In an upscale coffee shop, Choi Kyong-chol clutches his knapsack. All his worldly valuables are in the small black bag.

A North Korean refugee – a farmer who escaped to Seoul this year – Mr. Choi is still a bit dazed by the big city. A year ago, Choi lived on a pig farm in north China with his family, also escapees from hunger in North Korea. But one day, Chinese police came to the family hut, handcuffed the five Chois, and sent them home.

Arriving at a North Korean jail, they were made to stand and sit until Choi's mother fainted. Weeks later, they were released, "dumped into an empty field," as Choi says. Immediately they plotted to go back to China. "We had no money, no food, no future."

On March 14, Choi and 24 other North Koreans rushed into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing, as TV cameras rolled. That dash marked the first sight, for much of the world, of a special problem – runaways from the world's last Stalinist regime – that until recently had not even been identified. Since the mid-1990s, some 200,000 North Korean runaways have been voiceless and largely powerless pawns in a geopolitical conundrum: China doesn't especially want them, and the North will punish them if they return. They live in a silent daily struggle along China's border, where crossing a small river is a ticket to a new world, albeit one where they might be arrested.

Neither China nor South Korea wishes to provoke the unpredictable North. The issue is so sensitive that it wasn't raised publicly at high level North-South talks here this week.

In China, these refugees have no status and no rights, and are illegals. China did not regard Choi, for example, as a "refugee."

South Korea has officially increased its intake of North Koreans from 148 in 1999, to 553 last year, and an estimated thousand this year. The unofficial figure is higher, sources for this report confirm. Since March, more than 30 North Koreans have escaped into embassies or consulates in China, including two brothers this week who scaled the Albanian Embassy fence.

Since the Spanish Embassy event, the policing of illegal Koreans in China has intensified. Along the border, China has heightened a two-year crackdown – with stepped-up house-to-house searches, leaflets warning villagers not to help, and bounties paid to informants, according to seven recent escapees interviewed for this report. Meanwhile Beijing, eager for a "buffer" state between China and South Korea, is trying to improve relations with Pyongyang.

The refugees are caught literally and figuratively in the middle. They live in a netherworld between those hunting them and a frail underground railroad of intrepid volunteers who are aiding them. When they cross the border, they enter a patchwork of shifting zones of safety and danger. They hide during the day. They try not to speak their broken Chinese. To leave China, some burrow in trucks of potatoes, claw through Laotian jungles, and float down the Mekong River. Others are shepherded to Mongolia. One young man walked across the frozen Yalu River in February, obtained a fake passport, and flew to freedom in less than a month – for $10,000. For most, the journey is longer.

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