The Emperor Far Away (34 page)

To the rest of China, the north-east is still a place of grim and grey cities, its factories the Chinese equivalent of the dark satanic mills of the English industrial revolution. Its people are typecast too. The men are regarded as rough and ready with an appetite for alcohol and fighting. They are bigger than most Han, and a disproportionate number of China’s soldiers and nightclub bouncers are what the Chinese call Dongbeiren, or north-eastern people. The women, too, are taller than average and many have the milky white skin and big eyes that are the ideal of beauty in China.

Dongbei, though, is also the place where China is most likely to push its boundaries again, as it seeks to take advantage of its neighbours’ frailty and geographical isolation and turn them into de facto colonies. Sitting opposite the north of Dongbei is the Russian Far East, a vast, little-populated, underfunded region rich in natural resources that many Russians believe Beijing can’t wait to snap up.

North Korea is in an even worse position as it stubbornly sticks to its own unique version of an authoritarian state-controlled economy, a model that has been abandoned everywhere else in the world. A political pariah unable even to feed its own people or power their homes, the DPRK can only look to Beijing for support and is already little more than an economic vassal of China.

That Dongbei is the new front line of the Chinese empire is a historical irony, because until the seventeenth century it was not even part of it. Before then, the north-east was known to the Han as the ‘Land of the Northern Barbarians’. Just as the fort at Jiayuguan in Gansu Province marked the end of the Chinese realm in the west, so the Great Wall in Liaoning separated Han China from the untamed lands to the north. Outside Dandong, the remains of the Wall stand as a reminder that this was once the far northern frontier of China. Everything beyond it was Manchu territory, known in the west as Manchuria.

Originally, the Manchu were semi-nomadic tribes who roamed across what are now Dongbei, the Russian Far East and eastern Mongolia. Subdued, like everyone else, by Genghis Khan, the various Manchu clans were later allied to the Ming dynasty. But in the early seventeenth century they unified themselves under one leader and began marching south. In 1644, they seized Beijing and established the Qing dynasty. The Manchu were to be the last of China’s emperors, ruling until 1912.

Uniquely, the Manchu are the only one of China’s fifty-five minorities to have run the country, although various Mongolian dynasties displaced the Han throughout the country’s early history. That they did so for almost 300 years is all the more remarkable. But their reign came at a huge cost to the Manchu. It is a supreme paradox that the Qing extended the Chinese empire further than any Han dynasty, establishing the borders of what is essentially the China we know today, while losing much of their own homeland. Not only that, but their very identity was steadily diminished throughout their rule.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing emperors had begun to lose control of provincial China to warlords and rebellions. As they retreated further into the fantasy land of the Forbidden City, Russia appropriated much of northern Manchuria and absorbed it into the Russian Far East. At the same time, millions of Han were moving north to the then under-populated lands of Dongbei, a result of the Qing lifting their two-centuries-old ban on Han emigration to the region.

As the Qing grew ever weaker, Han resentment of their Manchu conquerors became far more pronounced and the familiar disdain and hatred of minorities began to emerge. In 1903, the proto-revolutionary Zou Rong made that explicit. He called for ‘the annihilation of five million or more of the furry and horned Manchu race, cleansing ourselves of 260 years of harsh and unremitting pain, so that the soil of the Chinese sub-continent is made immaculate’. Zou’s extreme theories on racial purity were espoused by Han intellectuals of the time including Sun Yat-sen, who became China’s first president in 1912.

But the Manchu weren’t wiped out in some Chinese precursor of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Instead the Han migrants to Manchuria began to marry the Manchu and make them Han. The Manchu tongue, which was always subordinate to Mandarin, became redundant, while their tribal culture and customs faded away until they were no more than a distant memory. So successfully were they assimilated that the number of pure Manchu left in China like Fei Fei, the woman I met in Urumqi, is tiny. Now, it is estimated that barely 100 people can speak their language.

