North Korean defectors
people defecting from North Korea, often to South Korea
People defect from North Korea for political, material, safety and personal reasons. Defectors flee to various countries, mainly South Korea. In South Korea, they are referred to by several terms, including "northern refugees" and "new settlers".
Towards the end of the North Korean famine of the 1990s, there was a steep increase in defections, eventually peaking in 2009. Since then, some of the main reasons for the falling number of defectors have been strict border patrols and inspections, forced deportations, the costs of defection, and the end of the mass famine that swept the country when Soviet aid ceased with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The number of defectors has plummeted during the 2020s. The most common strategy for defectors is to cross the China–North Korea border into the Chinese provinces of Jilin or Liaoning. About 76% to 84% of defectors interviewed in China or South Korea came from the North Korean provinces bordering China.
From China, defectors usually flee to a third country, due to China being a relatively close ally of North Korea. China is the most influential of North Korea's few economic partners, with the latter's situation as the target of decades of UN sanctions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “North Korean defectors” as people defecting from North Korea, often to South Korea. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as people defecting from North Korea, often to South Korea. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q491090. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “North Korean defectors” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.