The Emperor Far Away (38 page)

Beijing’s nightmare scenario in Yanbian is the sudden and total collapse of the DPRK. Inevitably, that would lead to people coming across the border in far greater numbers than ever before. One of the unspoken reasons why the CCP prefers to keep the Kim regime in power is the risk of the Han becoming a minority in Yanbian, which would only support the claims of the South Korean nationalists who believe it is part of a greater Korea. Returning the refugees was a tacit admission of Beijing’s determination to keep the Korean peninsula divided.

Border patrols were stepped up on both sides of the frontier. As the grandmother I met near Tumen recalled, the authorities started descending on villages checking identity cards and searching for North Korean women married to local men. The Chinese allowed plainclothes DPRK police into Yanbian to assist in the round-up as well, while rewards were offered to those who turned people in.

As they were fleeing both a desperate famine and a despotic regime, the North Koreans qualified for protection under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. But Beijing insisted they were just illegal economic migrants and so had no right to stay in China, a position it continues to maintain. North Koreans who are caught in China end up in detention centres like the one in Tumen, and face a prison sentence on their return to the DPRK.

North Koreans reacted to China turning on them by following the dispersal of the Chinese Koreans across Dongbei and beyond. Many of those who cross the border now leave Yanbian quickly and make for the big cities, where the police are not looking for DPRK refugees and they can blend in by claiming to be Chaoxianzu. Others, like Piao’s wife, try and escape to South Korea. There are two routes used to reach Seoul: either via Mongolia, which deports all North Korean illegal immigrants to South Korea automatically, or across China to Yunnan and then on to Thailand.

Both the escape lines are run by the South Korean missionaries in Yanji. They fund them by raising money at home and from the American Korean community. One day, Piao’s wife was spirited south-west to Kunming, then to Laos and Bangkok and finally to Seoul. Piao had seen neither her nor his son for four years. After hearing that, I understood why he was out every night getting so drunk, as well as his unhappiness with Korea being divided while he was stranded in China.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure if Piao was telling me the whole story. Some North Korean women marry Chinese Korean men, but stay in Yanbian only until their Mandarin is fluent enough for them to pass as Chaoxianzu elsewhere in China. There is an orphanage in Yanji full of children who have been abandoned by their fathers, after their North Korean wives decided it was time to move on. Perhaps Piao’s wife used him just to hide from the police before she could leave for South Korea, or maybe she was more scared of being sent back to the DPRK than she was in love with him. Either way, Piao is on his own now.

No one knows exactly how many North Koreans are living illegally in China. Most rational estimates settle on a consensus of somewhere in the region of 30,000 long-term refugees. What is certain is that DPRK citizens continue to come to China, even if their numbers are down from the time of the 1990s famine, despite the increased security presence along the border. Food remains desperately scarce, with ordinary people surviving on around 1,500 calories a day, according to the few NGO workers allowed into the DPRK. More than half of all defectors say it is the shortage of sustenance, rather than the lack of freedom, that drove them to leave.

What has changed is that some of those crossing the border are no longer staying permanently. Instead, they come to Yanbian in search of assistance, or to work illegally on a construction site or farm for a month or two, before returning home. In Yanji, most make for the churches or the undercover missionaries like Paul. ‘People in North Korea know they will get help if they go to a church,’ one ethnic Korean Catholic priest told me. ‘They ask for rice, clothes and money, the things that are essential for life. I don’t give them anything personally, but I’ll make sure a member of my congregation does.’

When I first met Paul, he told me he wasn’t involved in assisting refugees either to escape or to find supplies. Yet I knew North Koreans came to his restaurant, which suggested that people on the other side of the frontier were aware he could help them. ‘DPRK people do come here,’ he conceded one day. ‘But I never give them money, only food and clothes. If they get caught by the Chinese or the North Korean police, they’ll ask where they got the money and then I’ll get into trouble.’

It was a matter of national pride for Paul to be there for the North Koreans. ‘If I see a fellow Korean, a brother, who is hungry then of course I will help him.’ But it was also another way of fulfilling his messianic mission. Now Bibles have joined the long list of goods being smuggled into North Korea. Its people are too preoccupied with finding their next meal to be ideal converts just yet, but given what is happening in South Korea and Yanbian it is perfectly possible that Pyongyang will be a city of churches again one day.

A Protestant revival apart, Paul had no doubt that the Kim dynasty will not last. ‘I think there’ll be huge changes in the next five to ten years. People live such a poor life and are so hungry that I don’t see them agreeing to go on the way they are. I don’t see Kim Jong-un being able to maintain power for as long as his father did. Years ago, North Koreans thought their leader was a god. Now they don’t. They know it’s wrong they have no food. Only a few people are against the system now, but their numbers will increase,’ he stated.

If and when the regime goes, it won’t be with the help of Beijing. Not only will the fall of the Kims threaten China’s strategic interests and the DPRK’s current status as little more than an ancillary province of Dongbei, but it will result in increased uncertainty in Yanbian. The people of the third Korea come from North Korea, but have been cut off from their roots for the last sixty-odd years. Given the opportunity to rediscover their ancestral homeland, allied with their solid cultural ties to South Korea, more Yanbian residents could well join Piao in claiming to be citizens of one Korea. But, unlike Piao, those people are likely to be Christians as well.

24

The Arctic Borderlands

The full force of the Dongbei winter had been unleashed by the time I left Yanji. It was cold even inside the bus to Harbin, travelling through the west of Yanbian before veering right outside Jilin City and entering Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province. We ploughed along a two-lane highway bordered by snow-covered fields and rivers freezing over, spraying slush over the farmers passing in the opposite direction on their tractors.

