Since Kim Jong Un's rise to power in 2011,
defections in North Korea have plummeted dramatically. Today, North Korea has become
a veritable fortress, a nation-sized jail from which you cannot escape from.
In 2011, the year of Kim Jong Il's death,
there were 2,706 North Korean defectors. The very next year that number dropped to 1,502.
In 2020 there were only 229 defectors. If you listen to North Korean propaganda,
those plummeting numbers are due to Kim Jong Un's brilliant leadership turning the nation
into a lush garden of prosperity where nobody wants to defect. The reality is much crueler.
Autocratic despotic governments face their greatest threat to survival during regime changes,
and Kim Jong Un was keenly aware of this fact. Even before formally assuming power,
Un was already establishing himself as the legitimate ruler and heir to his father,
maneuvering potential rivals out of positions of power and consolidating his alliances with
the traditional North Korean habit of gift-giving. Lavish gifts are displays
of favor in North Korea, and promises of future favor from the halls of power.
However, upon the death of his father, Un moved quickly to consolidate his position as legitimate
ruler of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. This included a number of very high
profile purges, including some family members in senior positions of power. All of these purges
were carried out under the guise of punishing corruption or traitors to the North Korean state,
but much like the famous anti-corruption purges carried out in China by President Xi Jinping,
this was merely a cover for the elimination of political rivals.
The truth is, Kim Jong Un was knocking out anybody that could be a threat to his power.
But almost immediately upon taking power, Un had another serious problem- North Korean defectors.
A transition of power presents an opportunity for anybody looking to replace a current government,
even through military force, and Un now had to worry about the United States using the
opportunity to remove him by force. To avoid this, he needed to project the image to the
world that North Korea was firmly under his control, and even more importantly,
that it was a happy and prosperous place under his leadership. The US wouldn't dare depose him
by force if the nation was stable and prosperous- and while the US never had any such plans,
the paranoid mind of Kim Jong Un fed him constant fears of losing his newly acquired power.
The best way to repair North Korea's image was to deny South Korea its biggest weapon against it-
North Korean defectors. During his father's reign, North Korea had seen steadily rising
numbers of defectors, who would inevitably show up on South Korean media to denounce the
North and tell the world about the real state of affairs within the nation. This counter-propaganda
even reached citizens in the North who had illegal satellite internet connections or
radios able to pick up powerful broadcasts aimed directly at the north from the south.
Secure in his power, Kim Jong Il showed practically no concern for the rising number
of counter-propagandists defectors in the south, but Kim Jong Un couldn't afford to not care.
One of the first things he did was tighten up security along the DMZ.
In the past, defectors have been able to navigate the myriad stretches of barbed wire
and thousands of land mines to get to safety in the south. However, he needed to do this in a way
that wouldn't provoke the south to increase its own military presence. He increased the number
of border patrols only modestly, both to avoid provoking the South and its American allies,
but also because of the simple fact that most DMZ defections were of border guards themselves.
Placing more of them on the border would only increase the rate of defection, not decrease it.
So instead he focused on improving border security infrastructure, including replacing old fences and
reinforcing new ones. Vehicle barriers were also upgraded to stop defectors from ramming
through security barricades and speeding to the south, as has been done numerous times before.
However, while the DMZ was the most direct route out of North Korea for defectors,
it actually wasn't the most widely used one. The heavy security presence made it almost
impossible for civilians to approach, leaving it mostly used only by military defectors who were
already present at the border or could more easily pretend to have a reason to be there. Instead,
North Korea's greatest avenue for defections has always been its long shared border with China.
The border with China is just over 880 miles (1400 kilometers) long,
and largely uses either the Yalu or Tumen river as a physical marker of where the two borders meet.
This border has 25 official crossings where one can leave North Korea and enter China, and is a
lifeline for the hermit kingdom. Through China, North Korea is able to access world markets,
and while China is technically supposed to clamp down on illegal trade across its border,
it largely looks the other way on North Korean smuggling- including
even at times the smuggling of weapons for sale to other developing countries.
Such trade is a critical economic lifeline for North Korea, and the last thing China wants is
North Korea to fall and a pro-American South Korean led reunification of the continent.
But while these crossings make the moving of both legitimate trade goods
and contraband easy for North Korea, they are very heavily secured and any North korean
wanting to enter China needs official permission and is thoroughly vetted by security officials.
Sneaking through the heavily patrolled and secured border crossings is all but impossible-
so instead, defectors have turned to the largely unsecured countryside.
There defectors had traditionally been able to paddle across the river and into China
in homemade rafts, or at other times were met by international helpers using motor boats-
civilian traffic along the river is not prohibited, though Chinese boaters are warned to
stay away from the North Korean side of the river and never, ever, make landfall on North Korea.