Yet, in a contrary example of some Chinese opting to be classified as a minority, more and more people are claiming to be Manchu. Since the early 1980s, their numbers have doubled to over ten million, making them the third largest of China’s minorities. The increase is due to Han with Manchurian roots choosing to be registered as Manchu. They do so to avoid being subject to the one-child policy, or so their kids can score fewer points on the
gaokao
, the university entrance exam, and still win a place at college.

One of my former Chinese teachers defined herself as Manchu and liked to boast that her family had been friends with Puyi, the last of the Qing emperors, who ended his days as a humble gardener in Beijing. She believed that the Han still look down on the Manchu, making life difficult for them. But if that was the case, their numbers would surely be dropping. Becoming Manchu is regarded as a positive choice: a way of benefiting from the state’s preferential policies for minorities while knowing that nothing else, like language, religion or culture, marks them out from the Han.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in Guangxi Province in the south-west, where the Zhuang minority has increased to well over sixteen million people in recent years, making them the most numerous of all China’s minorities. Intermarriage between the Zhuang and Han is common, allowing people of mixed ancestry to claim to be Zhuang. But deciding to become a minority viewed as no threat by Beijing is very different from identifying yourself as Uighur or Tibetan. I have never heard of any Han choosing to do that, despite the opportunity to have more kids or go to university.

Around half of the new Manchu live in Liaoning in the five autonomous counties named for them, one of which is outside Dandong. But they are an irrelevance in the area, just like Manchuria is as dated a name for Dongbei as Formosa is for Taiwan. In Dandong, the Koreans are the only people of any significance who are not Han. The city has a large population of both North Koreans and ethnic Chinese Koreans, a result of it being China’s official gateway to the DPRK – a position which gives Dandong an importance out of all relation to its size.

Dandong is a springboard that allows China to plunge into the DPRK and expand its influence beyond its borders. Pyongyang has no choice but to acquiesce, because without Beijing’s support the Kim dynasty could not survive. China is its closest ally and regards the DPRK as a bulwark in a region where Japan and South Korea are firmly aligned with the United States. So Beijing props up North Korea, supplying it with up to one million tonnes of food aid annually, as well as a similar amount of crude oil and other essentials to keep the country from total collapse.

Virtually everything of any value in North Korea originates in China, and it mostly reaches the DPRK via Dandong. North Korean officials and businessmen, like the men I met on the train from Beijing, coming cap in hand on state-sponsored shopping trips are everywhere. Easily spotted by their badges proclaiming their loyalty to the various Kims, at night they haunt the Korean restaurants and karaoke bars within view of the DPRK itself. During the day, they congregate on the street by the border post beneath the bridge that leads to North Korea.

From the early morning to the late afternoon, the line of trucks waiting to cross into the DPRK tails back down the road. There are warehouses and wholesale shops all along it and a constant procession of North Koreans going in and out of them. They buy spark plugs and coils of wire, generators and tyres, household appliances and kitchenware. The goods are destined for North Korea’s armed forces, more than a million strong, for the few industrial concerns still working, or for the Pyongyang elite.

Other less legitimate trade opportunities abound in Dandong too. Photocopied sheets of paper taped to lampposts offer the chance to invest in dubious business schemes inside North Korea, while the smuggling of everything from mobile phones to rice is rampant. These illicit enterprises are largely controlled by the 5,000 or so North Koreans who live permanently in China and their equivalents across the border: the few thousand ethnic Chinese who are residents of the DPRK.

Some of China’s two million ethnic Korean citizens are also involved in trading with North Korea. Almost all of the Chinese Koreans, who mostly live in Jilin and Liaoning, have their roots in the DPRK and many still have relatives there. As such, they have the right to cross the nearby frontier, just as the minorities in Yunnan can travel to Myanmar and Laos. It is an easy matter for them to bribe the DPRK guards with a carton of cigarettes, so a blind eye is turned to what they bring in with them.

