Borderland: For refugees in China it pays to be Burmese, not North Korean

[pampango]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china/100928/myanmar-north-korea-refugees

Local Christian churches worked as part of an informal network to move refugees through and out of China, sometimes with success, and often not. Standing on the side of a highway that overlooks a North Korean communal farm on the other side of the river, a local Han Chinese man described how four or five years back, it wasn’t unusual to see North Koreans crossing the river in daylight to escape starvation and searing poverty in their own country.

Even though most of the rest of the world considers fleeing North Koreans political refugees, China views them as illegal immigrants and deports them when caught — a practice that reportedly ends in labor camp sentences or worse. Estimates vary widely, but it’s believed between 100,000-400,000 North Korea refugees live in China. Thousands more enter, stay or move through each year, but their numbers have slowed with tightened, tense border controls.

The situation is quite different on China’s opposite border, the boundary with Myanmar some 2,500 miles away. There, last summer, 40,000 Burmese refugees flooded into China in a matter of days, seeking shelter from civil war. China quickly established refugees camps and worked speedily to send them home. The border between Yunnan province and Myanmar remains relatively fluid and free today, nothing at all like the ultra-tight controls on the frontier next to North Korea.

But experts say there are reasons to compare the two places. China has long feared a flood of refugees from the poverty-stricken North Korea should the current regime collapse. With regime change on the near horizon, tensions are again high on the border.