The People’s Republic of Chains

Commentary

The following essay is an excerpt adapted from Yeonmi Park’s new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America” (Threshold, Simon & Schuster).

The Chinese economic growth miracle of the last two decades is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive and consequential developments in modern international history. Nicknamed “the red dragon,” contemporary China has become either the biggest or second-biggest power in global trade and commerce. It is at the forefront of science and technology. It is the global leader in payments, online retail, and infrastructure like high-speed rail, and will likely soon dominate consumer electronics. It also has a plausible chance of winning the race for predominance in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which would certainly help buttress its skyrocketing military power. Chinese defense spending in 2021 totaled about $240 billion, second only to the United States, and its active military force—over two million—is the largest in history.

These are remarkable achievements for a country that refers to itself as a “unitary, single-party, socialist state”—a political and economic model that, outside of China, has an unbroken historical track record of failure, collapse, and defeat. And it’s not as if China doesn’t share the same shortcomings as all the other communist regimes that have come and gone.

In 2020, of all countries in the world, China ranked 177th for “freedom of the press” by the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, outranking only Turkmenistan, Eritrea, and North Korea. China also came in at #129 in the CATO Institute’s 2020 Human Freedom Index, which measures 76 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom. Looking at qualitative indices of freedom, the only countries that cumulatively scored the same as or worse than China were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (the “Axis of Evil”) plus Cuba and Turkmenistan. Even when it came to business and financial freedom, China ranked 107th in an index put together by the Heritage Foundation.

My mother and I had the misfortune of being inmates in the prison that is China when we were trafficked there from North Korea. I went to China because I was determined to find my sister, but also because I wanted the one thing that by itself could grant me a better life: a bowl of rice. In exchange for that pitifully modest luxury, I became a man’s house worker and sex slave at the age of 13, and had to watch my own mother repeatedly pillaged by other men.

To this day it makes me physically ill to think about it. But the older I get, the more the sickness I experience has to do with the knowledge that it’s still happening—right now, at this very moment, as you read these words—to scores of other women and girls in China. What gives their captives the power and control they need to keep them enslaved is a single threat: “If you don’t do what I tell you, I will report you to the police.”

That threat is eminently credible. The Chinese authorities are notorious among North Korean defectors for their hair-trigger willingness to send North Koreans back “home,” where everyone involved—the girls, their captors, the police—knows they will end up in hard labor camps until they die, or else be executed on the spot. This is a deliberate policy decision by the Chinese authorities. If they ended it, the human traffickers and their clients would immediately lose their ability to enslave North Korean women. But they won’t: It is an important component of bilateral relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, and although the Kim regime can prove an irritant to the CCP now and again, China has shown no real signs of letting go of its client state.

The special relationship between the two communist regimes—the CCP and the Kim family—began during the Korean War, when China and Russia actively aided Kim Il Sung in order to “unify Korea” under the communist banner. Mao Zedong’s son, in fact, was killed in action in 1950 during an American bombing raid. (Legend has it that despite a prohibition on cooking at night in order to avoid detection from the air, Mao stole eggs to make himself egg fried rice on the night he died, alerting U.S. bombers to his unit’s location and contributing to their deaths. Nowadays, every year on the anniversary of Mao’s son’s death, rebellious Chinese internet users post recipes for egg fried rice in order to mock the government, which the authorities promptly remove.)

Accurate figures for Chinese aid and exports into North Korea are hard to come by, as the scale of North Korean dependence on its humongous neighbor is humiliating to anyone who actually thinks that the Kim regime has preserved any semblance of “self-reliance,” or that the Juche is anything at this point beyond a practical joke. But estimates from the last decade show North Korea to be little more than a Chinese colony. Chinese aid in 2014 was about $4 billion (North Korea’s entire GDP was about $28 billion in 2016), China seems to account for approximately 95 percent of all North Korea’s imports, and China receives about two-thirds of North Korea’s exports. Without China, in other words, the North Korean regime literally would not exist.

