Interviews with Ahn Myeong Chul

For a long time, China and North Korea have been very close. If China were to stop its support of North Korea, I think North Korea would collapse very quickly.

China probably is the most influential country in the world in terms of playing an important role in changing North Korea.

China used to trade in huge volumes with North Korea. It is encouraging that ever since Xi Jinping took office, China’s policies began to change a great deal.

[Xi Jinping (1953 – ) became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2012 and President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013.]

Kim Jong Un has not yet been able to make an official state visit to China, because the Chinese leader has not asked him to come.

[Kim Jong Un (1983 – ) became leader of North Korea after his father’s death in 2011.]

In the past, China used to always side with North Korea, but North Korea began conducting nuclear tests and developing missiles. China keeps warning North Korea, but North Korea is not listening.

This probably led to these encouraging policy changes in China. One idea I have is that there are a lot of Chinese people, including ethnic Koreans living in China, who have invested in North Korea.

There are numerous cases where these people’s money has been taken and been held in North Korea. I personally know many people who have gone through this experience.

It is very important that the Chinese government knows about these cases.

I believe the Chinese government does not want its citizens to be victims.

Ahn Myeong Chul was born in North Hamgyong Province in North Korea. As a teenager, he was the only person from his province selected to serve as a political prison camp guard. Ahn worked in several camps for a period of eight years where he was brainwashed into believing that political prisoners were enemies of the state unworthy of sympathy. As many as 130,000 men, women and children are imprisoned in North Korea’s vast system of gulags.

Although Ahn witnessed executions, starving children, and extreme torture, it was not until he became a prison truck driver that he questioned the system. Ahn would converse with prisoners he transported and was astonished to learn they knew nothing about the reasons for their imprisonment. It was his introduction to the country’s system of “guilt-by-association” punishment; in North Korea, whole families are incarcerated for the offenses of a single family member.

While on leave in 1994, Ahn learned that his father, a member of the ruling Workers’ Party, had committed suicide after questioning the regime’s rationing system. Ahn’s mother and siblings were imprisoned for his father’s offenses. Fearing that authorities would come for him, he fled to China and eventually reached safety in South Korea.

Since his escape, Ahn has become a North Korean human rights activist. He has provided testimony at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and is now the secretary general of the organization Free NK Gulag.