as criminals if they are caught. Some have served years in Chinese prisons for their pains.
The world has been hearing about this scene for years. There are many elaborate geopolitical rationales for why it must continue. But I can't help thinking all those fancy geostrategists ought to spend a week in Tumen and then ask themselves again: Why is this a norm they can accept?
