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Freedom of Belief

S&U interviews

3 October 2024

9 min read

Don’t send us back, North Korean escapee tells China

Timothy Cho hopes to help those still trying to escape.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A conference speaker at a podium against a backdrop of blue.

Timothy Cho.

GSHRD.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has recently stated that North Korea must be held responsible for the grave human rights violations that they have carried out, suggesting that such justice could be secured through the International Criminal Court. In the report, they detail serious human right violations which occurred between July 2023 and May 2024, many of which are tied to a serious escalation in the repression of freedom of thought and belief. Such repression makes North Korea that most dangerous country to be a Christian in 2024, sitting at number one on the World Watch List.

I don’t know about you, but I find North Korea hard to get my head around.

And so, I was utterly captivated, completely horrified, and generally left speechless by Timothy Cho’s story of escaping North Korea, at the age of just seventeen. Now, living in the UK and working for the religious charity, Open Doors, as well as lobbying cross-party parliamentarians, Timothy is able to shed a rare light on the realities involved in living in, and leaving, North Korea.

Would you be able to tell me a little bit about how you managed to leave North Korea?
I actually escaped twice and was imprisoned four times, three of those imprisonments were in China and one in North Korea. I was sent back, along with the seventeen other North Korean refugees, while we were trying to escape.

During my first escape, I crossed the border to China and met a Christian missionary guy. He tried to help me cross into China safely, so I followed him to his house. I saw a Bible and a cross and realised that it was a Christian missionary’s house.

That was very scary for me, I thought he was brainwashed. I believed that Christians were kidnapping North Korean children and selling them into trafficking. And so, when I saw a few children in that house, my legs were shaking.

I thought the Bible was cursed.

And so I escaped from the house. I did not regard meeting that man as an opportunity provided by God. I ran away from it.

And I was then arrested at the Mongolian border with seventeen other refugees as we tried to cross into Mongolia. North Koreans, we’re born without a passport. We don’t know how to leave the country. We’re told that you should never leave the country, so, at the Mongolian border, all eighteen of us were arrested by Chinese military. There were two women in the group, a mother and a daughter, they quickly took something out of their backpack and buried it in the sand. I asked them later what it was, they told me that it was a Bible. It was too dangerous to be sent back to North Korea with it in their possession.

And we were sent back to North Korea.

I experienced horrific crimes; terrible things were happening right in front of my eyes. I still live with the trauma of it now. But I survived that horrific experience in the North Korean prison, I was the only one among the eighteen of us who got out of there.

And then you attempted to escape a second time?

Yes, by then I couldn't walk properly because of the terrible things that had happened in prison. It was tragic.

I considered going to the Mongolian border again, but I was massively traumatised from the previous attempt. So, I went to Shanghai. I heard someone could help me to cross the fence into an American International School there, where I hoped I could get support and hopefully get out of China.

So, I met with a few other North Korean refugees in Shanghai and we managed to get into the school with a piece of paper that read: ‘we are North Korean refugees. Please help us’.

But the school couldn’t help us and the Chinese police arrived to forcibly remove us. In front of hundreds of students, we were beaten and dragged away.
We were sent to the International Shanghai Prison.

That was my fourth imprisonment.

They were going to send me back to North Korea a second time. And there was no way I thought I would survive that. I would have been executed.

So, what happened?

In my cell were seven other inmates, all from different countries. As I was crying every night not eating properly, one of my inmates asked me - why are you crying every night?

They had never met a North Korean person, of course. So, they were very curious about me. The guy who came to me and asked what was wrong was a South Korean gangster - so we spoke the same language, and I was able to explain to him that I was probably going to be executed.
Everyone looked quite shocked - and they all asked me if they could pray for me. I said yes, but I didn’t actually know what prayer was. Every one of them had a different religion but the south Korean man brought me a Christian Bible and asked me, ‘have you ever read this book?’

Again, this was a book that I was terrified of, and so my legs were shaking. I told him that I had never read it, and that I didn’t want to read it. I told him that it was cursed

But he said, ‘you probably have some time here in this prison – why don’t you read it. It might give you some comfort’.
Then he told me that I could pray to God for my survival. I was so desperate, you can imagine – you’re in the darkest prison, thinking that you’re about to be killed. I had nothing to lose. But I didn't how to pray, so I asked him - How do you pray? And he told me that you simply say Amen at the end of your wishes. That's how I learned how to pray.

So, my first ever prayer, right in that moment was ‘God, I don't want to be killed. Amen’.
And I don't want to go back to North Korea. I want to get up from this prison. I prayed hundreds of these kinds of prayers. Very short. Very desperate. I wanted to survive.
And, eventually, praying that many times a day gave me a feeling of comfort. I began to lean on it. I was holding it like a rope. I was desperately praying, with everything within me, for weeks and weeks. But nothing was happening.

