Steven Kim, an American businessman from Long Island, New York, may be the world’s leading expert on the market for North Korean brides. He acquired this expertise accidentally. He likes to say it was God’s plan.
A decade or so ago he was living in China, overseeing the manufacture of chairs he sold to retail clients in the United States, when he heard about a secret church that catered to the South Korean businessmen who worked in the Shenzhen industrial zone, not far from his apartment. It wasn’t registered with the Chinese government, as required by law, so it operated underground, billing itself as a cultural association. There was no sign on the door and no cross on the roof. The 100 or so congregants had learned about the church as Kim had, by word of mouth.
Kim, a practicing Christian, became a regular attendee. One Sunday he noticed two shabbily dressed men seated in a corner of the room. After worship, he went up to them, said hello, and learned to his astonishment that they were from North Korea. They had escaped across the Tumen River to northeast China and traveled 2,000 miles south to Guangdong province, a journey that took two months. They hoped to find a way to slip across the border into Hong Kong. “They came to church asking for help,” he says. “But the church would only feed them, give them a few dollars, and let them go.”
Kim was outraged. “I asked the pastor, ‘Why do you let them go?’” “Because we’re afraid,” the pastor replied. “If we’re caught helping North Koreans, the church will be shut down.” Kim took the two men home.
That was the start. Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe houses, food, clothing, and money; eventually he organized secret passage across China to third countries. Before long, he gained a reputation along the new underground railroad as someone North Koreans could count on for assistance. Many of them turned out to be women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them as brides.
Today he runs 318 Partners, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women in China. It’s named after Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code, the law under which Kim was arrested in September 2003 as he led nine North Koreans in a prayer meeting at his apartment. Convicted of helping illegal migrants, he spent four years in a Chinese prison. His home office now, on a quiet street on suburban Long Island, is a luxurious contrast to the Chinese prison cell he shared with a dozen felons. On the morning of my visit, his cellphone rings repeatedly with calls from South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regarding a rescue operation in the works. It is not until lunchtime, when most of Asia is asleep, that his phone finally goes quiet.
A missionary on the lookout for North Korean refugees in Yanbian. (Chien-Chi Chang / Magnum)
Kim clearly has his hands full. The only practical escape route for fugitives from North Korea is through China, and human-rights groups say roughly 80 percent of those thousands of refugees are women and girls who have become “commodities for purchase,” in Kim’s words. The most popular marketplaces are in the three Chinese provinces closest to the North Korean border—Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang—but North Korean brides are sold to men throughout China. Many of the buyers are farmers. Some have physical or mental disabilities that make them unsuitable as husbands in the eyes of Chinese women. In almost every case, the men are buying the one thing they want most in life: a wife.
But why import brides from North Korea? The answer is China’s family-planning laws. Ever since the one-child policy went into effect in 1979, Beijing has enforced it through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and even, human-rights groups charge, infanticide. The policy has had its intended effect of slowing the rate of expansion of China’s population. But there has been an unwelcome side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio.
Women may hold up half the sky, in Mao Zedong’s famous phrase, but they are treated as second-class citizens in much of modern China. Many couples still favor sons, both to carry on the family name and support them in their old age. In rural areas the birth of a son heralds the arrival of an extra farmhand as soon as the boy is old enough to hold a hoe. Not so long ago in China, an unwanted baby girl might be drowned in a bucket at birth or left unattended to die. These days abortion is the preferred method, and ultrasound tests let couples find out the baby’s sex early in the pregnancy for about $12, well within the means of most couples. There are laws against using ultrasound this way, but they’re widely ignored. “Sex-selection abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” says the British medical journal BMJ. Source
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Campaign Against Bride Trafficking (INDIA) on 8/20/2012 07:22:00 AM
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