Additionally, the number of NKers defectors in China is high - they aren't rare.
Experience with defectors from other countries, such as the former Soviet Union, shows they sometimes tell the truth, they sometimes tell false or exaggerated stories, and they sometimes tell half-truths. I don't know why North Korean defectors would be different.
> and their accounts of starvation, extreme poverty, and harsh authoritarianism all support one another.
This specific claim is about people going to die in droves to caves, not just about harsh authoritarianism or extreme poverty. That's why it must be considered skeptically -- because it seems just like the kind of thing we're prone to believing about North Korea given other news, but this is not enough to make it true. And once it gets repeated uncritically, it becomes the "common sense truth".
They weren't going into caves to die, quite the contrary, they were going into the caves to survive.
Defectors won't know any of this. It's expected that some would exaggerate unverifiable details, to ensure their safety. That wouldn't diminish what they actually went through.
People love shocking stories, so there can be real financial benefit on making up the wildest things up and then selling your story to media or publisher.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-... 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness#In_... 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom
Also to fit into their new environments. Everyone loves to hate on the enemy country. You might see that in the US with some Chinese Americans online, easier to fit in. Want upvotes, just go to Reddit, say "i'm chinese and eff china". Plug in North Korea and get more sympathy.
Defector accounts are actually often inaccurate or exaggerated. North Korean testimonies often fall apart: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...
One of the incentives is that they make money, or gain a visa, through such testimonies.
Back in the days when China was poor, many Chinese defectors or political refugees were actually economical refugees. They made up exaggerated stories in order to get a visa on the grounds of political asylum.
Like you mentioned, there is outside confirmation of these facts.
That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.
So yes, it is anecdotal evidence, but not, IMHO, entirely implausible at that.
> Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border...
Are you consistently as skeptical as you are in this case? For example, have you personally verified that the earth is round (or flat, according to what you believe it to be?)
I am consistently skeptical about outrageous claims, particularly in ideologically charged contexts. Or try to be, anyway -- I'm not a robot and I'm of course subject to bias, like all humans.
For example, I dislike Trump but if I read something truly outrageous about him I tend to be skeptical about it. In Spanish we call it "avoid buying rotten fish", i.e. do not believe any stories about your hated enemy, just because they sound like something he would do, until you can have at least some degree of verification. Because sometimes those stories are planted maliciously or are plain wrong.
In the case of North Korea there is the problem that the country is so secretive -- unlike the US with Trump -- that it's truly hard to get confirmation of just about anything, so the rumors fly easily. If something sounds true about North Korea, then it must be true!
That the Earth is round is non-controversial. I don't see how it's wrong to double or triple check sociopolitical claims though.
I do believe North Korea is a hereditary dictatorship and that their people suffer, in case you were wondering. This doesn't mean I will automatically believe any claim about that country.
You have not presented a case for this particular claim to be regarded as outrageous. Unless you do, then your attitude to such claims is beside the point here.
Does it make it automatically untrue? No. Do I believe many North Koreans live in really harsh conditions? Yes.
But this particular tale does seem too horrific to believe without some sort of confirmation beyond hearsay. All it lacks is some cannibalism to make it the perfect horror story about North Korea.
If you could have resisted the temptation to embellish, you would have made a quite reasonable point - though seeking collective shelter in caves in a harsh winter does not seem too far-fetched to me. It's not like humanity has no history of doing this! While famine is thankfully no longer a part of many peoples' experience, it has been for most of humanity's existence and still is for some.
As for ideological motivation, this anecdote is being presented in the context of an anthropological claim about early human behavior, not about North Korea or communism. I tend to trust OP's judgment as to whether he was being strung along by the driver for ideological reasons.
So I'm confused about the part you don't believe, is it that they went up to the mountains to do it?
Either the starvation wasn't quite as deadly, or new people kept moving to that strip of land, only to end up dying in winter.
> "people in border villages go up in mountain caves during the winter, and basically lie down there, starving and dying" to be a horror story
It didn't include all the other things you mentioned. Only the part in quotes seemed to be enough for GP to deem it as a suspect horror story.
Needless to say, there's nothing unusual or unbelievable about people dying of starvation.
Now you are depending on an absurdly literal reading of the tale to exaggerate its implausibility.
