China Grapples With Defection Dilemma

The note, purportedly written by the highest-ranking official to defect from North Korea, said: “Starting with my family, people will judge that I am mad. But the question is: Am I the only mad person?”

This message, South Korean officials said Thursday, was written by Hwang Jang Yop, 72, the North Korean Communist Party elder whom they claim to be protecting inside the heavily guarded South Korean Consulate here. They also asserted that North Korean agents tried to break into the consulate late Wednesday night but were repulsed by Chinese security police.

North Korea stuck to its claims that Hwang had been kidnapped.

Caught uncomfortably in the middle of the bizarre cloak-and-dagger episode being played out in a tree-lined Beijing diplomatic enclave, China on Thursday appealed for calm.

Chinese officials wrestled with the question of what to do about Hwang, a secretary of the ruling Korean Workers’ Party and the architect of its fanatically nationalist juche philosophy of “self-reliance.” He reportedly walked into the South Korean Consulate on Wednesday, demanding political asylum.

In a brief statement, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Tang Guoqiang gingerly avoided taking sides. “We had not been informed in advance of Hwang Jang Yop’s transit through Beijing,” Tang said, refusing to answer additional questions from reporters. “What has been reported is still being subjected to investigation and verification.”

The incident put Beijing in the awkward position of having to choose between its longtime Communist ally in North Korea, where peasants are reported to be near starvation, and South Korea, which in 1996 recorded $20 billion in bilateral trade with China.

Western diplomats with experience on the Korean peninsula predicted that if Hwang were returned to North Korea, he would almost surely be killed. Allowed to go to South Korea, he would be debriefed, feted and showcased as the South’s biggest prize in the ongoing Cold War between the two ethnic Korean states.

Thursday began with allegations from South Korean diplomats that North Korean agents had tried to enter the two-story consulate building, now cordoned off and ringed with dozens of armed Chinese security police.

“Last night, North Korean people who we believe were from the embassy tried to enter our consular section,” embassy spokesman Chang Moon Ik said. “We have asked the Chinese government to protect our embassy compound . . . against North Koreans or anything unexpected.”

Except for a brief, wooden-worded item from the English-language version of the official New China News Agency, the incident involving Hwang went unreported here. Outside China, however, the press and politicians had a field day.

In Seoul, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper scored what it claimed was a major scoop when it published letters attacking North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that it claimed were written by Hwang. “How can a society where people, workers, farmers and intellectuals starve to death be a socialist society?” one letter said. South Korean officials, however, urged caution in accepting the letters as authentic.

Meanwhile in Japan, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto jumped into the fray, attempting to explain why Hwang had not attempted to seek asylum in Japan, where he had traveled on a speaking tour before coming to Beijing. “On his departure,” Hashimoto said, “North Korean guards were tightly huddled all around Hwang as if they knew he intended to defect.”

Finally, on Thursday afternoon in Seoul, the South Korean government released a letter that it claimed was penned by Hwang in the Beijing consulate. In the letter, Hwang claimed that he was “tormented” by his decision. He defended the Workers’ Party, which he said had treated him with “love and consideration.”

But the letter decried the aggressive military stance of the North, which talked of turning South Korea into a “sea of fire” while at the same time urging unification of the two Koreas. “How could you regard this as the behavior of sane people?” it asked.