Inside North Korea's Forced Labor Program
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
That evidence all supports the argument that the PRC and Chinese companies are complicit in violating sanctions.
Further, it is telling that the NK government and their Chinese co-conspirators actively fight investigations. See the literature spread to workers threatening punishment for talking to reporters.
And this should surprise absolutely no-one. It's like it's 1980's Wall Street over there, and whatever makes a buck is what they do.
> Most of the people also don't care
I think it may be quite the opposite, albeit usually not genuine "caring", rather just "focusing". Whether nations want to redirect people's attention away from problems at home, or people want/let their attention redirected, they'll focus more on the crap happening in another country. An enemy or an issue are always created somewhere far away, something as contrasting as possible with the apparent situation at home.
Take the example of prisons and prison labor in the US. People know millions are imprisoned at home, many forced to work, with inhumane conditions. But that's a bitter taste when they know it's at home, that it's a democratic country, that this could be changed but isn't. So it's made better by looking at how much worse it could be.
It's an easy mental and moral release and people need one especially when there's a discrepancy between the image they have of their country and the reality. The bigger the discrepancy, the easier and more attractive it is to look at the speck/plank in someone else's eye.
This happens everywhere in the world because it's human nature: it's where people's desire to comfort their conscience and leaders' desire to manipulate that intersect.
Your reply seems out of place.
When espionage laws make other monitoring impossible, there can be zero trust in these companies to do the right thing. Allow detailed, random inspections, or your imports are blocked and you make no money.
Bribes?
You would if you got paid in Monopoly money and they offered you USD
1 raise tariffs on chinese goods.
2 undo massive regulatory red tape on all american industry.
3 enjoy fair trade transparent production of US sourced goods
Thw differential cost between still cheaper chinese goods with heavy tariffs and us good suject to heavy tax rate is more than covered by 3PL, shipping costs and supply chain delays.
You dont need to make productive costs similar all you need is to make producing in US marginally more competitive.
https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waiting-on-the-nuclear-regu...
but, the big cost overruns and the whole cost disease is because of atrocious change management, lack of standardization and, in general, bad project management.
https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X ( https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 )
My guess is that this is a rather limited trade that on the scale of things (700million chinese workers vs 100K North Korean) is really negligible.
After reading The Outlaw Ocean[0] by the article’s author, it’s clear to me there is no ethical seafood. The overwhelming majority of it comes from natural reserves where fishing is prohibited, depleting marine ecosystems, and fished by slaves who are prisoners on their fishing boats. One more reason (on top of heavy metal pollution, bottom trawling, human rights issues, bycatch, marine ecosystems destruction) for me to not eat seafood. Yes there is a microscopic chance you know of an edge case where the seafood is catches using traditional methods in sustainable quantities by a business that is virtuous… that’s not the seafood you’ll get in most supermarkets or restaurants anywhere in the world.
Do you think there is any way to make this happen in a more transparent/satisfactory manner? (IE, more batch auditing)
Do you think that, if there was total 100 percent auditing/QA of every single "peice" of seafood, this problem would go away?
IE; this already happens, and is why customs and border patrol exist. There doesn't need to be a law targetting one specificc boogeyman, the policies are frameworks already exist. Most border patrol do not work the southern border for migrants, they work ports to audit and investigate all imports.
Weather that works or not is another question, and you should ask your state reps.
Poland? Poland is a EU member country, is it legal to employ North Korean slaves in the EU?
Update: Found the following link https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2017-00624... Some Christel Schaldemose was asking the European Parliament the same question back in 2017, but I didn't see an answer.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-wo...
https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/made-in-italy-by-chinese-...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/16/the-crimes-beh...
Mr Troll, be careful with your karma: you can always wake up in some workers paradise, but be careful not to wake up on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence...
> Overall, at the end of 2016, 630 North-Korean citizens were holding a valid residence permit in the EU for work purposes, predominantly in Poland (534).[1]
> When processing the applications for residence permits for work purposes, it is the responsibility of the national authorities to check that the conditions are fulfilled, in line with the EU acquis on legal migration, working conditions and on health and safety at work.
