S2 E8: The untold plight of North Korean workers (China Pt. 3)

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What we're hearing here are the sounds of celebration captured on video in 2023 and posted to Duyin.

That's the version of TikTok available in China.

There are singers, musicians, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights, all courtesy of Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood processing company in Dandong, China.

2023 was a very good year for Jinhui.

They opened a new processing plant and doubled the amount of of squid exported to the United States.

So they threw a party and they filmed it.

In the Duyin videos, you can see drone footage projected on a screen that shows off Jinhui's Dandong campus.

It's a 21-acre fenced-in compound with multiple factories.

You can see processing and cold storage facilities and what appears to be a seven-floor dormitory for workers.

So this is pretty normal stuff, an overblown corporate party to celebrate a successful year, but there's some interesting details here that are easy for Westerners to miss.

The playlist at this particular party includes songs that are popular in North Korea.

Some of the dancers are decked out in North Korean colors.

At one point, a billowing North Korean flag is blasted across five video screens behind them.

In the audience, you can see dozens of workers waving miniature North Korean flags.

And this is, simply put, a problem.

As somebody in the comments section asked when the video was posted, aren't you prohibited from filming this?

Got some breaking news now out of North Korea.

Yes, another ballistic missile has been fired.

North Korea has reportedly launched a missile, sending it hundreds of miles before it crashed into the sea.

This launch has clearly indicated that North Korea poses a new level of threat.

Well, a chronology of North Korea's brazen missile tests over the past few years.

In 2017, North Korea tested a series of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

The UN Security Council responded by making it illegal for companies to import North Korean workers.

North Korean labor is forced labor by definition.

Nobody has a choice.

And the North Korean government is taking a cut from each worker's paycheck and using that money to fund the regime.

The UN Security Council, which includes China as a member, voted unanimously to ban these so-called labor transfers.

But since 2017, China has consistently violated those sanctions.

As my team and I dug deeper and deeper into the Chinese seafood supply chain, we turned our attention to the use of illegal North Korean labor.

Our goal was not only to show unequivocally that China is violating international law, but also to offer a look at what life was like for North Koreans who work under brutal conditions in these factories.

This is a world that China has successfully kept hidden from the West until now.

I'm Ian Urbina, and this is the Outlaw Ocean.

In the previous episodes of our investigation into the Chinese seafood supply chain, you heard about my team's extensive use of OSINT, which is open source intelligence, to track squid production from bait to plate.

Using those techniques, we were able to track squid catches back to mainland China and take an unprecedented look inside Chinese seafood processing plants.

We could see who was working and under what conditions.

Our reporting revealed that these plants were using Uyghur workers from the Xinjiang region of China.

Once we found Uyghur labor, we took a guess that if we kept looking, we'd find more examples of China not playing by the rules.

So we moved north from China's seafood processing hub in Shandong province to a coastal city called Dandong.

Dandong is in northeastern China, right against the North Korean border.

It has a population of about 2 million, and it's especially notable for one thing, the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge.

Not all trade with North Korea is illegal, and about 70% of the goods sent between China and North Korea cross this bridge.

The bridge spans the Yalu River and it's one of the few gateways between North Korea and the rest of the world.

The Yalu River is a major trade route for ships headed to Dandong, and there's a lot of seafood infrastructure on both sides of the border.

Together, all of this led us to believe that if we started looking, we'd find evidence of North Korean labor inside the Chinese factories that dot Dandong's coast.

Despite the prohibition against North Korean labor, the U.S.

State Department estimates that there are over 100,000 North Korean workers currently in China.

And as recently as 2022, the Chinese government itself put the number of North Koreans working in the city of Dandong alone at about 80,000.

Before 2017, the number of North Korean workers being sent to China was a bit easier to track because it wasn't expressly prohibited by UN sanctions.

In 2012, for example, we know that North Korea sent about 40,000 workers to China.

A think tank in Seoul estimated that this labor transfer program earned about $2.3 billion per year for the North Korean government through seized wages.

This forced labor program still exists, and one of the North Korean agencies responsible for managing it is called Room 39.

It sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, but it's a real thing.

Room 39 oversees some of the North Korean government's more nefarious activities like money laundering and cyber attacks.

It also funds the country's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The workers who take part in the program are carefully selected by the government to minimize potential problems.

For example, if a worker has a family member who has ever attempted to defect, they're automatically disqualified.

So what we set out to do was take these kind of abstract numbers from the U.S.

State Department and the Chinese data from before the sanctions and connect some dots.