In exchange for its support of the Kim family, China receives only small amounts of ores and mineral fuels. So what’s in it for Beijing? The fact is, the existence of North Korea is good for China. It serves as a geographic buffer between China and the U.S. military forces stationed in South Korea, and North Korea’s nuclear weapons function as a reliable military deterrent to greater U.S., Korean, Japanese, and Australian action in the region. North Korea is also, according to some Chinese officials and academics—and this is not a joke—an example of why communism is superior to capitalism and democracy.

Chinese influence and control, of course, extends far beyond its own neighborhood. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet are only the crisis points within China’s immediate sphere of influence, and countries like North Korea are little more than territorial extensions of the Chinese state. The majority of Chinese economic and political influence is being extended much farther afield, to the copper mines of Africa and Latin America, the land routes of Central Asia, and the energy fields of the Persian Gulf. Vladimir Putin’s ruinous war in Ukraine, and the resulting sanctions on Russia’s economic system, have virtually ensured that the entire Russian Federation—the largest sovereign landmass in the world—will become a Chinese economic dependency.

It is concerning enough that so much of the Earth’s surface and its population will be under the influence of a state dedicated to the overthrow of American power—what’s more concerning still is the shape that new power will take. China may be one of history’s most intense drivers of economic development, but it comes at a higher cost than even economic growth can justify. As many countries in Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America have started to learn, the spread of Chinese power across the world means the spread of environmental damage and exploitation, abusive labor conditions, ruinous debt accumulation, poor infrastructure, and sex trafficking. There is no doubt that, on net, the rise of Chinese hegemony represents a negative and threatening prospect for nearly every country in the world.

It is therefore incumbent on the world’s only rival superpower, the United States of America, to stop it. Unfortunately, in recent years, America has become compromised.

In 2020 alone, a year in which much of global trade was disrupted and GDP fell precipitously, the United States still managed to be the largest importer of Chinese goods in the world, sending the CCP a whopping $452 billion. The Chinese, moreover, have infiltrated American business and finance at nearly all levels, acquiring American companies, becoming the largest shareholders in many Ameri- can industries, buying up American real estate, forcing the transfer to China of American technology, and luring away the vast majority of American manufacturing. In Chicago, where I live, the epidemic of high-rise luxury real estate construction—contributing to a city-wide housing shortage, price hikes, and a housing affordability crisis—has been driven in large part by Chinese investment.

The fact is, a large segment of America’s elite classes and most productive industries have been purchased by the Chinese. Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the universities are all dependent on Chinese money and markets to keep their profits trending upward. Their behavior in the last two decades closely parallels Russia in the 1990s, when under Boris Yeltsin a handful of oligarchs looted and sold off the country’s resources to enrich themselves while ordinary Russian people were plunged into chaos and poverty.

The consequences of this were most visible during COVID-19, when nearly all U.S. corporations, universities, and media rushed to defend the actions and decision-making of the Chinese government, helping the CCP cover up the origins of the virus by deeming anyone who disagreed with the official Beijing line as a “racist” or “crackpot” or “conspiracy theorist.” It also became painfully clear that U.S. industry had outsourced the most basic capabilities to China: America, the most technologically advanced industrial country in history, could not even make its own masks or ventilators.

Across two presidential administrations now, the United States has vowed to do something about the Chinese threat: to bring more American manufacturing and business back home; to bolster U.S. defense capabilities; to counter Chinese influence in the Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East; and to stop the illegal Chinese practices of stealing trade secrets, forcing technology transfers, investing through shell companies, and integrating the use of slave labor into global supply chains. But both the Trump and Biden administrations have fallen far short. The fact is, America’s China policy is not even really made by the American president anymore. It is made by the lobbying and interest groups and oligarchical classes that are dependent on the Chinese market, regardless of the effect on ordinary American workers and consumers.

The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. The horror of North Korea is Exhibit A of what a more Chinese world would look like: more unspeakable crime, more abject human suffering, more terrifying exploitation of innocent people for the benefit of a communist party cadre. Instead of ending the North Korean nightmare, Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.