At first, I kind of thought that God was a man, like a very powerful man. The kind who could arrive on a helicopter and destroy the prison building. Like in an action film, that’s the only reference of escape I had. But nothing was happening. So, I told the gangster who gave me the Bible that God obviously doesn't exist. He lied to me.

Time was ticking. I was desperate.

I was a 17 year old boy, I didn’t understand God at all, but all I wanted was to survive.
About eight weeks later, two men visited me in the prison. At first, I thought they were from North Korea, finally forcing me back. But it turns out they were diplomats. One South Korean guy and one Westerner. They told me that China had made the very unusual decision to deport us to the Philippines with a diplomatic passport, not to North Korea.

This was completely out of the blue. I never expected that this would happen. That was the first and the last time that China had officially deported a group of North Korean refugees to a third-party country instead of sending them back to North Korea.

As it turns out, one of the school children at the International American school in Shanghai wrote to a local journalist about us because she was so traumatised at how she had seen us beaten and arrested. At the same time, other witnesses had written statements of what they witnessed and testified that what they saw in that moment was a crime against humanity.

This then caught the attention of the BBC, Washington Post and CNN, media outlets in Germany, South Korea, Japan. They all told our story and campaigned on our behalf, pressuring the Chinese Government. Then, many Christian and human rights groups watched that news. They protested in front of Chinese embassies all over the world.

I remember thinking - oh, this is how God has operated. I saw it straight away. Right in that moment, I needed to thank him.

One of the Bible scriptures I still remember reading during that prison stay was – ‘I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.’

I didn’t grow up with parents. They left, escaped to China when I was nine. I survived without parents, even though I was picking food on the floor and had no education. I suffered and struggled. And I complained about that a lot to God, even after he had rescued me and given me freedom. I had a lot of trauma, anger, hatred, all that. So many times I cried out to God, I shouted at him, I asked him – ‘why didn’t you leave me to die on the street? Then I wouldn’t have gone through all of this suffering.’
Every time when I prayed that to him, the only sentence he tells me in response is – ‘I love you, son’.

That’s an astonishing story. Thank you for sharing that. Since you’ve become a Christian, left North Korea and gained your freedom, what have you subsequently learnt about the hidden, underground, Christians in North Korea?

That my grandmother was a Christian, my father's mother. But she couldn’t ever share her faith with me.

Also, that Korea had experienced a spiritual revival in 1907. Evangelism swept through Korea at that time, and millions on people gathered in Pyongyang, which is North Korea today. Missionaries came over, even Billy Graham’s father-in-law went there as a missionary. They came, built schools, hospitals, universities, they were teaching English. In fact, members of the royal family were baptised by Billy Graham’s father-in-law.

My grandmother was a part of that revival generation of a Christians. The church has survived, underground, through decades of North Korean communist dictators.

People start reading this book (the Bible), and they find treasure in there, our daily life is in there. There are stories of economic hardship, persecution, suffering, oppression, anger, hatred. But to be found with the Bible is incredibly dangerous. People who smuggle the Bible are executed. When I was eleven, I watched a public execution. When they’re executing someone, they force the entire village to come out and watch it, and they force you to take your children. In fact, children have to sit on the front row. So, the man I saw executed when I was eleven, he was shot – first in the eyes, then the stomach, then the knees. I remember, my friends and I went and collected some of the bullet shells that were left on the floor. We thought it was normal. That man was accused of being a spy because he was found with religious materials.

They're very particularly against Christianity because the message liberates people.

Finally, this recent report from the UN Secretary General – you say that his recommendations are ‘noble aims’ but that they don’t quite go far enough. What would you like to see happen to bring about increased safety for the people in, and trying to leave, North Korea?

I’m now a Christian and human rights lobbyist, I encourage MPs to do something. The UK has always been influential in holding the flag for freedom of belief, in particular. So, what I suggest is that we have conversations with Chinese diplomats. China deported me to a third-party country; they can actually do that. They have the authority in their hands to make that decision. They don’t have to send people back to North Korea. They could even send them to South Korea.

Instead, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested and sent back to North Korea, even though China knows that these people will end up in prison camps. If they’re Christians, they’ll be executed.

So, I have a few recommendations. But this is something that the UK government can urge the Chinese government to do.

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Freedom

Trust

10 April 2023

9 min read

Reviving post-liberal society

There’s a crisis of trust, anxiety, and relationship in post-liberal society. Graham Tomlin looks into what might revive it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A loose rabble of a protest in the street is siluhetted against light and a shower of rain

A protest in Santiago, Chile.