Sure, we could safely assume that there are, in fact, North Korean workers in China based on what the State Department says, and we had a sense of the approximate number based on data from before the sanctions and before COVID.

What we wanted to do was find specific workers in specific plants, and we wanted to link that labor to seafood products headed to the United States.

That's something nobody has ever been able to do before.

So our first step was to map the number of plants on the Chinese side of the border.

From there, we confirmed that there were, in fact, labor transfers happening over the bridge.

Then we wanted to get a sense of scale.

How many workers and how many plants and how many exports to North America and Europe.

To do all that, we used similar techniques to our reporting on Uyghur labor.

We looked at government sources, domestic press coverage, and internal company documents like memos, quarterly reports, and press releases.

We reviewed trade data, shipping contracts, and the codes that are stamped on seafood packages to monitor food safety.

And we looked for videos posted to social media from people who live in the area or by Chinese workers inside the plants.

We had experts review the footage for North Korean accents, language, and other cultural markers.

That's where we found the video from the Jinhui Foodstuffs party.

We also discovered videos on Duyin posted by Chinese seafood smugglers advertising illegal crab from North Korea.

Here's a video on the same app from a labor contractor looking to place North Korean workers in Chinese factories.

A commenter asks, can they go to seafood factories in Dandong?

The contractor responds, yes they can.

We also found this video showing North Korean women performing a synchronized dance at a plant called Dandong Yuan Yi Refined Seafoods.

It's actually in Donggang, a city about 20 miles down the coast from Dandong.

The women are dancing in front of a mural commemorating Youth Day, a North Korean holiday.

The Chinese writing over the video reads, Beautiful little women from North Korea in Donggang's cold storage facility.

It seemed like the presence of North Koreans working in these factories was an open secret inside China, but one that they desperately wanted to keep from the West.

We wanted to get behind the walls of these factories to confirm that there were North Koreans present.

That meant sending Chinese investigators inside them to talk to workers and to take secret footage of production lines.

It posed a huge reporting challenge and we had to use some serious subterfuge to make it happen.

One tactic we used was to use a proxy to find a local official who might be sympathetic to our mission and then get that local to do a surprise walkthrough of the factory.

Ostensibly, they'd be there to check on workplace conditions, security, or productivity, but they'd bring our guy along and they'd be able to take a few pictures or at least see inside without raising too much suspicion.

Another option was to make use of a charity program that exists inside China that allows people of Korean descent to help their North Korean sisters by providing them with things like tampons or lip balm.

We could leverage that program to get someone inside the plant to drop off these gifts and to ask for a tour of the factory in exchange.

And through these means, we were able to get a glimpse inside the factories.

The risks to the people helping us with this reporting are huge.

The Chinese do not want evidence of North Korean labor reaching Westerners.

They have the resources, the infrastructure, the technology to do extremely advanced surveillance.

They have cameras everywhere, the ability to do facial recognition, data mining, you name it.

After our investigators visited a few of these plants, Chinese security officials publicly distributed pamphlets that said, quote,

people who make use of the special geographical proximity of the border city to North Korea and the status of a Chinese citizen to contact North Korean workers or who get too close to the workplaces of North Korean workers will be treated as engaging in espionage activities endangering national security and be punished severely.

The pamphlets also said that residents working with foreign media would be charged as spies.

By contrast, North Korea lacks the capital, the technology, the infrastructure to operate a China-level surveillance program.

It's a lot more old school, like the Soviet era in Russia, where you never know who's watching or when, but the state there is just as punitive and the stakes are just as high.

The jobs in Chinese factories are highly coveted by North Koreans, and that's because the contracts often promise monthly salaries of around $270.

Someone in North Korea might earn $3 per month for doing similar work.

But these Korean workers in China typically see less than 10% of that promised salary.

The bulk of their pay is sent to the North Korean government as loyalty payments.

After additional deductions for food, water, electricity, heating, and the workers' dormitories, what's left is often less than $30 per month.

Most workers who are transferred from North Korea do eventually return home.

It stands to reason that workers talk and that those who cross the bridge are well aware of the conditions inside Chinese factories.

Still, thousands of North Koreans make the trip across the bridge to take these jobs.

On a basic level, these are jobs with very little in the way of protections or safety nets.

For example, during the global pandemic, China went into a strict lockdown and closed its borders.

North Korean workers were essentially stranded with no jobs, no income, no way to pay rent or buy food.

To get these jobs in the first place, many of the North Korean workers had to borrow money from loan sharks to bribe officials.

Then, when the pandemic hit, these same workers found themselves stuck in China with no wages and unable to make payments to those sharks.

