North Korean workers in China are now subject to much more frequent ideological reviews following the recent death of a North Korean official in the country, Daily NK has learned.
According to a Daily NK source in China on Monday, garment factories, seafood processing plants, and electronics assembly plants in Liaoning and Jilin provinces that employ North Korean workers have been conducting daily ideological reviews since last month. The reviews and ideological lectures were initially held weekly.
The source said the intensified ideological crackdowns were due to the recent death of a North Korean official in Nanping Town, which is in the city of Helong, Jilin Province.
Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun recently reported that 2,000 North Korean workers in China conducted a demonstration after occupying their factory in January over unpaid wages. In the course of the action, they beat to death the North Korean official in charge of managing them.
Before the Yomiuri Shimbun story, Ko Young-hwan, a special adviser to South Korea’s unification minister and a former North Korean diplomat, included allegations of a strike by North Korean workers in China in a report.
A Daily NK investigation through multiple sources found that a male North Korean official in his 50s, who was in charge of managing overseas workers, was indeed killed in January by workers at a Nanping Town garment factory with thousands of North Koreans.
All the sources said that several workers got into a physical altercation with the official when they expressed dissatisfaction over wages and that the official was killed in the process. However, the sources pointed out that the factory was operating as usual on the day of the incident and afterward.
The official’s remains were returned to North Korea immediately after the incident, and many of the workers involved in the attack were quickly repatriated. North Korea appears to have moved quickly to stop rumors of the incident from spreading and to prevent similar unrest elsewhere.