What is this? #
This is an unscripted video Massi recorded while we were in the process of researching North Korean defector Yeonmi Park for the Yeonmi and North Korea documentary, in it we talk about some notable examples of Yeonmi peddling misinformation, the video was uploaded unlisted, so it had a very low view count.
The start of the video tackles the case of Zhu Xianjian, a North Korean who fled the country to China and was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison, with the Chinese government planning to deport him back to the North once the sentence was served, Zhu later escaped and was shot when the police recaptured him.
Yeonmi made a video about this that presented Zhu’s case sympathetically, she argued that Zhu’s only crime was being born in North Korea. We looked into this case for ourselves and found that she had massively misrepresented what Zhu was being punished for.
While China does have a policy of treating North Korean defectors as illegal immigrants rather than refugees and deporting them back to the North, Zhu had also stolen from several villages and, most importantly, stabbed an elderly woman who discovered him, which is why he was serving a 10 year sentence, she completely ignored this context and presented Zhu as an innocent victim, comparing his capture to the murder of George Floyd and even the treatment of Jews by the Nazis.
When Massi tried to post a source on Zhu’s crimes to Yeonmi’s comments section, the comments were deleted.
The rest of the video goes over the UFO case, a video Yeonmi uploaded to her YouTube channel claiming it was from the official North Korean state media, supposedly talking about how the people of North Korea’s Wonsan city had been kidnapped by UFOs.
Obviously the subtitles on the video were fake, we quickly figured this out by noticing that the content being shown on screen had nothing to do with the subtitles, and Massi confirmed this by asking Korean language translators to check the video for us. Yeonmi was essentially lying by omission by not mentioning that the subtitles were fake, in the video we showed some of the reactions this caused from her audience, who genuinely believed the North Koreans had executed the population of Wonsan and blamed it on UFO disappearances.
We speculated at the time that this was a parody video that Yeonmi was misrepresenting as real, that was something we later confirmed as we found the original source of the video, a parody account.
While neither of these examples were featured in the main Yeonmi and North Korea documentary, we later made a follow-up video about the UFO case,
the case of Zhu Xianjian however was only brought up in this unlisted video, which is why I thought it would be worth adding to the site, you can watch it below.
This video was originally uploaded unlisted on the 2nd of December 2021, it was added to the website on the 13th of March 2024.