> The EU acquis on legal migration ensures that third-country nationals working in the EU benefit from equal treatment with nationals in terms of remuneration, access to social security systems and other conditions of employment. It is the responsibility of the national authorities, including the labour inspectorates, police and judicial authorities to ensure that the prohibition of forced labour is enforced.
> The Commission will keep monitoring the transposition and application of the different instruments by Poland.
"In February–March 2021, South Korea continued to omit North Korea's "enemy" status from the South Korean military's White Paper after downgrading the status of Japan"
It gets worse from there.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93South_Kore...
During his election campaign in 2021, Yoon Suk Yeol said that he would ask that the United States to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea if there is a threat from North Korea.[162] U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Japan and Korea Mark Lambert rejected Yoon's call, saying said the proposal was against U.S. policy.[163]
In November 2022, a US-South Korean air force exercise named Vigilant Storm was countered by North Korea by missile tests and an air force exercise.[164]
In November 2023, both the Koreas suspended the Comprehensive Agreement Pact - a pact aimed at lowering tensions between the two countries - which was signed at the September 2018 inter-Korean summit, after North Korea launched a satellite into space.[165]
On January 15, 2024, Kim Jong Un announced that peaceful reunification was no longer possible and proposed identifying South Korea as a hostile state in the North Korean constitution. It was also announced that North Korea would dissolve the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the Mount Kumgang International Tourism Administration.[166]
Liberals believe this very much, and I sincerely wish it were true. But it's really not. Iran was simply taking advantage of what they could get, there was zero chance of them changing.
Iran is currently in the center, or at least involved, in so many conflicts I can barely list them all. (Yemen, Israel, Russia, Syria, Iraq, just to start with.)
You really believe they are doing this just because of Trump?
Number of wars started by the US in the timeframe: hold my beer.
Also Hong-Kong have been Chinese for centuries, before being colonized by the UK.
And, is it a matter of sanctions, or national policy that causes the most pain? We don’t have a lot of data, but we have some: that I know of, there are three countries in the world with extensive sanctions. One of them, Russia, hasn’t been communist in three decades. I heard that there is political repression there, but despite the sanctions, not starvation or even economic hardship.
The other two countries, Cuba and North Korea, are still communist. North Korea is not doing well. And Cuba is hanging from a thread; citizens survive thanks to direct support from their expats to the families at home, but the country’s infrastructure is ruined. In terms of modern commodities, 19th century Europe had way less access to trade than sanctioned Cuba, and yet made better roads and enjoyed better postal services and a much vibrant financial sector.
Expecting them to behave by sending them money is a failed theory.
EU here, not US. I don't want my money to fund the killings of our Ukrainian friends.
Come on. Their workers are abused because North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship, not because of sanctions.
If sanctions have any contribution, it's pushing the abuse outside of North Korea, which makes it more visible and possible to investigate.
This doesn't pass the smell test for me, this journalist never directly met or claims to have verified the identity of anyone that they are speaking to, the contacts were provided to them through unspecified "South Korean contacts" (are these contacts independent? not affiliated with SK state sponsored anti-NK propaganda initiatives?).
Of course they shouldn't be explaining who exactly is giving them these testimonies but it makes it very convenient to say 'I got this information from super secret sources, you'll just have to trust me that they are unbiased, forget the fact I am working for a USA based publication'
The single video that is actually shown simply shows the sort of seafood processing factories you see all over the world, nothing that proves anything specific about the accusations. Furthermore, this hasn't been accompanied by any release of the supposed documented evidence (with suitable redactions). I also love the use of handwritten testimonies to visually make the article look like it's backed by evidence, when this is the very evidence which has no established veracity.
I've seen how the USA media love insinuiating things through 'anonymous sources' about Iraq and countless other 'unfriendly' countries to justify devestating military invasions or economic sanctions on foreign countries. All to simply to enrich their own bottom line, keep the US Dollar flowing and keep their stronghold on resource extraction from poorer countries.
For a counter-factual, see this video with interviews with actual NK people living in SK on how NK defectors are treated by SK government, including testimony from a lawyer who has publically worked on defending them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4&list=LL&index=2
Make your own decisions about what that means for you.
