The cross-border smuggling landscape between North Korea and China is changing. Thanks to relatively stable prices in North Korea, cross-border smuggling has slowed with large-scale smuggling all but gone. Instead the "heydays of housewives" in smuggling are emerging, in which North Korean ladies illegally sell cheap and shoddy goods to Chinese across the border. In contrast to smuggling of scale, connived with border guards, that leaves little profits after bribes, smuggling on a small-scale involving housewives result in relatively handsome profits, because no bribes are needed, according to some North Korea watchers in the South.

These North Korean women carry contraband disguised as laundry to the Yalu or Tumen River and sell them to Chinese. Mostly the Chinese wade the river to the North or they exchange goods in the waist-deep midstream. Upon confirming the goods delivered, the buyer throws money to the seller, tucked in a vinyl-paper bag along with a piece of stone. The border guards rarely detect such "throwing" smuggling. Even if it is, troops, it is said, find it troublesome to crack down on the housewives, who challenge them to "Kill me."

Specialized smugglers are recently changing the item of their business from goods to people. They play the role of middlemen by smuggling North Koreans out to China to have them meet with their South Korean relatives. More risky than contraband smuggling as it is, it is more lucrative. But this business requires securing tight ties with State Security Agency and People's Security Ministry officials as well as border guards.

Soldiers accumulate bribes from smugglers, usually using the latter's homes as their hideouts. Smugglers look after the troops' laundry, meals and even liquor parties. They live like family members, forming a close relationship.

The bribing of border guards generally costs 1% of sales in the case of goods and US$50-US$100 per person in the case of people. North Korean brokers are linked with their counterparts in China. Smuggling a person out of North Korea to China and returning him or her to the North usually calls for a brokerage fee of between US$2,000 and US$3,000. Since it's so risky to take people out of the North surreptitiously, it is not easy to locate brokers in North Korea. Pyongyang authorities are also tightening up border crackdowns.

Kim Jong Il has tried hard, but in vain, to uproot cross-border smuggling since the early 1990s, even resorting to executing scores in Shinuiju and Hyesanjin in recent years. The viability of smugglers lies in their tightly-knit relationship with troops, offering their lives as security. It's an unwritten law for smugglers, caught while crossing the river by unconnected troops, not to divulge conniving soldiers even in the face of harsh torture. Persevering in hardship by themselves ensures the subsequent development of deepened relationship with particular troops.

(Kim Chol-hwan, nkch@chosun.com )