Journalist Jailed in China at Center of Bilateral Tussle

BEIJING —  No one disputes where Seok Jae Hyun was last Jan. 18. The 33-year-old South Korean freelance photographer was in the eastern Chinese port city of Yantai. He was carrying a camera.

But as Seok sits month after month in a Yantai jail, those are perhaps the only points of agreement between his distressed supporters back home, who say Seok was in Yantai to cover a news event, and Chinese authorities, who say he was there to help smuggle North Korean defectors out of the country.

In a case that has stirred tensions in Chinese-South Korean relations and drawn protests from international journalists groups, Seok was recently sentenced to two years in prison for “trafficking in persons,” according to Chinese prosecutors. He was convicted of trying to aid nearly 50 North Korean defectors who were boarding fishing boats to escape across the Yellow Sea to South Korea and Japan.

It is a charge that his family and friends call ludicrous. They say Seok was there to photograph the attempted escape -- not to orchestrate it.

“I don’t understand what crime my husband committed,” said Seok’s wife, Kang Hye Won, a graduate student in design who has been able to see him for only a few moments at his trial appearances and not at all in prison. “He is not an activist. He is interested in people, and in documenting their lives through photography.”

The reporters groups raise a similar complaint. “It is outrageous that China’s leaders consider Seok’s important journalistic work to be a criminal offense,” said Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Another group, Reporters Without Borders, is also objecting to his conviction.

Despite these protests and widespread pleas in South Korea and elsewhere for Seok’s release, the Chinese government contends that he broke the law by shooting “promotional film” of the event.

In a written response last week to questions about his case, China’s Foreign Ministry said he had been duly convicted in court, and added: “The Chinese side will mercilessly punish those uncovered ‘snakeheads’ who organize smuggling and illegal immigration.”

The acrimony over Seok’s sentencing comes amid recent reports of growing numbers of defections from impoverished North Korea, especially by some high-ranking bureaucrats, military officials and scientists.

Many North Koreans escape into China, where they are able to blend in amid a fairly large population of ethnic Koreans in the northeast. Many then try to head to South Korea or Japan in far riskier boat crossings. Others formally seek asylum.

But the Chinese government, eager to avoid a refugee crisis on the border, dismisses the attempted defections as illegal attempts by “economic migrants” to get into China and regularly repatriates the North Koreans it captures. Human rights groups say those returned face imprisonment, torture and other brutal persecution at the hands of the North Korean authorities.

It was this sort of attempted flight that Seok was on hand for earlier this year. It is impossible at this point to get his side of the story directly. Seok is not allowed to receive visitors at the Yantai prison or take telephone calls from reporters.

But a family friend in South Korea, Lee Young Ju, said there was no mystery as to why Seok took off abruptly one day in January, apparently on a flight from Inchon to Yantai, in China’s Shandong province.

“He got a tip about this case,” said Lee, “and he went to China, assuming he could sell his pictures later.” He was probably contacted by a South Korean businessman, Choi Young Hoon, who has been involved in an anti-North Korean group that regularly assists those hoping to defect.

Choi is also in prison in Yantai and received a five-year sentence in the case. Three others, two ethnic Korean Chinese citizens and a North Korean, were also convicted. The bid for escape from Yantai was foiled when Chinese authorities arrived, apparently acting on a tip from a Chinese national who had been involved in planning the boats’ departure.

Kang, Seok’s wife of two years, said that her husband almost surely did not apply for or receive a journalist’s visa to enter China, which would have been required under Chinese law for him to take photographs for news stories. He probably had a tourist visa.

But, she said, “usually if people are caught [reporting while on a tourist visa], they are kicked out of the country.” That was the worst risk he thought he ran in taking off to do his documentary work.

“He’d done projects on prison inmates, foreign workers in Korea and defectors,” said Kang, 38.

Because China and South Korea have been expanding trade, neither country seems to want to create a diplomatic blowup over the issue, but South Korea has repeatedly called for Seok’s release.

A spokesman at the South Korean Embassy here also said there was a chance Seok would be granted a new trial.

Kang was able to see Seok in the Yantai courtroom, but not to touch him, when the verdict and sentence were handed down May 22.

“We could exchange only a few words, that was all. He was overcome with frustration and emotion over the sentence,” Kang said. “When the sentence was read, he fell to the floor and put his head on the chair.”

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Verhovek reported from Beijing and Demick from Seoul.