This is why people say there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. To simply exist within the system of American imperialism is to be complicit in crimes against humanity.
How can something like this be allowed into The United States. Are trade sanctions actually bureaucratic yellow tape to get around with middleman shell companies? I am completely disgusted that I may have unknowingly purchased food prepared by a facility as inhumane as this.
For example, there are currently a variety of sanctions against the Russian and Iranian petroleum industries. So, they sell at a slight discount to neutral countries such as India which then re-export the "clean" oil.
Nobody actually wants Russia to stop exporting oil, because they are one of the biggest exporters in the world. World economy would take a huge hit if that much oil disappeared from the market. The purpose of the sanctions is not to prevent Russia from exporting oil, but to reduce the amount of money they get from selling it.
This is mostly a doing of the country (or elites) itself. North Korea could be much better (it's actually doing a lot better than many third-world countries despite their backward system) but they choose not to.
At least for Russian petroleum stuff, it's not as easy. The existing pipeline networks from the oil and gas fields are mostly focused on delivering to Europe due to history (everything east of the former GDR was supplied with gas and oil from Russia), and that is coming to an end rather sooner than later as Germany is building up import capacity from the North Sea and Croatia from the Mediterranean (a new LNG terminal on Krk and the existing oil infrastructure on Omisalj), as well as Ukraine planning to end oil transit in 2025.
Alternative transportation capacity is very very scarce as there are barely any pipelines and Russia doesn't have accessible sea ports in abundance.
Not just US. Did you know that as soon as Russian sanctions began with the latest war escalation, German exports of chips and machinery to Kyrgyzstan rose 900%?
(I'd be the first to say this sounds like a conspiracy but by now even Reuters reported on it)
Russia selling oil to India? It's now part of the world oil market, so decreases demand from India for other nations oil. Effectively they're still selling the same amount of oil, but now they get rupees instead of $, € or ₽.
Russia selling wood through Kazakhstan? Well it's the same wood being sold, but Kazakhstan is getting money out of this somehow. There are people to bribe on the way. There are logistics to be done. They will achieve a lower price on the wood now.
It seems like there should be, but we never hear about it.
Anybody know?
Some interesting details here:
If we're lucky, that comes along with some reforms. These would be reforms geared towards making those second-tier elites better off, of course. Perhaps just a change to how resources are spent and distributed. Perhaps some de-collectivization and private property. Perhaps secretly negotiated reduction in sanctions in exchange for some liberalization. But that could still be a move in the right direction.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/05/31/how-the-newest...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_Stat...
Even with all the problems in the West, with all that's broken at the moment in our end-stage capitalist societies, never forget that the alternative, in almost all instances, is pure terror.
We uniquely have the resources to be better and more advanced and create a more productive society with those resources, and merely lack the consensus to do so. There is no need to compare ourselves to anyone else to rationalize our incompetencies, consensus failures, or to spearhead development goals.
You can't make this shit up...ask me how I know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff_CNMI_scandal
Its how Americans talk about some other places so I always find that amusing
That's a weird way to spell "the most prosperous time/space ever, where borderline poor people live like kings 200 years ago, and there are fewer and fewer poor people as time goes on and poverty threshold goes up".
The question is more that, given how prosperous we are, and how much capital we have at our disposal, why do we still have so many poor people? Why is income inequality so bad?
Not than poor people 200 years ago, than kings 200 years ago. No king of early 1800s could have tropical fruits, antibiotics or an entire library of human knowledge at his fingertips.
>Why is income inequality so bad?
Does a burger taste any worse if you know someone's having caviar?
Also, how would you compare today's wealth inequality with that of 200 years ago, when peasants, being some 90% of the population, didn't own nearly anything at all?
Human beings have a fine-tuned sense of inequality and injustice; it's one of the things that makes us self-legislating agents, rather than beasts scrabbling for the top. The burger absolutely does taste worse if you know that it isn't a fair representation of the value of your labor.
