North Korea is remarkably entrenched in global supply chains
朝鲜在全球供应链中显得异常根深蒂固

What do salmon fillets, fake eyelashes and animated children’s TV shows all have in common? All these familiar parts of Western daily lives have recently been touched by North Korean labour. In an online shopping world where many consumers hit the “sort by price” button, North Korea’s combination of low-cost and high-skilled labour is irresistible for contractors with a tight bottom line.
三文鱼片、假睫毛和动画儿童电视节目有什么共同之处？这些西方日常生活中熟悉的部分最近都与北韩的劳动力有了联系。在一个很多消费者点击“按价格排序”的在线购物世界里，北韩低成本和高技能劳动力的组合对预算紧张的承包商来说是不可抗拒的。

The problem goes beyond the uncomfortable ethics of forced labour. These exports directly support the North Korean regime, funding both the lavish lifestyles of party elites and the nuclear-missile programme of Kim Jong Un, the hermit kingdom’s autocratic leader. Because this income is so important, his regime continues to find ways to dodge sanctions and sneak into international supply chains.
问题不仅仅在于强迫劳动的不道德。 这些出口直接支持北韩政权，为党的精英们奢华的生活方式和金正恩这个隐士王国独裁者的核导弹计划提供资金。由于这笔收入非常重要，他的政权始终在寻找规避制裁和潜入国际供应链的方法。

Take seafood. North Korea profits off virtually every stage of production. The fish itself may be of North Korean origin. Smaller Chinese fishing companies often buy permits from North Korean companies, probably to escape overfishing rules in Chinese territorial waters. A study in 2020 by Global Fishing Watch, a watchdog, found that about a third of China’s distant-water fleets fished in North Korean waters. Much of the catch from along the North Korean coast is then shipped to Chinese hubs, such as Dandong, for processing. Thousands of North Korean women work long days inside cold storage rooms cleaning, gutting and packaging seafood to be sent all over the world. According to various investigations, clams and squid have found their way onto South Korean e-commerce platforms, while salmon fillets have reached the shelves of an American chain of grocery shops.
海鲜。北朝鲜几乎在生产的每个阶段都获利。鱼本身可能来源于北朝鲜。较小的中国渔业公司往往从北朝鲜公司购买许可证，可能是为了逃避中国水域的过度捕捞规章。全球渔业观察组织（Global Fishing Watch）在 2020 年的一项研究发现，中国大约三分之一的远洋渔船在北朝鲜水域捕鱼。来自北朝鲜沿海的捕捞大部分随后运往中国的枢纽，如丹东，进行加工。数千名北朝鲜女性在冷藏室内长时间工作，清洗、剖腹和包装海鲜，运往世界各地。根据各种调查，蛤蜊和鱿鱼已经出现在韩国的电子商务平台上，而鲑鱼片则进入了一家美国连锁超市的货架。

Such slipperiness is not unique to the fishing industry. Strictly speaking, wigs and false eyelashes are among the few things North Korea can export legally under UN sanctions, mostly to China. They netted the regime an estimated $167m in 2023. While these hair products are made by a mixture of freelancing housewives, factory workers and prison inmates, all of them are relabelled as “Made in China” with no way to distinguish whether the hands that made them did so voluntarily. DailyNK, an investigative website, estimates that 90% of North Korean hair products are made by prisoners.
这种滑头的现象并非北朝鲜渔业所独有。严格来说，假发和假睫毛是北朝鲜在联合国制裁下能合法出口的少数商品之一，主要销往中国。2023 年，这些产品为该政权带来了约 1.67 亿美元的收入。尽管这些美发产品是由一群兼职家庭主妇、工厂工人和囚犯制作的，但它们都被标记为“中国制造”，无法区分制作它们的双手是否是自愿的。调查网站 Dailynk 估计，90%的北朝鲜美发产品都是由囚犯制作的。

Removing North Korean workers from the supply chain, however, is no easy task. When an investigation in 2024 by Outlaw Ocean Project, an outfit focused on marine crimes, revealed that Chinese companies selling seafood products were employing North Korean workers, South Korean giants Lotte and Coupang suspended sales of those products.
然而，要将北朝鲜工人从供应链中剔除并非易事。2024 年，专注于海洋犯罪的组织 Outlaw Ocean Project 的一项调查揭示了中国公司销售海产品时雇佣北朝鲜工人的情况，因此韩国巨头乐天和 Coupang 暂停了这些产品的销售。

Yet it is not as simple as blacklisting offending companies, says Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director-general of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, an NGO in Seoul. Ms Hosaniak’s team has tracked North Korean labour across coal, wig-making, garment manufacturing and other industries. “Whatever you start tracking, they will move to another sector,” she says. With a workforce that has no say in what it produces and is eager for a chance at lucrative foreign work, it is easy for companies to pivot quickly in response to sanctions or boycotts.
然而，首尔北韩人权公民联盟副总干事乔安娜·霍萨尼亚克表示，黑名单上列出违规公司的做法并不简单。霍萨尼亚克女士的团队一直在追踪北韩在煤炭、假发制造、服装生产和其他行业的劳工。“无论你开始追踪什么，他们都会转向其他领域，”她说。由于劳动力对其生产的内容没有发言权，并渴望有机会从事有利可图的外工作，企业很容易迅速调整以应对制裁或抵制。

Indeed North Korean companies are now casting their net wider. The pandemic and the switch to remote work opened up a whole new range of new ways for them to earn hard currency. Instead of hiding at the bottom of an opaque supply chain, IT workers started to use fabricated identities, AI-altered photos and accomplices in America to land remote-work positions across the tech world, including for a number of Fortune 500 companies, according to America’s Justice Department. The roughly $300 a month that a seafood factory-worker in China earns for the regime (because of state quotas and taxes, the regime gets about 90% of all earnings) is small fry compared with the $10,000 a month North Korean IT workers are said to be required to earn by the government.
如今，朝鲜企业正在扩大其业务范围。疫情和远程办公的转变为他们开辟了一系列全新的赚取硬通货的方法。根据美国司法部的信息，这些 IT 工作人员不再躲藏在不透明的供应链底部，而是开始使用虚构的身份、经过 AI 修改的照片以及在美国的同伙，以获得跨技术领域的远程工作职位，包括一些财富 500 强公司。中国一家海鲜加工厂的工人每月为政权赚取的大约 300 美元（由于国家配额和税收，政权获得约 90%的所有收入）与朝鲜 IT 工作人员被政府要求每月赚取的 1 万美元相比，实在微不足道。

Kim Seung-joo, from Korea University’s school of cybersecurity, worries that North Korea’s infiltration of the global tech sector positions the rogue state to pilfer corporate secrets or build back doors into trusted Western-based software that can be used for future cyber-attacks. Its hackers are already highly successful. In a global economy, an educated workforce willing to perform demanding work for 12 hours a day at half the cost of its rivals is appealing. North Korea may be isolated, but its workforce increasingly is not. ■
金承柱，来自韩国大学网络安全学院，担心北韩渗透全球科技领域，使这个流氓国家有能力窃取企业机密或在受信任的西方软件中构建后门，以便未来进行网络攻击。其黑客已经相当成功。在全球经济中，一支愿意每天工作 12 小时、成本是竞争对手一半的受过教育的劳动力是很有吸引力的。北韩可能被孤立，但其劳动力却越来越不孤立。■