North Korea sends 120,000 workers to learn from China
Staff Reporter 2013-04-17 08:54
Chinese tourists at the border with North Korea at Tumen, Jilin province. (File photo/CNS)
In what may be an unprecedented move, North Korea is sending 120,000 of its people to work in northeastern China to conduct "industrial studies," according to a Chinese expert on the US-based Sound of Hope Radio Network, run by overseas Chinese who oppose the government in Beijing.
These people will be clustered in three cities in Jilin and Liaoning provinces. The rest will be relocated in the same northeastern region, though farther from the border between the two countries, according to the report.
According to the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, the North Korean leader sent these workers to study reforms in China's rural villages, which suggests preparations in Pyongyang for the country's own opening up and reform policy, a move which Beijing has encouraged. North Korea has never organized and dispatched a labor force on such as scale, said Jin Qiangyi, director of the Center for North and South Korea Studies in Jilin's Yanbian University.
The 120,000 North Korean workers will likely be subject to strict monitoring from their supervisors, similar to the 30 North Koreans who have been working in Huaxi in Jiangsu province, the richest village in China, since December 2011, who have to seek permission for everything down to their diet. Most of them are children of North Korean senior officials.
A portion of the group is said to be the "lost children" of senior officials from the Kim Jong-il regime. They were studying in the country before their parents were ousted along with the dismissal of vice marshal Ri Yong-ho, who was reportedly discharged due to an unspecific illness in June last year. They can no longer reach their parents and have been forced to seek financial support. Those with degrees from Chinese universities have become staff members at high-end hotels, while others are reported to have become sex workers.
