The Emperor Far Away (33 page)

Western travellers, too, steered clear of the region. Marco Polo wrote, ‘the air in the summer is so impure and bad’, and warned that any foreigner ‘would die for certain’. When Reginald Fleming Johnston, a Scottish diplomat based in eastern China, passed through in 1906 on his way to Mandalay, he struggled to persuade his porters to accompany him. Fleming Johnston survived to become the tutor to Puyi, the child who was China’s final emperor, a role which resulted in him being immortalised by Peter O’Toole in the Bernardo Bertolucci movie
The Last Emperor
.

Nor have the Dai and Jingpo in Ruili prospered as the Dai in Banna have, despite the banana plantations surrounding the city. ‘The Dai here aren’t locals like the Dai in Banna are. They’re more like Burmese people and so are the Jingpo,’ one Han man told me over
shaokao
: barbecued meat and fish served on skewers at outdoor stalls and the most popular eating option in Ruili.

Throughout Dehong Prefecture, the Dai and Jingpo are almost indistinguishable from their relatives across the frontier, a telling fact considering the huge wealth gap between Yunnan and Myanmar. All the minorities resent the way Ruili has been smartened up, superficially anyway, while they have not benefited. That discontent surfaces in their ambivalence towards visitors, Han or foreign, and they are far from welcoming. Ruili is the only place in China I have been to where I felt the need to look over my shoulder at night.

There are no beautiful Dai girls in dancing shows for Han tourists to goggle at in Ruili, just lots of hookers trying to make enough money to support their families or a drug habit. Prostitutes are the most obvious sign of Ruili’s underbelly. The shop-front brothels that once dominated the centre of town have been closed down, but working girls still congregate on streets not far away. Others do as prostitutes do all over China, and paper every hotel room in town with business cards and wait for a phone call.

Heroin use remains widespread too, with any number of innocuous-looking shops selling it, and
yaba
too, under the counter. Walking down Ruili’s main street early one evening, I almost fell over three men slumped against a wall. They were dirty, oblivious to everything, and a syringe was sticking out of a vein in the arm of one of them. Across Ruili, and especially in the Jiegao district by the border, discarded syringes half full of blood are a common sight.

But compared to the trade in women, the drugs, prostitution and jade smuggling fades into insignificance. Selling innocent young girls into lives of misery is so sordid that it makes everything else going on in Ruili appear almost wholesome. Even more depressing is the fact that many of the traffickers are Jingpo themselves, like the women they fool into travelling to China. ‘Sometimes, Jingpo people come to Kachin State to find a bride and because we see the Jingpo as our brothers and sisters, we say yes when they ask for one. But often it’s a fake marriage and the women are sold when they come to China,’ said Julia.

Their collaboration in the trafficking trade is probably a result of them being almost as poor as their cousins in Myanmar and willing to do anything to rectify that. Possibly, it is just sheer ruthlessness. But there is no question that poverty drives the sale of women. China’s gender imbalance ensures a market for forced brides, but it is the dire economic and political situation in Shan and Kachin State that prompts young women to leave. It wouldn’t matter if the barrier between Muse and Ruili was ten metres high and electrified; people would still find a way to come to China in search of better lives.

Aba’s return to Ruili was proof of that. Just three months after she had been rescued, Aba climbed back through one of the holes in the border fence. This time, she was alone and looking for a job to help keep her parents. Now she earns £60 a month working seven days a week as a waitress in a restaurant. Her time as a trafficked teenager has left her speaking fluent Mandarin, enabling her to blend in with the locals. Learning Chinese, though, is scant consolation for the three years of her life that were stolen from her. ‘I still hate the family for what they did to me,’ Aba told me when we last met. ‘I think I always will.’

Part IV

DONGBEI – PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

There is nothing like being an imperial people to make a population conscious of its collective existence .
.
.

Eric Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism

since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
(1990)

21

The Pyongyang Express

I thought the two men were Han at first. They wore the black trousers and shoes and casual but smart sweaters which are almost a uniform for provincial Chinese businessmen. Swaying in the area between carriages, cigarettes burning between their fingers, they could have been any aspiring entrepreneurs returning home after a trip to Beijing. But over the roar of the train, I heard them speaking a different language to Mandarin. Then I glimpsed the tell-tale badges of Kim Il-sung fastened to their sweaters.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘North Korea,’ one replied in surprise. I tried not to smile. For the last couple of hours, I had been prowling through the carriages in search of North Koreans. It was the reason I had caught this particular train: the K27. Twice a week, it departs Beijing for Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea. Apart from a handful of flights and a train from Moscow, the K27 is the only public transport link between the DPRK and the outside world.

Neither of the men conformed to the popular image of starving North Koreans. Years of famine over the last two decades have left many in the countryside stunted, or with the large heads and spindly legs that are evidence of malnutrition. But these two didn’t look like they had skipped any meals. One was stout, the other over six foot tall. I asked them about the man whose face stared out from the small badges they were wearing. ‘It is our great leader Kim Il-sung,’ said the taller one.

Kim Il-sung was the first president of North Korea, installed with Soviet backing after the Second World War, and its absolute ruler until his death in 1994. Still known as the ‘Eternal President’, he was succeeded by his late son, Kim Jong-il. Now his grandson Kim Jong-un, the ‘Great Successor’, is the leader of the DPRK, the only country in the world where a hereditary communist dictatorship maintains power. As with Lenin and Mao, Kim Il-sung’s godlike status in his home country is such that his body was embalmed and is on public view in Pyongyang, while hundreds of statues of him are dotted around the country.

