By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 7, 2005; Page A10

TUMEN, China -- After five days of hiking in the biting cold, Lee Shanyu made her escape from the other bank of the Tumen River, where the tortured land of North Korea ends in a row of barren brown hills crusted with frost.

The promise of a bribe to North Korean border guards got her to the river's edge, she recalled, and a furtive midnight trot across the frozen water got her to this side of the border, where she said the police all seemed to be indoors trying to stay warm. And so in the middle of the night, pale, penniless and poorly clothed, another desperate North Korean had washed up in China.

"I decided to take a chance," Lee, 25, said to explain her risky flight across the border Feb. 20. "We have to do something," she added in an interview, fighting back tears as she recalled the mother she left behind. "We can't make a living in North Korea."

Every day, according to aid workers, a handful of North Koreans make the same decision, driven by hunger, want and oppression. The lucky ones find their way to South Korea, a few by sneaking into embassies in Beijing, some by traveling to neighboring countries to get help. Others get picked up by Chinese police and sent back. But many -- aid workers estimate the total is more than 200,000 -- end up working underground in China, trapped by their illegal status in menial labor, prostitution, concubinage or petty crime.

The daily trickle of asylum-seekers along China's 800-mile-long northeastern border goes a long way to explain why Beijing resists U.S. pressure to squeeze North Korea harder over its nuclear weapons program. Like U.S. officials, Chinese authorities want North Korea to abandon its effort to build a nuclear deterrent. But they also have been careful not to do anything that would further destabilize their neighbor's already decayed communist system.

Chinese specialists have said they suspect the Bush administration feels a period of chaos would be justified if it meant ending the quirky rule of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, and so views the escapees as part of a welcome trend. But as a traditional ally, and the logical destination in case of tumult accompanying Kim's collapse, China has sought to discourage North Koreans from seeking refuge on its soil, lest the trickle turn into a flood.

Those who do sneak across have been refused asylum or any other legal status, making them prey for traffickers or unscrupulous employers. In periodic crackdowns, Chinese authorities have forcefully returned them to North Korea, where they face imprisonment or even execution for having fled.

In its annual human rights report, the U.S. government last Monday criticized China for barring the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees from this border area, where recently arrived North Koreans congregate. It charged that several thousand refugees were returned in 2004 and that many others were harassed and detained, while some Chinese and foreigners who tried to help were arrested.

Fleeing North Koreans have found that in many ways they fit into the landscape of this frigid border region about 650 miles northeast of Beijing, called the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Many Chinese citizens here are of Korean origin. Of the 350,000 people of Yanji, the prefecture's capital 20 miles southwest of here, more than 200,000 are ethnic Koreans; the Korean language is heard as much as Mandarin in shops and offices.

But China's system of government controls means aboveboard employment is difficult if not impossible without proper identification papers. As a result, aid workers and residents said, many North Korean women who flee end up as prostitutes in China. Many others, they said, are sold to poor farmers unable to find a bride. Not married legally, these women in effect are concubines, forced to stay available but out of sight in exchange for rudimentary living quarters and food.

Because it is easier to escape notice in the countryside, male escapees also frequently end up on farms in northeastern China, the aid workers said, doing chores for food and a place to sleep. Others work in restaurant kitchens in Yanji, Tumen or other towns, doing dishes or peeling vegetables for 50 cents a day plus room and board.

"They are just like Mexicans in the United States," said an aid worker who, like others involved in helping the escapees, declined to be identified for fear of encountering problems with Chinese authorities.

Driven by desperation, enough North Korean escapees have turned to robbery that they have acquired a reputation as untrustworthy among Han Chinese, the country's dominant ethnic group. Residents of farming villages around Tumen tell of North Koreans breaking into their homes and making off with appliances and livestock, then selling the booty for cash.

Local officials and police, many of whom are ethnic Koreans, often ignore the North Koreans as long as they commit no crimes, aid workers said. But when orders come down from Beijing, as occurred following a rush of asylum-seekers into the South Korean Embassy last fall, scores of North Koreans are rounded up and shipped back across the border.

Lee, a delicate woman whose black hair was cut in a boyish bob, said she was well aware of these dangers when she walked across the ice of the Tumen River that night. She had come to China for the first time in 2002, she said, and fell victim to a trafficker who sold her to a Heilongjiang province farming family as a concubine for a 32-year-old man she described as mentally retarded.

For a little over a year, she was kept in the house so no one would know she was there, she recalled. She finally escaped one day when the man's mother forgot to lock the door. She fled to a suburb of Harbin, the province's main city 400 miles northwest of here, and washed dishes in a restaurant for food and lodging.

That job lasted for three months, until police discovered her and deported her back to North Korea, she said. Back in her homeland, she said she was punished for her escape by being sent to a labor camp for eight months, where she was forced to carry bricks on a construction site.

"But I was so weak, I couldn't carry the bricks," she recalled. "And so the guards kept on beating me."

After her release, she returned home to a bleak situation. Her father and elder sister had perished during the food crisis of the mid-1990s, she said, and on her arrival she found her mother had fallen sick.

Almost immediately she vowed to try the trip again. With the proceeds from selling a bag of cornmeal -- about $5 -- she and a hardy 71-year-old neighbor set out for the border at Tumen. At five checkpoints along the way, she said, they paid money to North Korean soldiers to let them pass.

By the time they arrived at the river, the two women had no more cash, she said. But one of the soldiers on duty at the final guard post was a relative of the elderly neighbor, she recalled, and let them by on pity and a promise: They would return one day and give him 100 Chinese yuan, or about $12.

Once on the Chinese side, they knocked on three doors seeking shelter from the cold despite the hour, she said. Everybody turned them away. By the next day, however, they were taken in by two brothers who, citing Christian principles, have let them sleep in the attic and given them food for the last two weeks.

"They even brought us pork and rice once," Lee recalled. "It was so delicious."

This time, Lee declared, she will not be stopped in China. Her resolution, she said, is to make it all the way to South Korea. Aid groups have stepped in and her hopes are high. But what the next step is, she acknowledged, she does not know.

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.