That meant the loan sharks started leaning on these workers' families back in North Korea, sending thugs to their homes.

Workers often have to sign two or three year contracts.

After they arrive in China, their passports are confiscated.

If they try to escape or complain, their families at home can face reprisals from the government.

Shifts at seafood plants run 14 to 16 hours.

Workers receive up to one day off per month and few, if any, holidays or sick days.

In seafood plants, women sleep in bunk beds in locked dormitories, sometimes with 30 people in a room.

Workers are forbidden from leaving factory grounds, listening to local radio, or watching TV.

Occasionally, they're allowed to socialize, but rarely outside the grounds of the processing plant.

This is a video posted on social media of North Korean workers playing volleyball inside the walled grounds of a factory.

One commenter writes, quote, they've been brainwashed and they don't know how good the outside world is.

And make no mistake, the conditions inside these plants, for women especially, are brutal.

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I think that a big part of the struggle with this type of reporting is how to simultaneously show the scope and scale of a problem while also humanizing statistics.

Because the scale of this particular problem is massive.

When we looked at the presence of Uyghur labor in Chinese seafood factories, we were able to get some first-person perspective on what life was like for those workers through social media posts.

Despite a history of conflict and cultural repression, Uyghurs are still Chinese citizens, so they have access access to things like cell phones and duyin.

But that's not the case for North Koreans, especially North Koreans who are working in China.

Their access to the outside world is basically non-existent, and their actions are monitored closely by the state.

Talking to journalists about their lives means risking serious repercussions from both the Chinese and North Korean governments.

We knew that getting first-hand accounts from these North Korean workers would be crucial to our reporting, and through contacts in South Korea and China, we were able to make that happen.

Through a series of proxies, we were able to interview roughly two dozen people who had worked at Chinese plants, a few managers, but mostly North Korean women who had worked on the factory floor.

These workers were told that their responses would be shared publicly by an American journalism outlet.

Our investigators recorded their responses by hand, sent photos of what they'd written, and destroyed the originals.

Again, the workers faced considerable risk in speaking.

If they were caught, they could be executed, and their families could be put in prison camps.

Still, they agreed to talk.

and their responses were frankly shocking.

Here's what those women told us.

Workers didn't have contracts.

They had no idea how much they'd actually be paid or when.

Deducted from their salaries were things like food, board, medical needs, as well as loyalty fund payments.

Those are fees collected by the North Korean government.

Workers would get whatever was left over, which was generally very little.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, some women weren't paid at all.

Their living conditions were cold and putrid, and they were under constant surveillance.

They were never allowed to leave the compound unchaperoned and had virtually no time to socialize.

Workdays were often 14 hours long, and the factory smelled like rotting fish.

Violence was persistent.

They faced the constant threat of reprisal for any perceived insubordination or failure to work hard enough.

Men in the plants often slapped, groped, and harassed the North Korean women.

Threats of sexual violence were common.

This could happen on the job or after hours at managers' drinking sessions where female workers were summoned to serve them.

We asked the women if they could recount any happy moments.

Most said no.

A few said they were happy to get at least some of their pay.

One woman said that her experience at a Chinese plant made her feel like she, quote, wanted to die.

17 said they'd been sexually assaulted.

During COVID-19, the state still demanded loyalty fund payments, even though plants were shut down.

So managers forced female workers to sell their bodies.

These workers said they felt a deep sense of despair.

The pressure of debt, sexual violence, and loneliness led some to take drastic measures.

For example, in 2022, two North Korean women who worked at a factory died by suicide.

Some of the North Korean workers we interviewed were still in China.

One woman said that she'd spent the past several years gutting fish at a processing plant in Dalian, China.

She described grueling work, long hours, and constant stress.

The exhaustion left her with sores in her mouth.

She described a sense of imprisonment that felt suffocating.

She said, quote, if you show even the slightest attitude, they'll treat you like an insect.

Another said, quote, living a life where we can't see the outside world as we please is so difficult that it's killing us.

The scale of this problem is immense, and its tendrils stretch across the planet.

And so the other side of all this reporting, those big numbers, those seemingly abstract statistics, all of that is also hugely important.

So here's what we found.

At least 15 large seafood processing plants in China have used over a thousand North Korean workers.

Since sanctions went into effect in 2017, 10 of these plants have together shipped more than 120,000 tons of seafood to more than 70 American importers.

Those importers supplied grocery stores including Walmart, Giant, ShopRight, and the online grocer We.

They also supply major restaurant chains like McDonald's and Cisco, which is the largest food distributor on the planet.