Snow was thick on the ground in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, and fell every day and night, turning it into a monochrome city. The giant green onion dome atop St Sophia, a former Russian Orthodox cathedral and the city’s most famous landmark, was dusted white, while cars churned along roads of black sludge. People slithered along the treacherous pavements, despite the efforts of the teams of workers who chipped away at the ice with hoe-like implements or shovelled the snow into neat piles which bulldozers removed at night.

Shrugging off the weather, the tall Harbin women strode out in short skirts, leggings and knee-length boots, although a fair few still tapped along in high heels. I was wearing multiple layers, thick gloves and a woolly hat pulled low over my ears. The contrast between the toast-warm interiors of apartments, hotels and restaurants and the freezing conditions outside ensured I spent much of my time either stripping off clothes or putting them on.

Heilongjiang was the Manchu heartland, the place where their forebears the Jurchen tribe hailed from. It is still home to a dwindling number of minorities such as the Oroqen and Hezhen who straddle the border between Heilongjiang and the Russian Far East, just as they did when those lands were part of what was then known as Outer Manchuria. Harbin, though, is essentially a Russian creation. Disused churches like St Sophia and pockets of European-style buildings stand as testimony to how the tsar’s empire absorbed much of Manchuria, even while a Manchu emperor sat on the Dragon Throne in the Forbidden City.

In 1858, the Treaty of Aigun formalised the division of Manchuria. Everything north of what the Russians call the Amur River and the Chinese the Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, was assigned to Russia. Two years later, more Manchu lands went north under the Treaty of Peking. In all, Russia acquired a million square kilometres of Outer Manchuria. It is a massive area. Stretching from the present Sino-Russian border to the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, it includes what are now the major cities of the Russian Far East – Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk – yet the tsar’s army barely had to fire a shot to attain it.

Faced with internal rebellions and in the midst of the Second Opium War with the British and French, the Qing dynasty was so enfeebled by the late 1850s that Russia was able to take Outer Manchuria simply by threatening Beijing. The once mighty Manchu, who had expanded China’s frontiers in the west and south-west, conceded the territory in the bitter knowledge that they were now unable to defend even their own homeland.

With the western colonial powers establishing themselves in China’s major ports in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, Russia’s takeover of northern Manchuria was supposed to be the prelude to it conquering all of Dongbei. The extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway, first to Harbin and then south to Port Arthur, now known as Lushun, was another step towards that goal. From 1897, Russian workers started arriving in Harbin, then not much more than a fishing village on the Songhua River, to build the new rail line. So many Russians came over the border that they dominated Harbin for the next couple of decades.

Russia’s dreams of turning Dongbei into a colony were dashed by its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Instead, it would be Japan which occupied Manchuria from 1931 until the end of the Second World War. But Harbin remained primarily a Russian city. Like the Koreans who escaped the Japanese occupation of their country by moving to Yanbian during the same period, Russians sought refuge in Harbin from the chaos at home.

Well over 100,000 White Russians arrived after the Russian Revolution of 1917, joining 20,000 or so Russian Jews who had fled tsarist pogroms a decade earlier, making Harbin the largest community of Russians anywhere outside the old country. Far outnumbering the Chinese population, and with the new rail link boosting the local economy, the Russian residents, known as Harbinets, created a city which imitated distant St Petersburg and Moscow.

Harbin’s main shopping street, Zhongyang Dajie, offers an architectural history lesson. Art Nouveau hotels and department stores sit alongside baroque-style buildings, and once grand houses with large arched windows and iron balconies line the streets running off it. Former Russian Orthodox churches, as well as synagogues with window frames in the shape of the Star of David, are scattered throughout the city.

Along with other Chinese cities which have an extensive foreign heritage, such as Shanghai and Tianjin, Harbin is ambivalent about its cosmopolitan past. The buildings, even the crumbling houses which have been chopped into apartments, are much more distinctive and impressive than anything built in the communist era. Yet they are also evidence of how Harbin was more Russian than Chinese until 1949. To admire them is unpatriotic, and locals claim to be indifferent to structures like the former St Sophia Cathedral, regarding them only as unique backdrops for wedding photos.

Most Harbinets returned home after the Second World War or emigrated to the west. By the 1960s only a handful remained, although Harbin’s last Russian resident didn’t die until the early 1980s. But the city attracts many tourists from across the frontier – enough for the Chinese to assume that any foreigner in town is Russian. They come on shopping trips from Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, in search of a far wider and cheaper range of products than are available in the Russian Far East. There are also many Russians studying Mandarin, the language which may one day be the lingua franca of the former Outer Manchuria.

Others arrive in search of work, prompted by the slump in the Far East’s economy that was precipitated by the break-up of the old USSR in 1991 and continues today. In an echo of 1920s Shanghai, when the refugee daughters of the Russian aristocracy were reduced to dancing in nightclubs to survive, all Harbin’s premier nightspots feature a show with Russian dancers. Those who can’t perform professionally come on month-long tourist visas as working girls, crowding out the same clubs in search of clients. It is not uncommon in Harbin to see a tall, blonde Russian woman on the arm of a Chinese man.

There is a significant Russian population in Beijing too, but it is Dongbei which is receiving the most migrants as people abandon the Far East for the chance of earning a better salary in China. Whether they are tarts, traders or translators, the latest generation of Russian immigrants are the most obvious sign of how China is now far more powerful and influential than Russia. It is a reversal of roles no one could have foreseen in 1949 when Moscow was the big brother to Beijing’s eager little sibling, the cradle of communism and the place where many of the original CCP leadership were trained.

China and the Soviet Union began drifting apart after 1960, as Mao came to regard his political philosophy as superior and the USSR regrouped after the trauma of the Stalin years. That split became gradually more toxic until it culminated in a brief border skirmish in March 1969, when the Soviet Red Army and the PLA exchanged shots over one of many disputed islands in the Ussuri River, a tributary of the Amur.