The NYT has a brief take on the efforts of South Korean missionaries to convert North Koreans and Chinese.

This being The NYT, the tone of the piece is mostly negative. The piece emphasizes some of the frictions and miscommunication between missionaries and defectors, and ignores the big elephant in the story — that just as the abolition movement in the U.S. before the Civil War was fired by Christian religious zeal, so are many South Korean (and American) missionaries who brave enormous risks to smuggle out North Korean defectors to freedom through the new underground railroad (meanwhile the rest of of the world is largely sitting on its collective behind, ignoring a massive human tragedy ensuing in the world’s largest prison that is North Korea).

Still, there are some interesting bits in the piece:

With a nearly 30 percent Christian population, the South [Korea] has the world’s second largest missionary movement, after the United States, with 14,000 people abroad. An estimated 1,500 are deployed in China, evangelizing secretly and illegally among Chinese and among North Koreans living in China - a population that various estimates say ranges from 10,000 to as many as 300,000. South Korean missionaries shelter North Koreans and have brought thousands here to the South; others train them to return home to proselytize, as well as smuggle Bibles into the North.

And the following quotes should delight leftist materialists everywhere:

“My wife was never a party member, so it was easier for her to accept Christianity,” he said. “I was a party member for 10 years, and they indoctrinated us with the party ideology. When I hear Christian preaching, it sounds similar to the party teachings. Christians praise God, but North Koreans praise Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il,” the founder of the North Korean state and his son, the current leader. “At least, they are mortal and we can see them. In Christianity, they ask me to praise the Lord, whom we cannot even see.”

As with other corrupt, repressive dictatorships, this particular defector’s tale also demonstrates that life can be good for the elites in such societies:

… Mr. Park made money in the growing unofficial trade between North Korea and China. A strong swimmer, he smuggled people back and forth across the Tumen River, charging about $60 for the 30-minute swim and sometimes making as much as $1,000 a month. He often bribed a North Korean intelligence official to protect him.

At the time, while most people in his town counted themselves lucky if they ate three meals of corn a day, he and his family ate chicken, pork and rice daily. He said that he liked the freedom and opportunities in South Korea, but that he missed his relatives and the power he had back home.

“Here I’m just a follower, but over there I was a leader,” the defector said. “It’s not because I was a party member, but because capitalism is creeping into North Korea, if you have a lot of money, you can have power.”

Except without a genuine rule of law, it really isn’t capitalism, because the government comes knocking:

But in the middle of one night, in 1999, the friendly intelligence officer woke him up. He told Mr. Park that he had been implicated in a case and warned him to flee to China. With his wife, seven months pregnant with their second child, Mr. Park swam across the river, barely making it to the other side. A month later, he returned to North Korea one last time, to get his older daughter and money for a lattice machine for his wife.

That’s what happens when there are no constraints on the government, when there is no freedom. One might do well economically, enjoy power and then suddenly — WOOSH! — the secret police shows up and throws one in a gulag, never to be seen again. People who cry “police state” about the U.S. have absolutely no idea what a real police state is.