To make this more salient: your argument would apply to people living under repressive regimes as much as it does to content Westerners sitting at home. Or do you think that North Koreans in China have no right to object, given that their equivalent domestic forced labor would be even worse?
Sure some countries do better others, and one can say higher taxes and social services are the way, but that's still good old capitalism.
Also, libraries existed 200 years ago, as did tropical fruits. Really not sure what your argument is there.
If you gave that out and those two billion people tried to spend it, you’d just get hyperinflation because there isn’t enough supply to match that demand.
We have a lot of abundance but not that much. Still fewer people as a percentage live in poverty by far than at any time in human history. It’s mostly going in the right direction. We’ve lifted a billion out of poverty in the last 20 years.
Second, as the last few decades have shown, just sending food, medicine and other supplies to these regions just makes more miserable people.
We dont need less capitalism but rather more and faster.
There is no clean spectrum. We need more good capitalism (free trade, free movement of labor, entrepreneurship) and less bad capitalism (negative externalities, money in politics). Just like we need more good regulations and less bad regulations.
We shouldn't force heterogeneous things into a single conceptual basket (called "capitalism") and then conclude more is better, or less is better. Components of the system should be separated out and analyzed on their own merits.
The goal should be to make today's relatively poor comparatively rich to the poor of generations past.
Since the current system is deeply unfair, I'm not sure why adding additional wealth to the system would make it any more fair. The majority of every extra dollar goes to the ultra rich.
Removing it brings about the outright terror seen every time it gets removed. Change my mind.
That's just an opinion. What we do know is that as more wealth has been generated via Capitalism more and more people globally (and nationally) have been brought out of poverty to the point where poverty has had to be redefined in certain areas. Capitalism has made starvation a thing of the past and diabetes the new, but better, problem of the poor for example. Poor people can afford to eat meat daily. Not even wealthy could do this in the not so distant past.
So instead of fighting over probably wrong opinions we should look at the data and then continue to do more of the thing that has been generating better outcomes for more people. That means more capitalism because that leads to better outcomes.
1) Why are there so many poor?
2) Why are their ranks increasing?
To say something is better than before is not the same as saying it is as good as it could be. And yet no one is trumpeting the latter.
They're not. Both absolute number and percentage in both "extreme poverty" and just "poverty" have been steadily decreasing since the 70s.
You're falling for the ruse. Funny how the First World all but abandobed the rest of the (impoverish) world until it needs that head count to pat itself on the back and sell the ruse
Thank you for proving my point.
Regardless, the question remains: why so much poverty in so many places? *Especially* in the First World?
"Smile and be happy you pathetically poor, you're slightly less pathetic than before"
Do you not sense how insensitive and in-a-bubble that sounds?? Certainly, we can do better. Certainly, we shouldn't be bragging about that is still a massive loss to so many.
It's very easy to ruin this and very hard to improve upon. Why should I believe whatever anyone suggesting is going to make things better? Every single attempt of destroying capitalism "for the benefit of the proletariat" made it worse for said proletariat, big time, every time.
Also, figuratively speaking, clean your room.
Or simply a twisted rationalization so some can sleep better at night?
I would recommend you read "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden. There's are some serious systemic thumbs on the "globalization" scale, and those thumbs are the same outfits spewing the narrative you're parrotting.
Get the book. We can resume this in a couple weeks.
True, many more people are out of poverty, but few are truly prosperous anymore compared to the "American Dream" in the latter half of the 20th century.
Our goal should be getting further and further away from "pure terror" year after year. Instead we have politicians fucking with our way of life, restricting more and more freedoms and telling us that the alternative is North Korea.
North Korea isn't an alternative to technofeudalism we have now, let alone the only alternative.
Socialism doesnt work because it doesnt consider greed as a positive force. Starting from there, every sign of greed is suppressed until remains only an oppressive bureaucracy in charge of hammering any sign of attempt of maybe earning something.
Socialism is not evil, it's even benevolent: but it's flawed because it ignore 50% of human nature. Better let people deal with their greed in a monitored sandbox that averages out excesses. And that is never called socialism, since it derives too much from accepted socialist dogma.
