How the Few Freedoms North Koreans Enjoyed Have Vanished Since the Pandemic

The city of Hyesan, just over the river from China, once offered a glimpse of a more open North Korea. Now it exemplifies Kim Jong Un’s mounting authoritarianism.

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee

April 7,2025 – SEOUL — The border city of Hyesan once offered a glimpse of a more open version of totalitarian North Korea. It was flourishing in a way that could almost be called capitalist, and residents could easily learn about the outside world in China, located just across a narrow river.

Not anymore. A city that once exuded hope now exemplifies how Kim Jong Un has dramatically expanded his authoritarian controls to erode North Koreans’ few freedoms, according to residents of and escapees from Hyesan.

Over the past five years, since the pandemic broke out, Kim has tightened his grip on trade across the border. This has limited ordinary people’s ability to make money and attain a level of autonomy from the regime.

“The market system is dead,” one Hyesan resident, a woman in her 40s who used to operate a wholesale business over the border, told The Washington Post through an intermediary. “The government is taking all the profits that those of us making money would have kept.”

Kim has also used the pretext of the pandemic to put up new barriers — both literally and figuratively — that have isolated Hyesan residents like never before: New fencing stops people crossing the river. Clampdowns on illicit phone calls made using Chinese cellphone towers have made it much harder for residents to call or text family and friends in China or South Korea, and mindlessly scroll through China’s version of TikTok.

These new restrictions are profoundly changing the way North Koreans go about their lives, both in Hyesan, a provincial capital of about 200,000 people, and across the country.

“Hyesan was once a rare opening, but draconian covid-era restrictions have slammed it shut, dragging the country backward by decades,” said Hanna Song, executive director of Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a Seoul-based NGO. “Now, North Korea is more isolated and restrictive than ever.”

It is impossible to know exactly what is going on inside the totalitarian and reclusive state, let alone grasp a full picture of life in a certain city or region.

But in an effort to understand how life has changed since the start of the pandemic in January 2020 — when Kim hermetically sealed the borders, cutting off the flow of goods and information — The Post has tried to peer into Hyesan. The city theoretically should have been among the easiest to access, given its historical openness.

This article is based on interviews with three people who still live in Hyesan and 12 who escaped from it, most in 2019 just before the border crackdown, and maintain intermittent contact with their family or friends there. The residents and some escapees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for their or their relatives’ safety.

To reach residents in Hyesan, The Post partnered with Asia Press, an independent Japanese media outlet that has maintained a network of contacts inside North Korea for decades. They talk via Chinese mobile phones that can catch a signal over the river about things they know: their surroundings, prices at the markets and the impact of regime policies on their daily lives.

Asia Press sent The Post’s questions via text message to Hyesan residents and relayed the answers in Korean. The outlet told the three residents that the questions were from an American newspaper, and they were not compensated for answering these questions.

The Post also reviewed and geolocated satellite imagery and videos uploaded to Chinese social media sites.

The portrait that emerges is one of unprecedented restrictions that are making residents more isolated and dependent on the regime than ever.

Representatives at the North Korean mission at the United Nations in New York did not respond to a request for comment.

Life in Hyesan was not like this for most of the past three decades.

The city’s economy began growing in the late 1990s after a devastating famine ravaged North Korea, killing as many as 3 million and revealing that the state was unable to provide for the people. Residents began making, selling and buying items to survive, and this was tolerated as the Kim regime tried to let out steam — and avoid potential social unrest.

Thanks to the city’s proximity to entrepreneurial China and the nominally communist Kim regime’s newfound willingness to let ordinary people make their own money, its markets became some of the best-stocked in all of North Korea.

For a time, Hyesan was even known as the “smuggler’s village” because it was so easy for people to buy and sell across the river, which is only 300-feet wide in places. Its markets used to be so flush with Chinese products that North Koreans joked they could buy everything there “except cat’s horns.”

When Kim, then just 27, took over from his father at the end of 2011, some analysts — and many North Koreans — hoped the millennial leader would open up the world’s most closed state. Some even thought he might follow China’s example and usher in market-oriented reforms that would give people greater economic agency.

Kim has confounded such hopes. In the 14th year of his rule, he is now projecting himself as a confident and assertive leader, apparently feeling stronger than ever thanks to the pandemic-era controls that he’s kept in place and his strategic alliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

He could receive another boost with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In his first term as president, Trump met with Kim on three occasions, calling him “very talented.” Although those talks did not go anywhere, the president has signaled he’d be willing to “reach out” to the North Korean dictator again.

But Kim, and North Korea, are in a very different position than the last time Trump was president.

It is now harder than any time in the past 33 years to get in contact with North Koreans, said Jiro Ishimaru, the founder of Asia Press. But what Ishimaru has heard from his contacts inside North Korea over the past four years is consistent: Life has gotten much harder. And it appears to be by design, he said, to increase residents’ reliance on Kim’s regime.

“The more people realized they could fend for themselves, they started to care less for what the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has to say,” Ishimaru said. “

Kim focuses on the border

The people of Hyesan used to say that one unofficial trader fed 13 people, so great were the flow-on effects from the post-famine cross-border trade that made the city hum.

Some of this happened on the sidelines of the official trade that took place across the border. More than 98 percent of North Korea’s trade goes to or through China, with North Korea exporting everything from coal to wigs.

Regime officials struck deals off the books and pocketed the profits, creating a rich entrepreneurial class with ties to the regime, known as donju, or “masters of money,” who became increasingly — and conspicuously — rich and powerful.

