SEOUL: On the Chinese side of the North Korean border, a generation of children born of women refugees is growing up stateless, barred from society and ignored by the international diplomacy trying to bring Pyongyang to heel.

The two Koreas were holding talks on Wednesday on humanitarian issues but relief workers say no government is doing much, if anything, for the thousands of children born to North Korean women who fled their destitute home to live with Chinese men, who often purchased them through traffickers.

The children, by some estimates numbering tens of thousands, live in legal limbo, their mothers too afraid to register them with the Chinese authorities whose policy is to send North Korean refugees back to the hermit state where they face almost certain torture and imprisonment.

‘The tragic reality for such children is that they obtain nationality — and the chance to go to school — only by losing their mothers,’ Human Rights Watch wrote in a recent report.

Registering the child simply to attend school in China, places the mother at high risk of deportation, the report said.

Some local Chinese authorities will only allow the children to be registered once the father produces paperwork saying the North Korean mother has been arrested or deported, while others will issues papers if bribed, relief groups said.

If both parents are North Koreans, the entire family remains in hiding, relief workers said.

The result is that few children are ever registered and so live on the fringes of society.

Attention to the plight of these children was raised when two US journalists were arrested by North Korea after they crossed over the border from China, where they had been investigating the subject.

‘Incidents such as the arrests of the US journalists make things more difficult because they bring to light embarrassing items that China would like to remain in the dark,’ said Joanna Hosaniak, an aid worker with the Citizen's Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

Orphanages on the border

Relief agencies work along the border in China helping North Koreans make their way to South Korea and taking care of the children who can easily end up as orphans.

‘Mothers run away from abusive relationships and leave the children behind or they are sent back to the North and the Chinese father does not want to raise the child on his own,’ said a US missionary who runs orphanages along the border.

The orphanages are usually just a few children in a house where they try not to raise the interest of Chinese authorities.

‘If the Chinese want to find the orphanages, they will. They are not amateurs when it comes to internal security,’ said the missionary, who asked not to be named for his own security.

If the children are sent back to North Korea, they face imprisonment along with their parents. If released, they are usually sent to the most destitute parts of the impoverished state and kept under close surveillance, relief groups say.

Education usually stops before children become teenagers in these parts of North Korea because the state forces its rural youth to work in fields and factories, according to a report from the Citizen's Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

North Koreans, mostly women, started to flee over the relatively porous border with China by the tens of thousands after the state suffered a famine in the late 1990s that estimates say killed about one million people.

A steady trickle make their way to a third country and then find passage to South Korea, where they are almost always granted citizenship.

South Korea has set up a special school for the offspring of North Korean defectors and youths who escaped on their own to prepare them for a new life in the capitalist South.

Most of the students live in South Korea without one or both of their parents, few have had much formal education and almost all have emotional scars from their harrowing escapes.

‘Finding a way to live after they leave this school is nothing compared to the struggle it took for them to get here,’ said principal of the Hangyoreh school, Gwak Jong-moon.