I live in Hong Kong, so I know how hard the balance is to strike. But socialism worked so little here that most people are 3rd generation immigrants who fled collectivisation, loss of property right and only desire to be left alone by the evangelists of a better world. It's hard to hear people who leave in free capitalist sandboxes lecture us about how socialism could maybe work. Try and weep, as we did.
I've spent some months in HK-Kowloon (2002-2016) and it was one of the most capitalist places I've ever visited from the entrepreneurs running food stalls and working night markets, to the media (granted my Cantonese is minimal, but there were english language newspapers), to the massive banking business. There was a desperation, hustle, and exploitation along with the positives I expect from capitalism. There seemed to be basic social support, housing, and medical care... but that's true in the US, which I think is not socialist. It seems to me that most of Europe is more socialist, but I'm not here to judge what people want or what's best for them.
Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and even Germany, France or England are more socialist than I've experienced in HK, TW, or Singapore. They have pretty well established democracies and rule of law, but basic needs like food/health/housing/child care are pretty well comfortably provided by their governments. More so than past the New Territories.
I really wish you the best in HK now. It's a beautiful place full of great people who've worked really hard. Financial leverage provided a lot of jobs and made the rich wealthy, but if that investment fails to turn a profit, everyone will have to pay for it.
I would argue that it could be applicable in a voluntary mode in more smaller states (city sized) where people not agreeing would have the freedom to leave.
And yet the USA have had 2 economic recession due to greed and it was regulation who saved the day.
Capitalism doesn't even thrive under greed, as it incentives any means necessary to get more even if it's illegal.
Well, one shitty alternative alternative anyway
Government officials carefully select workers to send to China, screening them for their political loyalties to reduce the risk of defections. To qualify, a person must generally have a job at a North Korean company and a positive evaluation from a local Party official. “These checks start at the neighborhood,” Breuker said. Candidates who have family in China, or a relative who has already defected, can be disqualified. For some positions, applicants under twenty-seven years of age who are unmarried must have living parents, who can be punished if they try to defect, according to a report from the South Korean government; applicants over twenty-seven must be married. North Korean authorities even select for height: the country’s population is chronically malnourished, and the state prefers candidates who are taller than five feet one, to avoid the official embarrassment of being represented abroad by short people. Once selected, applicants go through pre-departure training, which can last a year and often includes government-run classes covering everything from Chinese customs and etiquette to “enemy operations” and the activities of other countries’ intelligence agencies. (The North Korean government did not respond to requests for comment.)
I don't think their goal is improving people's work conditions in far away poor countries.
But I’m also beyond believing that the goal of media outlets which shape people’s perceptions is to present objective reality out of the goodness of their hearts.
In that way the clueless "normie" does listens to MSM without any weight is sometimes more reliable to believe in.
It brings to mind Last Train Home, maybe the best piece of Chinese propaganda I’ve ever seen.
Of course there’s no chance that the New Yorker writers are “allied” with some kind of repressive interest, but if the down voters think the authors are aligned with the US commoner, they’re nuts.
At the same time, 2024-02-25T18:06:34, 13of40@hn:
>> as a hiring manager, I'm not going to waste my time with a candidate whose resume shows them hopping companies every year or two.
Voilá, this is how those in power are kept in power.
You caused $XXX of damage and you have no funds to cover it, you should work for the state until you pay back the sum.
The biggest issue, if we ignore moral values and try to keep it a cold hearted calculation (which I don’t agree with), then you have one big problem: making prisoners a profitable business will encourage imprisoning more people. Economy responds to incentives, and this seems to me like a bad incentive.
I once saw a machine to peel garlic, basically roll garlics in a container and the skins will come off automatically. I wonder if it can works out cheaper and kill this industry.
It's already a thing, and there are big issues with it https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...)
Prison labour is often heavily discounted and it undercuts non-incarcerated people who're looking for a job.
But even if you want more, what should the prision do if a prisioner refuses to participate in the forced labor? How do you force them. Violence and torture is the only ultimate way. That is what you are demanding.
Boredom will break them easier, even if it takes slightly longer.
The title of the article is:
Inside North Korea's Forced Labor Program
That might be a hint.