North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting China for the first time in five years. After appearing right beside Chinese President Xi Jinping for a viewing of the military parade in Beijing on September 3, Kim and Xi held a bilateral summit the next day.
This marked the resumption of high-level China-North Korea diplomacy after a lull following the failed Hanoi summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019. Five years later, strategic cooperation between Beijing and Pyongyang is back in earnest.
However, behind this diplomatic thaw lies a group that has long been overlooked: North Korean workers laboring in silence on Chinese soil.
According to a recent report by Daily NK AND Center, titled “Forced Labor Report on North Korean Workers in Chinese Fisheries,” North Korean workers endure 12-14 hour workdays in Chinese seafood processing plants while “donating” 80-90 percent of their wages to the state. The remaining 10-20 percent never reaches the workers directly – instead, managers distribute only a portion as living expenses. Some officials testified that “most of the profits are transferred to North Korean Ministry of Fisheries accounts.”
The contract and wage payment structures offer limited transparency, and workers have restricted autonomy regarding refusing work, negotiating wages, selecting working hours, or their ability to move and communicate. Their lives are restricted to the factory and the dormitory. This meets virtually all the key conditions for forced labor as defined by the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Even more shocking is that just before deployment, female workers suffer sexual humiliation from officials in exchange for obtaining “life assessment certificates.” This underscores that worker deployment is not “voluntary contracting” but structural exploitation accompanied by sexual and economic predation. According to the report, some women face additional layers of violence within Chinese factories, including sexual threats, harassment, and forced abortions.
The gravity of this issue lies not in isolated human rights violations, but in the exploitation mechanism systematically designed by the North Korean regime. During COVID-19 lockdowns, North Korean authorities even imposed foreign currency quotas on overseas female workers, effectively condoning or encouraging prostitution. This transcends simple labor exploitation to become structural human rights crimes that fundamentally violate human dignity. The fact that similar forms of control continue across various industrial sites today makes this an urgent matter requiring international intervention.
North Korean workers’ suffering is embedded in the exported seafood that flows worldwide. Between 2021-2023 alone, approximately 4,360 tons of seafood were distributed through 36 Korean companies. These products, processed into pollack, salmon, clams and other items, reached Korean consumers’ tables through major retailers and fish markets labeled as “Made in China.”
Western countries like the United States, Canada, and Spain are not exempt. Seafood produced with North Korean labor has entered global supply chains disguised as Chinese products, with many companies and consumers unknowingly purchasing goods based on forced labor. This represents not mere ignorance, but a fundamental failure of human rights due diligence.
Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2397, North Korea was required to repatriate all overseas workers by December 2019. Yet thousands of workers remain in northeastern China and Russia, and the foreign currency they generate continues to fund the North Korean regime’s operations.
Despite being a signatory to ILO conventions and a permanent U.N. Security Council member, the Chinese government tolerates human rights violations within its borders. Companies importing these seafood products also bear responsibility for participating in human rights violations by continuing transactions without carefully examining forced labor in their supply chains.
The North Korean worker issue easily remains in surveillance “blind spots” for three reasons. First, North Korea’s thorough control structure blocks external information flows. Second, Chinese authorities remain passive about human rights investigations, citing “non-interference in internal affairs.” Third, differing international positions on sanctions implementation prevent consistent coordination.
This makes the current moment crucial. As China-North Korea relations enter a new phase, the international community must prepare creative responses to establish worker protection mechanisms and understand the actual situation. Specifically, we need to institutionalize systems for securing field testimonies, supply chain tracking investigations, and labor rights education and safe reporting mechanisms through collaboration between civil society organizations, media, academia, and international organizations.
Simultaneously, we need “evidence-based response strategies” that secure and analyze materials like contracts between North Korean authorities and Chinese companies, import-export documents, and fraudulent labeling.
The moment when Xi and Kim shook hands again represents both a diplomatic event and a turning point for resolving transnational oppression. If we continue to turn a blind eye, North Korean workers in China will be pushed further into silent existence, unreachable by the rest of the world.
North Korean authorities have already formulated plans to counter resistance by increasing surveillance personnel and proactively preventing whistleblowing. In response, it is essential that our actions become more systematic and coordinated. This situation extends beyond a human rights concern; it also pertains to issues of justice in Northeast Asia and the obligations of the international community.