China to beef up inspections at NKorean border
SEOUL, South Korea—China will step up inspections along its border with North Korea during the Olympics to try to reduce the growing number of North Korean migrants, an official of South Korea's spy agency said Tuesday.
The National Intelligence Service official also dismissed a news report that China plans to close all bridges into its communist ally during the Olympics and that China has demanded that North Koreans already working in China leave.
Citing unnamed diplomatic sources, South Korea's Yonhap news agency had reported Monday that the closure of bridges was part of China's efforts to prevent North Koreans from crossing into China.
In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also dismissed the Yonhap report as "totally groundless."
"Everything along the China-DPRK border is normal," Liu said, referring to the North by the acronym for its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The NIS official, who asked not be named, citing an internal policy, told The Associated Press that China had no plans to close all bridge links with North Korea "out of concerns of diplomatic friction with North Korea."
The official also said China would not ask all North Koreans in China to leave, saying that Beijing plans to crack down on North Koreans who illegally stay in China and limit visa renewals for North Koreans.
Officials at the North's embassy in Beijing were not immediately available for comment.
A growing number of North Koreans cross into China in search of food and to avoid political oppression and many seek eventual asylum in South Korea.
Activists claim tens of thousands of North Koreans live in hiding in China, where they face forced repatriation to their impoverished homeland if caught.
As a key ideological ally of the North, China views North Korean defectors as "economic migrants," not refugees, and is obligated to send them back under a bilateral treaty.
But China has allowed those involved in high-profile cases to travel to South Korea, usually via a third country.
More than 13,500 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the Korean War, according to South Korea's Unification Ministry. The war ended with a 1953 cease-fire that has never been replaced with a peace treaty.