It is a well-established fact that North Korea suffered several years of famine in the mid 90s, with at least 1/4 million fatalities and probably much higher, arising from a combination of the loss of economic support from the former USSR, El Niño and a kleptocratic bureaucracy. In such circumstances, it would not be that implausible if some peasants reverted to the winter survival techniques used by millenia of nomads and subsistence farmers.
As for lying in the sun: if you are cold, famished, and have exhausted all the new-grown food that the spring has produced so far, then perhaps it is the best you can do.
Sure, that would be very plausible. Stocking up a cave with food, keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available, eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer...
Not quite the same as the original story, though.
You are doing the same as the_af here: nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story in order to avoid realistically evaluating its credibility. Anecdotes are not theorems, invalidated by one infidelity. Your objections are pedantic and irrelevant to the author's purpose in relating it.
Furhermore:
> Stocking up a cave with food...
According to the driver, the women would reportedly illegally cross the river to prostitute themselves in China before the winter to obtain rice to survive.
>... keeping a small fire going inside with whatever flammable material is available...
and the nearby land so denuded of firewood that they would otherwise freeze to death.
>...eating little and sleeping a lot to make the food last longer.
Well, yes - that was apparently the point of relating this anecdote. As we can see, the story as presented is close to what you consider plausible, especially as we know there actually was a severe multi-year famine in North Korea not so long ago.
The author posted it in a comment on an article about Neanderthals who might have had the ability, never before observed in humans, to slow their base metabolic rate to withstand extreme cold. And they suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same.
In my modified version, their body temperature stays within the normal range and they're conserving energy by limiting movement, but their base metabolism stays the same and they still have to eat regularly, i.e. they're not hibernating.
Maybe that's just "nitpicking over the exact phrasing of the story", but it's also the only way in which the story is relevant to TFA.
>And [OP] suggested those North Koreans were likely doing the same. [my emphasis of the weasel word]
So it seems you will read the anecdote literally when doing so allows you to attack its credibility, and you will find an unstated assumption in it if doing so allows you to attack its relevance.
As noted above, the OP merely seems to be suggesting something that other posters have also mentioned: the physical evidence mentioned in the article might have been the result of winter famine, and not definitive evidence of hibernation; furthermore, there may be people alive today, or recently deceased, in whom this physiological damage might be found. I can't say for sure, but OP may be suggesting that they might help with the further studies of this hypothesis.
So it's really not so far-fetched that people living on the Chinese side of the border meet north koreans and hear their stories.
It's not as black and white as that, and I believe some measure of restraint is valuable when making decisions that can have unbounded consequences. Sometimes making the right decision eventually is better than making the wrong decision immediately.
And some things about the Holocaust turned out to be myths, for example that the Nazis regularly made soap out of the body fat of their Jewish victims, and similarly regularly made lampshades out of their skin. It sounds plausible, because the Nazis engaged in so many horrific acts that why not this, but this alone doesn't make it true (and it turns out, historians today don't think this was true -- not a regular practice, anyway).
In order to criticize a dictatorship you don't need to uncritically believe everything bad said about them. Some of it will be false. Always be wary of particularly outrageous claims.
There is almost no detail of the Holocaust that couldn't be described as an "outrageous claim", and yet these things actually happened.
What is far more pernicious is for people to engage in ideologically motivated skepticism and denial towards these atrocities, which I think Cambodia provides a much better example of: https://quillette.com/2018/07/15/devastation-and-denial-camb...
> Refugee testimonies were not be dismissed, Chomsky argued, but nor were they to be trusted. “Refugees,” he wrote, “are frightened and defenceless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear.”4
> Many other Western intellectuals summarily dismissed Barron and Paul’s conclusion of a “monstrous dark age that has engulfed the people of Cambodia.” The aforementioned Gareth Porter called refugee testimony the “least reliable kind of documentation,” and derided the refugees themselves as merely the wealthy elite of Cambodian society who had lost out in the collectivisation process. When Porter testified before U.S Congress he stated, “I cannot accept the premise … that one million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people.”5
Believe me, when I say that you sound like a Cambodian genocide denier, it's because you sound a lot like a Cambodian genocide denier.
I share your disgust for genocide deniers.
But when you hear bizarre claims, backed by no evidence but tenuous hearsay and no means of independent confirmation... I mean, surely some of it is true, but each single bizarre assertion must be considered with your skeptic hat firmly on.
It's hardly a bizarre claim if you've ever read an account of what life was like during the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor.