• North Korean Leader Vows to Curb Missile Program (Aug 5, 2001) • China's Release of North Korean Refugees Sidesteps Sensitive Issue (Jun 30, 2001) • China and U.N. Meet on North Korea Immigrants (Jun 28, 2001)

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UMEN, China ?The census takers move from house to house, asking pointed questions in Chinese, demanding responses, looking for signs of incomprehension on the faces of those they see lurking in the shadows.

"If you don't understand them, they will think you do not belong, and ask for identification," said a worker at a church that ministers to the Korean-Chinese community that dominates the population of this border town on the Tumen River facing North Korea. "They will arrest you and send you back to North Korea."

The Chinese government has opened what those working with refugees say is the most severe crackdown on North Korean refugees ever undertaken here.

Viewing them purely as "economic migrants," China appears determined to convince as many as possible of the 300,000 North Koreans estimated to have fled across the frontier to northeastern China in recent years that they cannot stay.

The crackdown spreads fear among refugees, many of whom shift homes from night to night, flee to shelters in the countryside or try risky trips to Mongolia, en route to South Korea.

"The Chinese police are performing a survey covering every house from June to the end of September," the church worker said. "Groups of police scatter around a designated area. They search everything. About 20 or 30 from my church alone have been arrested."

The campaign against the refugee presence began in March but has gained momentum since the episode in June in which seven North Korean family members obtained asylum in Beijing at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Chinese government permitted them to leave on a flight to Singapore, en route to South Korea, avoiding adverse publicity before the International Olympic Committee, meeting in Moscow, selected Beijing as the site for the 2008 Olympics.

For many other refugees, the conditions of life as an illegal economic migrant have worsened since Beijing was chosen for the Olympics.

Moreover, many refugees believe, the publicity surrounding the family that escaped through the United Nations High Commissioner's office gave Chinese police and security agents fresh information on how refugees are able to get out of China.

The incident "revealed all routes to escape," said a missionary at the Cho Yang Church, a small parish in Yanji, the city about 30 miles west of here that is the heart of the Korean- Chinese community in this region. "Now all channels are blocked."

Refugees hardly dare to appear on the streets of this border town and other communities for fear that the Chinese police, or North Korean security agents working with them, will talk to them, discern where they are from by how they respond and hustle them back to uncertain fates in North Korea. "I try to get some money by begging," said Pang Jin Chul, 20, lingering near a church that he hoped would provide food, a small cash handout and possibly a place to stay. "Now things are getting tough. I am really afraid."

As fast as the Chinese send North Koreans back home, they leave again, many of them within days after again bribing North Korean guards to look the other way. The standard payment is the equivalent in Chinese currency of between $25 and $30.

Children darting among the South Korean tourists who flock to the border crossing here for a glimpse across the Tumen River at North Korea are likely to lose everything in their pockets to North Korean guards once they are returned. Many of them are beaten as well, first by the Chinese police, then by the North Koreans, the children said.

"There is no food at home," said Kim Kun, hiding with two other boys on the fringes of a parking lot by the river in hopes of handouts from visiting South Koreans. "We have to come back every time or we will starve to death."

The crackdown, however, meant that Kim Kun and his friends, who gave their ages as 17 even though they all looked about 12, often went hungry on this side, too.

"We haven't eaten in two days," said Kim as he and his friends began slurping up some flavored ice on a stick given them by South Koreans. The boys stared at uniformed Chinese police on the river bank, then quickly fled when a Chinese security guard, not wearing a uniform, shouted at them.

"If the refugee says he just came looking for food, North Korean authorities will probably let him go after a few days or a month or so," said a missionary at a small church near here. "If he says he got help from a church, he's likely to go to prison and never been seen again."

And if the refugee is discovered to have been on his way to South Korea, through Mongolia or via another route, he faces the real possibility of execution as a traitor.

It was that realization that panicked the parents of two young men who believed that they had escaped China when they got to a telephone booth in the narrow buffer zone between the Chinese and Mongolian borders. "We got here safely," the mother quoted her older son as saying triumphantly.

The Chinese police, she said, must have arrested her sons right after the call. "They were already in Mongolia," she said. Now she and her husband, who fled North Korea three years ago, are trying to raise enough money, several hundred dollars, to buy their sons out of jail.

While the crackdown lasts, refugees are learning to trust no one.

The Chinese have offered rewards to businessmen willing to reveal the names of North Koreans working for them illegally. One businessman sent a busload of North Koreans into a police station after telling them they were on the way to a boat that would take them to South Korea.

Ultimately, however, the North's economic problems are so huge that the refugees are likely to have no choice but to keep coming across the Tumen River frontier.

"Conditions are getting much worse in North Korea," says a Korean-Chinese working with refugees in Chang Chun, a large Chinese city north of here. "The number of refugees may go down slightly in the crackdown, but there's no other way out for North Koreans. They have to keep coming, or they will die."