It services cafeterias in the U.S.

Congress, on American military bases, and in public schools.

We reach out to these restaurants and grocery stores, but most decline to comment.

I think a large part of why China has been so open, at least within their own borders, about using North Korean labor, and perhaps why the people who run these seafood plants act with such impunity towards these North Koreans, is because no one has really been able to connect the dots until now.

Even though the country is tied to the rest of the world through global trade, China is still basically a black box.

It's hard to get information in or out.

And their strength as a manufacturing superpower gives them a lot of leverage to say no to things like independent oversight.

We've talked in other episodes this season about the problems with audits.

That's no different here.

In fact, in that video of the party from Jinhui Foodstuff, where they're using North Koreans, they're actually bragging about passing Western audits and being certified as a good actor.

by the Marine Stewardship Council.

China has become the factory of the world, and we need that factory.

So we turn a blind eye to what's happening.

And North Korea is even more shut off than China.

It's the Hermit Kingdom.

So getting information about China's relationship with North Korea, well, suffice it to say, it's difficult, but it's not impossible.

And we found that, yes, there are conclusively North Koreans working in these Chinese plants.

But what can we do with that information?

So on the one hand, you have things like the UN sanctions and the U.S.

countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CATSA,

and those rules are black and white.

Nothing touched by North Korean workers can come into the U.S.

And then on the other hand, you have this kind of poorly kept secret of North Korean workers.

in Chinese factories.

And those very factories are shipping huge amounts of seafood to the US and the rest of the world.

So how do those two things sit next to each other?

Well, again, the answer to that comes down to the bewilderingly complex series of handoffs, transactions, and transfers that make up the global supply chain.

There are all these dots in the middle of it that are hard to connect.

We're talking about trying to trace the journey of a single squid from a ship parked somewhere on the ocean at the ends of the earth, back and forth across the globe a few times, to a grocery store somewhere in the US.

When a Western company goes into China, they know the rules of engagement.

They know that they're not allowed to ask about certain things like human rights violations, Uyghur labor, North Korean workers.

China has the leverage to say, if you're going to come into our country and pay 10 cents to the dollar for labor, then you're going to play by our rules and not ask the wrong questions.

And And those rules are designed to keep the dots in the middle invisible.

Those are the dots that connect Indonesian slave labor on a ship to Uyghur labor in a factory to a grocery store down the block from your house.

Those invisible dots are plausible deniability and it's built into the system.

It's essential.

It keeps the whole thing running smoothly without anyone asking too many questions or anything slowing down.

Most importantly, that plausible deniability keeps prices low and profits high.

We live in a globalized world, and that has allowed us to make luxury items, you know, things that were once scarce and expensive, like certain kinds of seafood, now plentiful and affordable.

We're on the other side of the world, at the other end of this insanely long supply chain.

We're the ones enjoying these low prices.

But I think the thing to remember here is that there are costs being paid by the people doing the work, the ones producing the seafood.

Bottom line, the real cost isn't what you see on the price tag.

If you're interested in digging deeper, I'd encourage you to visit our website at theoutlawocean.com.

On the site, you'll find a link to our entire reporting around China, The Superpower of Seafood.

In addition to the print version of this story that appeared in The New Yorker, you'll also find interactive features, documentary films, a summary of the impacts of this reporting, and a lot more.

We're really proud of the work we've done on this, and I'd love for you to take a moment to check it out over at theoutlawocean.com.

Supporting this kind of not-for-profit journalism is more important now than ever before.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano.

Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson.

Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh.

Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler.

For CBC podcasts, our coordinating producer is Fabiola Carletti, senior producer Damon Fairless.

The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Special thanks to the Oak Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Mick Pike Zema Foundation, the Pulitzer Center, Foundation Hans Wilsdorf, the Band Foundation, Ann Lusky, the Blumenthal Family Philanthropic Fund, 11th Hour Racing, which is funded by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Cyrus R.

Vance Center for International Justice, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Human Trafficking Legal Center, the Levine Family Foundation, the Philip Stevenson Foundation.

Also thanks to Pierre Qatar, Joe Sexton, Maya Doles, Joshua Farinella, Ed O, and Will Miller, Sea Shepherd, Greenpeace, Global Fishing Watch, and Kay Daly.

But biggest thanks of all goes to the staff of the Outlaw Ocean Project, especially Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Ben Blankenship, Joe Galvin, Stephen Foxwell, Marcella Bowler, Rafaela Moraes, Adrian Urbina, and Bridget Gallagher.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.