All this started to change in the mid 2000s, as the mounting numbers of North Korean defectors
put domestic political pressure on the Beijing government. South korean defectors also made
China's close relationship with the hermit kingdom an international liability, and as China began to
assert itself on the world stage, North Korea's anti-propagandist defector problem was now China's
problem as well. To remedy this, China changed the responsibility of the border from local
police forces to the military, and undertook an extensive program of border security. This
included the installation of dozens of miles of high security fencing and concrete barriers
along the most popular defection routes. It also increased the number of patrols, leveraging the
vast manpower of the Chinese army, and implemented harsh measures to deal with North korean defectors
that to many were reminders of pro-slavery federal laws from mid-19th century America.
These new laws included the immediate and forcible removal of any illegal North Korean immigrants
in the nation, and harsh punishments for those caught harboring or aiding North Korean defectors.
But even with these increased security measures, such a vast border is practically
impossible to secure, and many visitors to the area have reported that in many places,
it still seems as if a border crossing would be relatively easy to accomplish.
Why then are North Korean defectors increasingly more rare since 2011?
One of the first things Kim Jong Un did was to improve the security situation along the Chinese
border, and this included better oversight of the border guards already present. For decades
these guards were easily bribed by defectors and smugglers alike, creating a culture of extreme,
almost commonplace corruption. If you could afford even a meager bribe of money or food, most border
guards would happily turn a blind eye- they too after all were largely suffering from impoverished
living conditions. Food specially could be in astonishingly low supply for most North Korean
troops, leading to many establishing official and unofficial farming operations of their own.
While North Korean generals get cash cards as gifts to ensure their loyalty,
most conscripted soldiers have to scrape by with a meager living.
This laxness towards security changed when Kim Jong Un took power however,
with more firebrand officers being moved to the border regions to enforce better discipline.
Punishments for soldiers caught taking bribes also became tougher- while before local officers
would often be worked into the system of bribes and receive their 'cut' so to speak, not unlike
a mob operation, these new measures punished even senior officers caught taking bribes.
Roads were also built to facilitate security patrols into previously hard to reach areas,
and military river patrols also became much more common.
North Korea undertook its own fence building program, but ran into the same difficulties
and financial costs as China when trying to secure such a vast border. In the end,
no amount of security measures could ever actually stop the flow of defectors out of the nation.
Instead, more focus was turned inwards. Would-be defectors were publicly punished as a warning to
others- the punishment was often a life sentence in one of North korea's not-so-secret gulag style
prison camps. In these brutal camps inmates are worked to death and fed little to no food,
so even a less-than-life sentence typically ends in death for the condemned. However,
under North Korean law up to three generations of a family can be punished for a single crime,
meaning that a defector could be condemning not just themselves, but their parents and
children to life imprisonment in a brutal prison camp. Ostensibly, this practice is
part of North Korea's ideology of it taking three generations to root out evil, but in
truth it's merely another harsh punishment tactic meant to keep the civilian population in line.
However, during Kim Jong Un's regime, defectors outside of North Korea were increasingly being
invited back into the country. North Korean agents would frequently make contact with defectors in
the south, even going so far as to promise no punishment for themselves or their families,
free housing, a good job, and a cash sum worth up to $44,000 US dollars.
This was part of Kim Jong Un's counter-propaganda strategy, and while few took this offer those
that did soon found themselves on North Korean television singing the praises
of the supreme leader and denouncing the living conditions outside of the nation.
Why would anybody choose to return to such an oppressive state though?
Well, while North Korean defectors may have found freedom in the south, they often face
extreme challenges in finding employment. Most are relatively unskilled or poorly educated,
making them suitable only for very low income jobs. This is on top of the same prejudice that
immigrants face everywhere around the world, and while they do receive a government stipend
to help start a new life, this stipend is itself very meager. Facing financial hardships
and likely very homesick for family they left behind and will never see again, some defectors
are glad to take up the North's offer of amnesty in exchange for being used as a propaganda tool.
But the real reason why today you can't escape from North Korea has to do with the same recent
events that have rocked the entire planet- Covid 19. Unlike many nations around the world,
North Korea has taken the Covid virus very seriously,
and implemented very stringent measures restricting movement of the population.
As the nation is currently teetering on the verge of the worst famine in three decades,
it has been forced to act to limit the health disaster of a full-blown Covid outbreak,
and given the authoritarian nature of the government to begin with, implementing
full-scale movement restrictions of the civilian population has been relatively easy. This has made
it all but impossible for defectors to make the long and difficult journey to the border
crossing areas from their hometowns, and while in 2019 over a thousand people defected, just a
year later in 2020 barely 230 made it out of the country. That figure is expected to remain equally
low at the end of 2021, though it'll be some time before we have an official count as the process
of actually defecting often involves a journey lasting up to six months through Southeast Asia.
Now go check out 50 insane facts about North Korea you didn't know,
or click this other video instead!