Interview

Change

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.

Article

Change

Community

Hospitality

7 October 2025

6 min read

In an age of disconnection, I want to belong

Old rituals offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Wassailers emerge from a shed beside a wood

Wassailing at Bourne Woods, Lincolnshire.

Bob Harvey, CCL, Geograph.

Once, I went to a ‘wassail’ on the edge of the city I lived in. A Wassail, from the Old English phrase meaning "be in good health", is a ceremony that involves toasting apple trees and scaring away evil spirits to ensure a good harvest, and it dates back to Anglo Saxon times. A man dressed in green and brown layers and leaves led the ceremony, passing around cups and cider for us to offer to the trees. We listened to stories, shared food. The event was ticketed. I was curious. But I felt out of place; a fraud stepping into this old ritual with no prior connection to these particular apple trees or this bit of land they were on, or to the people who surrounded them – trying to convince myself and others that I belonged. To what? To who? At the end, we all went back to our separate homes across the city, no more responsibility for those trees, nothing to link us to each other anymore.

I’ve been advertised many events like this. Places to be celebrated through feasting, music and dance, entering into “ancient traditions connecting us to nature” – beating the bounds, toasting the land, enjoying seasonal feasts, listening to old stories. Photos advertising these events are like something styled for Country Living magazine, placing heritage rituals in high-end consumer settings; signalling intentionally or not that they are curated lifestyle experiences available to those who can afford them. They are part of the growing ‘return to the land’ movement that I often come across online, mediated through brands and influencers, curated retreats, Instagrammable countryside.

I look outside the window towards our rural Devon village. It is grey and drizzly, and it will probably be grey and drizzly at harvest time. There will be no Instagrammable moments, but there will be deep roots that have grown slowly and are tended all year round.

Perhaps these events signify an ache for a particular kind of rootedness. I have this ache. I am envious of friends who farm in landscapes their ancestors have inhabited for hundreds of years, of people who feel a clear sense of home and belonging. In the past, these feelings were often linked to community and to the faith and work traditions that bind community together: harvest home, Lammas, Rogation, saints’ days, midsummer. They weren’t boutique experiences open to anyone who could pay for them; they were communal and local, woven into survival, farming, faith, community. I am trying to carve out these feelings too.

I have been wondering what we lose when old celebrations and rituals are curated, commodified, or disconnected from the deeper soil of faith and tradition that once sustained them. How do we celebrate the longing for rootedness without flattening it into a lifestyle accessory, stripping it of faith, memory, obligation, and mystery? How might old rituals help us to feel deeply hopeful and rooted in an environmentally and socially fragmented age?

I think it can help to place these rituals in the context of place; of community; of faith. These contexts offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart, even when I’d rather walk away. Without some kind of infrastructure of belonging, I think old rituals can become about consumption and lifestyle rather than connection to people and place. They become weekend events, or expressions of self, or a nice vibe – not a life’s ordering. Real ritual, I am coming to realise, requires weight; a tie to story, belief, and responsibility — not just aesthetic revival. A harvest festival in a rural, overlooked parish like mine may be small, strange and inefficient. It will not be photogenic, but it will connect me and others to a stream of 2,000 years of worship here, and before that to millennia of agricultural rhythm-marking. It introduces me to people and farms, to old stories that have lain dormant like relics in the soil, to possibilities for my own faith and belonging.

I have been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine. By ‘machine’ he means the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged; a project of modernity “that is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfil the most ancient human dream: to become gods.” I suspect Kingsnorth would see the commercialisation of ancient rituals as a consequence of machine culture. Disconnecting the rituals from their origins and landscapes and relational ecosystems is to render them floating experiences, available to be purchased and claimed and bent to anyone’s will. A machine-friendly spirituality that strips mystery and, importantly, the cost of that spirituality – commitment, belonging, sacrifice, inconvenience.

Kingsnorth shows that the razing of old stories, communities, and traditions created a blank canvas that allowed for the success of the industrial revolution, and so today’s materialistic and economically-driven culture. And so I see hope in the interest and resurgence of old traditions, in our hunger for roots, in the reclaiming of stories that were once trampled and forgotten. But I think it matters whether they are resurrected as machine-friendly buyable experiences, or as ways of being that seek continuity with something older and truer, something outside of today’s dominant paradigms.

Anthropologist Victor Turner explored the ideas of liminality and communitas. Liminality refers to an ambiguous ‘between’ state where individuals are stripped of their usual social roles and statuses. Communitas is the unstructured social bond that emerges among people in this liminal state, creating a sense of equality, directness, and shared humanity that challenges formal social structures. Perhaps – in this time of climate change and AI and an increasingly unknowable future – we are all in a liminal space. Perhaps the revival of old rituals allows for direct human connection. Perhaps the wassail event, and others like it, encourages human connection in a fractured time. Perhaps they make the countryside into a sanctuary in unknowable times, and perhaps that is enough.

The Christian story does these things too, but I think it goes deeper still – it sanctifies time itself, embedding the rituals and seasons in liturgy, creating a steady rhythm that can hold community together without being dependent on trends or tickets. It is a story grown from a sacred supper, shared feasts, prayer, fasting, seeds, and rituals of death and new life. It is a story that binds together its hearers into relation and rhythm-making.

Christianity is not a neat ‘answer’ to the rootlessness and unbelonging of our time. But it offers old and tested examples of depth, continuity, and gratitude in ritual. It has of course long absorbed and re-shaped older rituals, born of older communities – like the Celts, who knew that place and time and land and people, animated by something beyond, could combine to create particular patterns and poetry which, when taken seriously, could deepen identity and togetherness with each other and the Earth. Christianity recognised this and built on it (and squashed it in places, but that is another story). I think that picking and choosing and bending old traditions, detaching them from time and place and cultural significance, even if just to remove religious baggage, reduces that old poetry to prose. It is no longer sustained by its original social and spiritual infrastructure.

Such an infrastructure, built over generations, connects us to a through-line of celebration, gratitude, lament, and renewal. Following this through line – which whether I’ve liked it or not has linked me to new and old expressions of the Christian faith – is what is helping me to find belonging and participation. The wassail I joined signified to me that I’m still on the search for belonging. I want to go to a Wassail event again, but I want to do it outside of the ‘machine’, in a place I am putting roots into, with trees that I help tend, lifting bread around a harvest table with others I am working to know. I still feel a tug to these old rituals, as if assessing their ability to provide orienting infrastructure to my life and to the life of community. But in this age of disconnection – of industrial food, global supply chains, loneliness – what I want is less curated experience and more real belonging. I hope to find a bit more of that at harvest time.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge a gift now