With China playing such a dominant role in the DPRK economy – the yuan has already superseded the North Korean won in some border areas – North Korea is on its way to becoming just another province of Dongbei. In return for Beijing’s aid shipments, Chinese companies have been allowed to set up joint ventures in the DPRK that are busy plundering some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of coal, iron ore and an assortment of minerals. New roads, almost certainly funded by China, are being built in North Korea too, despite the fact that hardly anyone in the DPRK owns a car, simply to facilitate closer economic ties with Dongbei.

Beijing does not even bother to treat North Korea as a country in its own right any more, much to the fury of South Korea, except when the DPRK is being targeted with sanctions by the United States or the UN and China is forced to offer public support to Pyongyang. Relations with North Korea are handled not by the Foreign Ministry, which deals with all China’s other neighbours, but by a combination of the CCP, the PLA and the Ministry of Commerce, as if the DPRK had already been absorbed into the Chinese empire.

Pyongyang is in no position to complain about Beijing’s blatant disregard for its sovereignty. So hungry is it for Chinese cash that a number of official North Korean restaurants are located in Dandong, as well as one in Beijing, their profits being remitted back home to the government. Despite my misgivings about helping to subsidise the Kim regime, I decided that a North Korean meal could be justified in the name of research. One night, I walked into one of the restaurants close to the Yalu River to be greeted by an attractive waitress in a red, flight-attendant-style uniform.

She spoke decent Chinese and was clearly used to westerners turning up and trying to pump her for tales of life inside North Korea. Like the businessmen in Dandong, the waitresses in the official DPRK restaurants are loyalists, otherwise they wouldn’t be in China at all. She soon became impatient with my attempts to make conversation, shoving a menu in front of me and brusquely telling me to hurry up and order.

I chose
bibim naeng myun
: cold buckwheat noodles served in a spicy soup – North Korea’s one notable contribution to world cuisine. The waitress marched off, leaving me alone in the restaurant apart from two middle-aged ladies who were downing glasses of
songak
, a white spirit that is the North Korean equivalent of China’s
baijiu
. I asked where they were from, already knowing the answer. They said almost nothing but did press a couple of glasses of
songak
on me, a drink as vile as
baijiu
. Then, like every other North Korean I had met, they disappeared, leaving me to my noodles.

Dandong’s North Koreans were not proving to be a profitable source of information. I hadn’t expected them to be. They are too tied to the regime to be anything but circumspect when a foreigner accosts them wanting to talk. Nor does Pyongyang trust even those people it allows out of the country. Agents from the State Safety and Security Agency, the DPRK’s intelligence service, criss-cross Dandong keeping a watchful eye on their citizens. Any North Korean spotted talking to a westerner would instantly arouse suspicion and face uncomfortable questions, or worse, on their return home.

Only those who have escaped the regime are willing to talk about what really goes on inside the DPRK. It is the refugees to China, the thousands of people who each year flee the food shortages and the crushing control over their lives for Dongbei, who know better than any official or businessman what is happening outside Pyongyang. But Dandong is not the place to find them. Security on both sides of the border here is tight; the area around the city is the one part of the frontier that is fenced. The Yalu, too, is far too wide to make crossing it without a boat feasible.

Instead, most refugees and defectors from North Korea arrive further north in Jilin Province. Not only is the Tumen a far narrower river than the Yalu but the borderlands of Jilin are part of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture, the heartland of China’s ethnic Koreans. Every North Korean knows he or she will find people there who can speak their language, and maybe even a relative. The peak times to cross the border are in June and July before the summer rains arrive, when the Tumen is easy to wade across, or in the deep winter when it freezes and escapees can walk to China.

There is one spot near Dandong where crossing from North Korea looks easy. It lies in the shadow of the Great Wall, once the dividing line between Han China and the Manchu empire. Twenty kilometres north-east of Dandong, a steep stretch of Ming dynasty-era Wall known as the Tiger Mountain Great Wall runs parallel with the border with the DPRK. From the top of its heavily restored watchtowers, you can gaze down on North Korea.