"She went to the police station," the 6-year-old girl said in a barely audible voice. When asked if she knew what happened to her mother, she hung her head and stared at the floor. At the end of the interview, during which she said very little, I realized she was holding onto the hem of my jacket. I wondered if I reminded her of her mother.
The girl's Chinese father, a tanned, middle-aged farmer,explained how the child's North Korean mother was arrested by the police and sent back to North Korea in 2005. They had not heard from her since. The only good thing that came out of this tragedy was that the father could finally register the girl on his hukou, or household registration, meaning that she can attend school. In China, despite laws saying all children are entitled to nine years of elementary education, in reality, this only happens if a child can produce a hukou document.
"Where I live, if you want to obtain hukou for a child with a North Korean mother, you must obtain a police document verifying the mother's arrest and repatriation," said the girl's father. As a matter of policy, the local government is breaking up families and leaving children motherless. Once repatriated, the women are likely never to see their children again.
China continues to arrest and repatriate North Korean women, although they could face mistreatment, imprisonment, torture and even execution because, under North Korea's penal code, leaving the country without state permission can be considered an act of treason.
This strong risk of persecution upon return means that, under international law, many North Koreans in China are considered to be refugees. As a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the Chinese government has an obligation not to repatriate them, an obligation that Beijing ignores.
The 6-year-old girl who clung to my jacket lives in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in the eastern Jilin Province of northeast China, which has a large concentration of ethnic Koreans. Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans escaped to China to avoid a famine that is estimated to have killed one million people, or about 5 percent of the population.
Her mother was among the North Korean women who ended up living with a Chinese man in a de-facto marriage. Some women entered such a relationship voluntarily while others are victims of trafficking. Local residents estimate that there are several thousand to tens of thousands of children born to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers in the area. The Chinese fathers face a painful dilemma: They can register their children at the risk of exposing the mothers, who could be arrested and repatriated to North Korea, or they don't register their children, who then remain unable to attend school.
Desperate parents resort to bribing school officials, borrowing a Chinese child's hukou, or even buying a fake hukou to give the children access to education. But these measures are illegal, work only temporarily and certainly can't be used beyond elementary education.
Children who have migrated from North Korea with their parents are even more vulnerable than those that are half-Chinese, since it is impossible for them to obtain hukou. In some cases their parents are repatriated to North Korea, but the North Korean children remain behind.
"I am afraid they will find out I am North Korean, and kick me out of school," said a 13-year-old North Korean girl, who began attending school in 2007 by borrowing a Chinese girl's hukou. "Because I don't have hukou, I started school only this year, and I am four years older than my classmates, who are all Chinese."
Under China's Nationality Law, the children born to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers are entitled to Chinese nationality. But there is a huge gap between rights and reality: The 6-year-old child should have been registered under her father's hukou, regardless of her mother's status. She should have been given access to education without any preconditions. And her mother should have been treated as a refugee and never have been repatriated to North Korea.
It is time for Beijing to take steps that are not only sensible and humane, but which would simply enforce China's own laws, and the international treaties it has ratified. All children in China must be able to attend school, regardless of residency status or nationality. Beijing has nothing to gain by continuing to ignore the rights of these children as it will inherit a new generation who are neither registered nor educated. In fact, Beijing has a lot to lose.
Kay Seok is North Korea researcher for Human Rights Watch.
