Blazingcatfur

IN FEBRUARY OF LAST YEAR, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in Dandong, China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. Videos posted by a company representative show machines labelled in Korean, and workers with North Korean accents explaining how to clean squid. At the party, the company played songs that are popular in Pyongyang, including “People Bring Glory to Our Party” (written by North Korea’s 1989 poet laureate) and “We Will Go to Mt. Paektu” (a reference to the widely mythologized birthplace of Kim Jong Il). Performers wore North Korean colors, and the country’s flag billowed behind them; in the audience, dozens of workers held miniature flags.