Ignacio Amenábar on Unsplash.

Much has been made in recent times of the alleged demise of liberalism. From the heady heights of 1989, when Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay announced ‘The End of History’ and it seemed that liberal democracy was the only game in town, things don’t look so auspicious now. Back then, it seemed that of the three great twentieth-century political creeds, fascism had met its ugly end in the Second World War, communism had crumbled in the ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and so western, free market, secular liberalism was the last one standing, the only realistic political and philosophical option for the future of the world.

Then a whole series of events challenged that narrative. The attack on the twin towers in 2001 announced that religion was not a spent force in the modern world but a powerful motivator outside the western European and American bubble, for better or worse. Throughout the twentieth century, Christianity had been quietly growing in Africa from just 9% of the continent’s population in 1900 to 48% a century later, and it continues to grow. The remarkable rise of Chinese Christianity after the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, the resurgence of Islam worldwide and the prediction that in coming decades, atheists, agnostics and others who do not affiliate with any religion will make up a declining share of the world’s total population, made the prediction of a secular future suddenly seem foolish. The financial crash of 2008 put paid to the hope of gradual economic growth in the trusted hands of the market, and then the rise of Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and, of course, the political and social earthquake of Brexit placed a huge question mark over the assumption of a globalised, liberal order gradually taking over the world.

In the wake of these events, a growing number of voices started to call attention to the travails of liberalism. Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed argued that liberalism had failed to achieve its lofty goals:

“A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equality, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity and, of course, expand human liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”

The crisis in liberalism is a theme that runs through the worried pages of many political broadsheets or cultural commentaries. Is liberalism dying, or is just going through a period of sickness before recovering in new forms? Most people think it’s not on its last legs yet, and yet the crisis in liberalism have led us into a number of crises in modern life, many of which can be traced to the flaws which lie alongside the strengths of the liberal project.

A crisis in trust

First, we have a crisis of Trust. Liberalism presented itself as a rejection of the tyrannical and stifling control of social, religious and political convention. The controlling eye of Church, school, family and government was seen as oppressive, contravening the rights of the individual. Throwing off the yoke of such supposed authorities was essential to living an authentic life. John Stuart Mill, one of the great pioneers of liberalism, wrote of the ‘despotism of custom’. And while Mill’s rejection of starched Victorian conformity may be understandable, the result of the revolt he helped to unleash was to undermine trust in authority and government.

A society full of mutual suspicion cannot function well, and is not good for us.

Examples abound. A recent one was Baroness Casey’s recent report on the Metropolitan Police, that accused it of being institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Before that, the abuse of expenses trashed the reputation of MPs; the financial crash taught us bankers couldn’t be trusted; and the phone-tapping scandal bersmirched the reputation of journalists. In addition, a number of studies suggest that the length of tenure of CEO’s has decreased in recent years as they struggle to maintain legitimacy, while here in the UK, we have gone through Prime Ministers as quickly as football managers. The Church is no different – the many stories of child abuse, the betrayal of vulnerable adults, the prejudice against minorities have all eroded levels of trust in the clergy. Whether you look at business leaders, bishops, local politicians, estate agents – levels of trust in sectors of our society that are crucial for the good functioning of social life are at a very low ebb.

It's hard to tell whether the crisis stems from our increasing scepticism that truth-claims are only ever power-plays, or because the rise of movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter have led to our leaders being held to a higher sense of accountability. Have standards in public life diminished? Have our leaders become less trustworthy? Are our institutions more systemically corrupted? Or is it that we now expect far more of our public figures than we used to and therefore constantly find them wanting? Whatever the answer, the overall result is catastrophic. Trust is essential for the good functioning of any human community. A society full of mutual suspicion cannot function well, and is not good for us. As Graham Greene once put it:

“it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all: oneself.”

Liberalism's tendency to challenge past authorities may been justified. Taken to the extreme it has been, however, has bred a society in which it’s hard to put your faith in anyone.

A crisis of anxiety

As well as a crisis of trust, we have a crisis of anxiety. Economic liberalism valorized free markets, liberating individuals to benefit from the mutual exchange of goods and releasing human enterprise from the shackles of convention and control. Deregulation would liberate the human spirit of adventure to develop a future shaped by progress. Rather than accepting to live within the limits and rhythms of the natural world and the givenness of a broader cosmic order, the liberal instinct was to declare the freedom of the individual to self-create, to forge individual identities in the search for autonomy and self-realisation.

