After Kim Il-sung’s statement, the General Association of Korean Residents started a mass repatriation campaign in the guise of humanitarianism. The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the J

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The Yalu River separates China and North Korea. A lot of people cross over it, and even more try to. Bizarrely, some thirty years earlier, many Chinese Koreans and Chinese had tried to escape to North Korea during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, that country’s own attempt at mass starvation. Now the whole migration had been th

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By the summer of 1995, we were truly terrified that we might die of hunger. Then in August, disaster struck. A devastating flood hit South Pyongan Province, an important grain-producing area. That meant the end of our grain ration. When autumn came, we started to collect acorns in desperation. With no grain, acorns were the only things that might s

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