“The rich people live unimaginably well and do not treat ordinary people as humans, let alone talk to them,” said a woman who lives in Hyesan, this one in her 30s, who was also contacted through Asia Press.

But there were also plenty of scrappy North Koreans who bribed their way over the river, returning from China with goods — secondhand clothes, cheap electronics, action movies on DVD — they could sell in the markets. This turned Hyesan into a capitalist haven in a socialist nation that had failed them.

Lee Suk-jeong was one of those unofficial traders whose entrepreneurial zeal supported many. She paid suppliers for gold they’d mined, medicinal herbs they’d picked and soybeans they’d grown. Lee would sell these goods to Chinese buyers over the Yalu River, paying drivers to deliver them and bribing border guards to look the other way.

“All those people treated me very well. It’s how they made their living, too,” said Lee, who left in 2019, eight years after Kim took power.

In the first years of his rule, the young leader had allowed the markets to continue and even encouraged wealthy entrepreneurs to invest in them so they expanded from his father’s days. This allowed a small fry like Lee to enjoy a limited but increasing amount of economic freedom.

But by 2017, Kim was apparently feeling more confident in his role: He was attracting global attention for the barrages of increasingly high-tech missiles his regime was firing, including from the White House. That year, Trump oscillated between threatening to rain down “fire and fury” on Kim to saying he’d be “honored” to meet the North Korean leader.

But the missile advances, and its seventh and most powerful nuclear test, brought international sanctions that affected North Korea’s already-limited ability to trade.

That may have prompted Kim to pay more attention to the border. The young leader began tightening controls by cracking down on unapproved trading, according to residents, escapees and economists in South Korea.

That also enabled him to direct more money toward his priorities, said Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute in Seoul who specializes in the North Korean economy.

These measures will “hurt a lot of households that were previously making a tidy income,” Ward said. “The government is not just going to be making more money, it’s also going to be able to control people’s lives much more directly.”

New restrictions since the start of the pandemic have limited cross-border trade in Hyesan.

Pandemic-era controls remain

North Korea gradually started opening its borders in 2023, more than three years after the pandemic began, and allowing some trade with China to resume — but under new rules, according to residents.

“Regular people can no longer earn money on our own,” said the Hyesan resident in her 30s. “Compared to the trading business we were able to do in the past, it is night and day.”

Now, almost all cross-border sales are regulated by customs, inspections, trade officials and border guards, said a third Hyesan resident, also in her 40s: “It’s no longer what it used to be when business ran wild. … We can’t make any direct transactions without giving the government prior notice.”

While some unofficial trade has resumed on the sidelines, only activities approved by the regime are tolerated, according to three escapees who maintain contact with people in the city. That means used cars and engines are being let in, but Chinese clothes that can be sold at the markets are not.

This off-the-books trade is happening at significantly smaller scales than before the pandemic, they said.

As a result, the current residents said, the flow of goods at the markets has become irregular and what is for sale has become more expensive.

Lee Young-bin, who fled in 2019, said she can’t fathom how the city’s economy can survive without its once-bustling unofficial trade: “If not for Yalu River, there’s no other option to make money. … If smuggling stops, people’s lives deteriorate.”

Previously, many people fed up with the deprivations of life in North Korea would try to escape. They would bribe brokers and guards along the border, and when the river froze in the winter, they would dart across in the middle of the night.

Before 2020, more than 1,000 North Koreans had arrived in South Korea every year for two decades. But last year, fewer than 200 North Koreans made it to the South, and the vast majority were already living in China or Russia before covid broke out.

This, like trade, has changed markedly. It is now almost impossible to sneak across the border anymore, thanks to increased fortification and heightened surveillance since the onset of the pandemic.

The North Korean regime has installed new fencing and watch towers along the border, at times adding a second layer of fencing in some areas, according to an analysis by Human Rights Watch. The organization found that between 2020 and 2023, the North built at least 300 miles of new fencing along border cities and enhanced another 162 miles of existing fencing with new structures.

Satellite images captured by Maxar from 2019 through summer 2024 show new fencing in the Hyesan area that did not exist in 2019. In one area near the Pochonbo Battle Victory Tower, about a mile from the statues of Kim’s father and grandfather in the city center, there were three layers of fences visible last year that were not there five years earlier.

Because it is so difficult and dangerous to escape from North Korea, brokers — many are escapees themselves — coordinate when and where to cross the border, whom to bribe and whom to meet after they cross.

Their fees had been increasing as their work got harder, but now no amount of money can buy freedom.

June 2024

“I’ve been asking around for people [along the border] who can arrange an escape route,” said a man who escaped from Hyesan in 2015. “But they’re telling me that there’s just no way out from North Korea.”

The same brokers used to transfer remittances from people who’d escaped to South Korea; usually small amounts of money that made an enormous difference to the North Korean recipients’ lives.

Such activities were fraught with risks even before covid. But now, it has become so dangerous that brokers are charging inordinate fees to send cash into North Korea, making it difficult for people outside of North Korea to help their family or friends, escapees said.

Some brokers transferring remittances are now demanding commissions as high as 70 percent, a huge increase from about 30 percent pre-covid, escapees said.

“Most escapees can’t even afford to send money anymore” because of the fees, said Woo Young-bok, who fled in 2019 and talks to her uncle in North Korea once a year or so. “He tells me life has gotten hard, that it’s just so hard. … It breaks my heart.”

Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei and Hanna Park in Seoul contributed to this report.

WUNRN

North Korea’s few freedoms have vanished under Kim Jong Un – The Washington Post

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