North Korean defector recounts trafficking, sexual abuse in China in U.S. congressional hearing

Human trafficking, sexual assault and escape: A North Korean defector’s harrowing account of being trafficked in China took center stage at a U.S. congressional hearing on human rights abuses in North Korea and China.

“I was sexually assaulted by [a trafficker] and lived under his control for approximately a year and a half, and it was the most painful and difficult times of my life,” Deborah Choi said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing held Wednesday in Washington. 

Choi is a North Korean defector and human rights activist who escaped North Korea in 2004 and resettled in the United States in 2006. She was among the first groups of North Korean refugees legally admitted to the United States under the North Korean Human Rights Act.

Choi recollected how human traffickers captured her after she crossed the Tumen River into China, took her to Beijing and sold her to a Chinese man she had never met and whose language she could not speak.

There was also another North Korean woman who crossed the river with her, who was extremely thin from hunger. But traffickers threatened to send the woman back to North Korea because they believed she would not fetch much money.

“Sell me anywhere. Just do not send me back to North Korea,” Choi recalled the woman pleading. 

The traffickers took turns sexually assaulting the woman that night, Choi said.

“She couldn’t say a word and got abused all night,” Choi said. “She was terrified that if she resisted, they might send her back to North Korea.” 

Choi claimed that she was spared the same treatment because the traffickers believed they could sell her for a higher price because she was a virgin. The other woman was sold to a rural farm the following day, and Choi never saw her again.

Choi’s decision to leave North Korea had come just months earlier, after she secretly watched a South Korean television drama with friends in 2004.

The group locked the door and covered the windows with thick blankets as they watched young people around their age speak, travel, fall in love and dress freely.

“At first, I thought it was a fake and propaganda to deceive us,” Choi said. “But eventually, I realized that it was a real life they live in.” 

Her testimony described how she and about 10 other young people spent almost three days watching the drama whenever electricity was available.

“If a world like that really exists, I want to experience it once, at least once, before I die,” Choi recalled thinking in her written testimony.

Within about three months, she crossed the border into China.

“Once you know the truth, I couldn’t stop thinking,” Choi told lawmakers in the hearing. “Once you know it, you got to find that way to see it, experience it.” 

Choi also spoke about memories of growing up under the North Korean regime.

When she was about five years old, she accidentally scribbled on a photograph of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung in a book and tore part of the page. Her father became frightened and angry and beat her.

“Because of this one small thing you did, our entire family could be finished,” Choi recalled her father telling her. 

Years later, Choi was forced to join hundreds of other people, including children, to watch a public execution. People about to be executed were tied to wooden posts, while their family members were placed in the front row.

“When the gunshot came, I covered my eyes, but I still remember looking through my fingers, and I saw the blood coming from their bodies,” she said.

The experience taught her how fear could be used to enforce obedience.

"I remember thinking, 'I will never do anything the government tells me not to do,'" Choi recalled thinking. "I do not want to die like that, in front of families."

The hearing went beyond the plight of North Korean escapees.

Another witness, Sylvia Zin, testified about the detention of her husband, Min Zin, a U.S. citizen and researcher who traveled to Kunming in China’s Yunnan province in June to participate in an academic workshop.

Her husband had traveled to China before, including for an academic conference in Shanghai the previous year, giving her no reason to be anxious about the trip.

When she did not hear from him for six hours after his arrival, however, she and others began trying to reach him. The following day, she received a call from a Chinese number.

“The person on the line told me Min Zin was in custody and the Ministry of State Security in Yunnan was conducting an investigation,” she said. “When I tried to clarify what this meant, the line went dead.” 

The family later learned that Min Zin was under investigation on allegations of “endangering national security.”

The family was surprised because her husband is a UC Berkeley scholar and executive director of the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a think tank conducting open-source research on the country. In her written testimony, she described him as “entirely dedicated to independent academic freedom.”

“We’ve learned that he was initially being interrogated every day for four to six hours and is held in a small cell where the light stays on for 24/7,” she said. 

More than 100 days into detention, Min Zin was not granted access to his Chinese lawyers and his wife did not know where he was being held.

“Notably, the last time the leaders of [the United States and China] met, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri of Zion Church in China was freed by the CCP afterwards,” Rep. Young Kim, a Republican from California and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s East Asia and Pacific Subcommittee, said in her opening remarks, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “So, I hope to see Min Zin free soon.”

Kim added that Beijing’s treatment of Americans extended beyond China’s borders, and said it is a “direct assault on U.S. sovereignty.” 

She also warned that Americans could be used as leverage by Beijing.

“If you travel to China, Beijing may take you hostage as leverage in diplomatic negotiations,” Kim said. “And if you are an American belonging to a minority group persecuted by China, you may be subject to the CCP’s transnational repression.” 

Rep. Ami Bera, a Democrat from California and the subcommittee’s ranking member, emphasized the connection between human rights and U.S. national security and the role of outside information in exposing abuses.

“Human rights are not separate from our national security interests,” Bera said. “They are central to our values and our ability to counter authoritarian coercion. But confronting these abuses also requires exposing them, and free flows of vital information are vital to that effort.” 

Cooperation between China and North Korea on repression extends beyond Beijing’s forced repatriation of North Korean escapees and into international supply chains, according to Victor Cha, president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“Beyond China’s forced repatriation of refugees, the collusion on transnational repression is embedded in their supply chains,” Cha said. “An ongoing CSIS project examines the hidden links between North Korean forced labor and international supply chains.” 

Measures that would impose costs Beijing could feel, including targeting state-owned enterprises rather than only security agencies and disclosing information about the wealth and foreign assets of CCP leaders, were called for by Peter Mattis, president of the think tank the Jamestown Foundation.

BY LEE TAE-HEE, YOO JEE-HYE [[email protected]]