Yet today, Generation Z perceive climate change as the number one threat to their future. Climate Change Anxiety is an increasingly recognised syndrome, leading people to forego – out of despair - bringing children into such a damaging world, and fuelling high levels of mental health problems especially amongst young people. Add in a global pandemic, spread rapidly around the world by our fondness for limitless travel, that saw levels of anxiety rocket. We now have war within the borders of Europe, for the first time since 1945, with the added prospect of China being drawn into the war on the side of Russia. And as a result of this, and never quite learning the lessons of the 2008 financial crash, we have a cost of living crisis more severe than has been known for decades. The progress of the sophisticated algorithmic technology of social media fuel increases levels of anxiety and mental health problems for those addicted to clickbait or the desire for likes, and talk of an epidemic of mental health problems doesn’t seem an exaggeration.

A crisis of relationship

Third, we have a crisis of relationship. At liberalism’s core is the idea of the freedom of the individual from societal expectations and strictures. Michael Freeden, Professor of Political Theory of Nottingham University, summarised the heart of liberalism as “a rallying cry for individuals desiring space to be free from unjustifiable limitations." Theorists such as Ronald Dworkin argued that the individual is best placed to choose their own vision of the good (and therefore the state must remain neutral on such notion), leaving the playing field open to myriad definitions of what people ought to aspire to – almost as many as there are people.

If that is our central moral ideal – that the individual should be free from obligation or restriction from everyone else, should we be surprised that we end up more distant from each other?

The liberal ideal of individual freedom – that each person should be free of interference from their neighbour in their choice of the good life as long as they don’t harm others – is superficially attractive. Attractive, that is, until we realise that it gives us no good reason to care for one another, and in fact encourages us to think of our neighbours as potential infringements on our freedom to do as we choose. The result has been a slow erosion of the social bonds that tie us to each other. If that is our central moral ideal – that the individual should be free from obligation or restriction from everyone else, should we be surprised that we end up more distant from each other? Should we be surprised that we treat each other as enemies on social media? Or that we refuse to have contact with those of another political tribe? Or that we abandon those older ties, those social institutions that bound us to each other - family, parish, church, local voluntary societies?

Now, a crisis of trust, anxiety and relationships is, in fact, a crisis of Faith, Hope and Love.

This trio has a long history in Christian life and thinking ever since St Paul coined it in a letter to the fledgling church in Corinth in the first century, in words that echo in many a wedding service today: “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Christianity focusses attention on these three ‘theological virtues’ as they are known, and the Church, with all its flaws and failures, has continued to be a school in which they can be learnt, though a number of distinct practices.

Trust is built when people keep their promises.

First, faith. The creeds begin with the simple word ‘Credo’ – I believe. It’s the first thing you do as a Christian, to put your trust in something - or better, someone - who you cannot see, cannot prove, and yet you are invited to do exactly that – take the risk of faith. Trust is built when people keep their promises. The God that the writers of the Bible speak of describe him with exactly that idea: that he is faithful to his promises, like a marriage partner who does not give up on the other, no matter how wayward they might be. Being a Christian starts to teach you to trust God, in a way than might even lead to learning to trust people again. That doesn’t mean accepting deeply flawed and abusive institutions, but it does mean giving people the benefit of the doubt - the assumption of trust rather than mistrust – that tends to bring the best out of most people.

If our hope is in our political leaders to deliver radical solutions to combat mental wellbeing, it’s unsurprising Generation Z despairs.

Second hope. In politics false dawns are as predictable as taxes. If our hope is in our political leaders to deliver radical solutions to combat mental wellbeing, it’s unsurprising Generation Z despairs. Christian hope on the other hand, rests not on any human promise or expertise, not (thank God) on the superior qualities of bishops or popes, but on something entirely outside human capacity – the story of the Resurrection of Jesus, the conviction of a divine break-in to the order of the universe that has always had the capacity to bring a sense of hope in the darkest moments of an individual’s or a community’s life.

When I look into the eyes of my neighbour I see not a potential threat to my personal autonomy, but a person of infinite value.

Last, love. At the heart of the Christian faith is the conviction that each person (whatever his or her qualities, background or even character) is infinitely valuable because loved by the God who made them. The outworking of this idea in history is to make love, not suspicion or even tolerance the ideal bedrock of social life. This is the tie that binds. When I look into the eyes of my enemy I see my brother. When I look into the eyes of my neighbour I see not a potential threat to my personal autonomy, but a person of infinite value, whom I am bound to love as God does, however annoying, contrary or wrong their personality or political opinions.

These three qualities – faith, hope and love, are like muscles. The more you exercise them, the more they grow stronger. A life, or a society that chooses to root itself in Christian faith tends to grow in its capacity for faith, hope and love.