A report published by two human rights organizations on Tuesday revealed the alleged existence, exposed interviews with North Korean witnesses, of a North Korea regime prison operating secretly in Beijing to help capture potential defectors.
The study, published by the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) and Global Rights Compliance (GRC), accused North Korea of violating Chinese law by engaging in transnational repression within Chinese borders, undermining Chinese law enforcement, and violating specific agreements Pyongyang and Beijing have signed in cooperation. Both communist dictatorships, North Korea and China are longtime close allies, as the Chinese military actively enabled North Korea’s belligerence in the Korean War and has defended its foreign policy interests abroad. That relationship has cooled somewhat, however, under current dictator Kim Jong-un, who has distanced Pyongyang from Beijing and established closer ties to Russia.
North Korea’s regime is notorious for imprisoning, torturing, and killing any citizen suspected of opposing the ruthless Kim family dynasty or engaging in “anti-state” activities, such as believing in Christianity. The report stated, based on testimonies with North Korean defectors, that part of this repressive apparatus operates within China to identify, silence, and capture individuals allowed abroad but who are suspected of considering defecting, especially if they carry state secrets that may embarrass the Kims.
The report identified the “primary targets” of this secret operation as “high-ranking officials, Kim’s bodyguards, weapons and scientific experts, hackers, diplomats, students studying abroad, and overseas workers and managers that are knowledgeable about the Kim family’s private life, secret organizations, and sanctioned businesses.”
“When North Korea detects that diplomats, students studying abroad, Party cadres, individuals sent with special missions, and operatives in China and elsewhere attempt to defect,” the study explained, “it lures them to Beijing under false pretenses. Upon their arrival in Beijing, they are immediately confined within the embassy.”
Some of the victims of this underground detention facility, it added, are foreign nationals, including Chinese and South Korean citizens. Those detained are dragged into the basement of a consular building in Chaoyang, Beijing, where they are “interrogated,” presumably violently, before being forced to return to North Korea. Those return flights are also reportedly marked by brutality. The emblematic example in the report is the treatment of Pae Yong-ju, a hacker who attempted to defect to South Korea. North Korea has invested millions of dollars in training legions of hackers who engage in widespread, global financial crimes to help fund the ruling communists, who are blocked out of much of the world’s legitimate commerce as a result of human rights and nuclear sanctions. According to the TJWG, Pae was interrogated in the secret prison and ultimately repatriated in August 2023. To bring him home from Beijing, North Korean officials reportedly put his entire body in a cast and forced him into a wheelchair.
“They are sent by plane. Plaster casts are used to immobilize them. These [joints] are tied up and encased in plaster. These [feet], too. Also, bound in plaster to prevent screaming or moving along the way,” an unnamed North Korean businessperson explained in an interview for the report.
TJWG compared the North Korean operations to capture potential defectors with China’s own illicit activities abroad. China has for years engaged in a program known as “Operation Fox Hunt” in which its agents, often violating local laws, identify, stalk, and harass Chinese dissidents abroad to force them home, where they can be arrested or otherwise silenced. The Chinese government openly announced “Operation Fox Hunt” in 2014, claiming it was necessary to catch wealthy, corrupt Chinese former officials and businessmen who fled the country to avoid paying for their crimes. In reality, the project typically targets known anti-communist dissidents, Christians, and other persecuted groups.
Chinese officials have been arrested on multiple occasions in the United States, implicated in “Operation Fox Hunt.” In October 2020, the FBI announced the arrest of five individuals identified as Chinese agents, working to pressure a former Chinese official to leave New Jersey and return to Communist Party custody.
Three years later, the U.S. government revealed that it had identified an illicit Chinese police station operating in New York City, also used to persecute anti-communist dissidents and engage in widespread surveillance, a violation of American sovereignty. The arrests following the publication of a report by the research group Safeguard Defenders revealing the existence of dozens of illicit Chinese police stations similarly working to persecute political opponents abroad all over the world, including in Canada, Japan, Brazil, and Spain.
The Chinese government claimed its secret police stations were erected during the Wuhan coronavirus era to facilitate the processing of passports and other legal documents for Chinese nationals stranded abroad.
The government of North Korea has not commented on the TJWG report at press time, nor has Beijing. The report insisted, however, that Pyongyang running a parallel legal system under Beijing’s nose was a violation of Chinese sovereignty, “North Korean diplomats have the duty to respect Chinese laws and regulations,” and the Chinese government should act to protect its interests.
“The criminal activities of North Korean operatives in China directly contravene the 1998 revised and renewed agreement between China and North Korea,” the report reads. “Article 5(1) of the agreement provides that neither party may carry out investigations or arrests on the other’s territory and, if necessary, must ask the other to conduct investigations or arrests.”