Born into a life on China’s margin

Thousands of children in China are unable to attend school or obtain the privileges of citizenship because their mothers are North Korean refugees, Human Rights Watch said Sunday.

Large numbers of women who fled famine in North Korea came to China and entered relationships with Chinese men, and although these couples live as man and wife, the unions are not recognized by Chinese law and the children go unregistered.

The numbers of affected children may reach the tens of thousands, Human Rights Watch said in its report. China is home to as many as 100,000 North Koreans, the vast majority of them women. Just as the women need food and shelter, Chinese farmers are desperate for wives.

China’s traditional preference for sons and the migration of young women to the cities have left the countryside with a shortage of marriageable women.

Children of migrant workers living away from their legal residences also have difficulty attending school, but not to the degree of the children of North Korean women, who are in effect stateless, having no home village to fall back on and no legal status in either country.

Unfortunately, the report says, the only chance the offspring of these unions may have to attend school is if their mothers are apprehended or flee.

“For a half-Chinese, half-North Korean child, you must obtain a police document verifying the mother’s arrest or another form that you fill out explaining that the mother ran away. You also need signatures of three witnesses,” the father of an 8-year-old girl told Human Rights Watch researchers.

The father also said officials expect a bribe to register a child with a North Korean mother, even if the mother is no longer around.

Yu Sang-jun, a North Korean defector, gave a similar account in an interview with The Times this year. He said he had visited a village near the North Korean border where about 12 of the 30 children had North Korean mothers.

“At the very least you have to pay a bribe to register them in school,” said Yu, who was interviewed in Seoul, where he now works with North Korean refugees.

North Koreans began escaping across the 850-mile border with China in the late 1990s, and increasing numbers of their children are now reaching school age.

A 30-year-old North Korean woman who lived for three years in China said the children are afraid to go outside or socialize for fear that their presence will betray that of their mothers.

“Everybody knows a child doesn’t just drop from the sky. If there’s a child, there has to be a mother. Whenever there is a crackdown on North Koreans by the Chinese police, they look for the children,” said the woman, who moved to Seoul last year.

China actively seeks North Koreans in hiding, infiltrating refugee networks with informants and paying bounty hunters. Those captured are deported to North Korea, where they are sent to harsh labor camps, often beaten and, in extreme cases, executed.

Some human rights groups have suggested that China is widening the dragnet for North Koreans in an effort to deport them before the Summer Olympics in Beijing in August.

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barbara.demick@latimes.com