Asking about their badges was just my opening gambit. I offered each a smoke to keep them from fleeing. ‘North Korean cigarettes are cheap and very strong,’ said the taller man, fingering the one I handed over. He revealed that they were returning from a two-day holiday in Beijing. I wondered if Pyongyang was similar to the Chinese capital. ‘No, it’s not very much like Beijing.’ He asked me where I was from. ‘England? I’ve never met anyone English before.’

He and his friend were living temporarily in Dandong, the city on the border with the DPRK I was bound for. ‘I like Dandong. There are lots of new buildings and restaurants and many Koreans living there,’ he said. I asked what they did there. ‘We are working in the electronics business.’ Just when I thought he was warming up and would talk on, his silent stocky partner muttered something to him in Korean. ‘We have to go,’ he said, shaking my hand and turning away quickly.

They were the first North Koreans I had ever met, citizens of what is perhaps the world’s most reclusive country. The DPRK’s twenty-four million or so people live in a rigidly controlled society largely closed to visitors, pounded by propaganda into believing they are blessed to be under the benevolent rule of the Kim dynasty. A vast army and the Workers Party of Korea, the North Korean version of the CCP, are the sharp teeth behind the dictator’s smile, and the state intrudes into every aspect of life, a means of making sure no one questions, in public at least, why this Cold War relic of a country still exists in the twenty-first century.

In many ways, North Korea is reminiscent of China before the death of Mao in 1976. There is the same cult-like worship of the leader and an all-powerful ruling party that has to be obeyed no matter what. A belief in the country’s supremacy results in an extraordinary insularity, while an archaic, barely functioning economy ensures the vast majority of the population don’t live but merely subsist. Food is rationed, like it was in China until the late 1980s, while fridges and TVs are luxury items, just as they were in China before Beijing embraced capitalism.

My brief companions on the train were part of the select few: well-fed party members who live in Pyongyang and are trusted enough to travel overseas. Ordinary North Koreans are not allowed to leave the DPRK, in case they abscond after being seduced by the home comforts which are now taken for granted in China and elsewhere. Worse still is the possibility that they might return to challenge the state’s insistence that life in countries like neighbouring South Korea is a hell of American-sponsored repression and depravity.

Just as most North Koreans can’t get out, so westerners can’t get in to the DPRK except on brief, restricted tours that make Beijing’s rules on travel for foreigners in Tibet look lax. Dandong was as far as I could go on the Pyongyang express. After an overnight ride, I emerged from Dandong’s train station on a blustery and cold late-October morning, while the K27 prepared to rumble on across the bridge that links China to North Korea here.

Almost every visitor to Dandong heads first to the Yalu River, which separates the city from North Korea. I joined the Chinese tourists, and a few South Koreans, snapping away with their cameras at Sinuiju, the North Korean border town a few hundred metres away on the opposite bank. There is little to see. A solitary factory with no smoke emerging from its chimneys, some functional one-storey buildings and a stationary Ferris wheel, a remnant of an amusement park built in the 1970s, are the only signs of life.

‘It looks like a village,’ said one of the Chinese. Another was more scathing. ‘It looks like China thirty years ago.’ Such disparaging comments are the typical reaction of Chinese tour groups when they assemble in Dandong and first see the DPRK. But the lack of progress in North Korea is also part of its attraction for many Chinese. The fact that it is frozen in time, a throwback to the China of the Mao era, makes a trip to the DPRK a nostalgic experience, as well as enabling the Chinese to crow over how their country has changed for the better.

Evidence of that was all around. Dandong spreads west, south and north of the Yalu, and for the North Koreans who can occasionally be glimpsed pottering around on the other side of the river, it stands as a sobering reminder both of their country’s stalled development and of the sheer lack of vitality in the DPRK. The regime in Pyongyang can bombard its people with as much misinformation as it likes, but North Koreans living along the border with China only have to lift their eyes to see how very different life is outside their country.

Music was bellowing out of loudspeakers on the river promenade as old ladies danced in keep-fit classes. Lines of people waited to board the boats that run their passengers within twenty metres of North Korea for a close-up view of stagnant Sinuiju. Cars and trucks crowded the road that runs parallel to the river, which is lined with newly built apartment blocks. In the distance, giant cranes were hoisting seemingly unlimited quantities of raw materials to construct yet more of them.

When I returned to the promenade at night, the contrast between Dandong and Sinuiju was far crueller. A yellow moonbeam shone down on the river like a searchlight, but the buildings along Dandong’s waterfront were already lit up by thousands of watts, a riot of multi-coloured neon. Over in electricity-starved Sinuiju, there were only a few isolated lights. They looked like torches vainly trying to stab through the impenetrable darkness that has enveloped North Korea for decades.

China’s border with the DPRK runs for 1,416 kilometres along two rivers. The Yalu marks the boundary in Liaoning Province, where Dandong is located, and in the south of neighbouring Jilin Province until it gives way to the Tumen River. That waterway winds slowly north-east across Jilin and then turns abruptly right and flows south along the DPRK’s far northern border. Eventually, it reaches a tiny sliver of land where the frontiers of China, North Korea and Russia meet, before running into the Sea of Japan.

Along with Heilongjiang further north, Liaoning and Jilin make up the three provinces known collectively in China as Dongbei: the north-east. Surrounded on three sides by Mongolia, Russia and North Korea, it is a region of climactic and geographical extremes. In the winter temperatures can drop to -40 degrees Centigrade. Summers, though, are baking hot and humid. Forests that are home to a dwindling number of Siberian tigers cover much of Dongbei, but it was also China’s heavy manufacturing base until Beijing turned off the money tap in the 1990s and began denationalising many industries.