Does North Korea have a pirate problem?

At  7 a.m. on May 6, Yu Xuejun received a phone call from the captain of a fishing boat he owns. "I asked him what the problem was," Yu told state broadcaster China Central Television in an interview broadcast Monday, "and he said one of the ships was missing" from off the coast of Liaoning, a Chinese province that borders North Korea.

Thus began the bizarre, opaque, and as-yet unresolved saga of the North Korean kidnapping of 16 Chinese fishermen.

The next day, May 7, Yu received a call on a satellite phone from someone he identified only as "the North Koreans’ translator." The mysterious caller asked for $200,000. "Then," Yu told CCTV, "they said we don’t want that much, just $130,000." Yu asked, "Why did you take my boat?" He couldn’t understand the caller’s answer.

"If you pay, we’ll release the boat," the translator told Yu. The calls kept coming, from the same number. On the fourth call, Yu says, the captors dropped the number to $100,000 and allowed the captured captain to speak to him. "His voice was trembling. I could feel he was very afraid," Yu wrote on his microblog, where he broke the news of the kidnapping. "I suspected that my crew had been mistreated. I can’t imagine what the North Korean side could do."

China remains North Korea’s closest ally, yet often gets repaid for its friendship with inexplicable acts of aggression. The kidnapping was probably coordinated by Pyongyang — as the Chinese newspaper the Global Times wrote on Monday, the kidnappers are "highly likely from the North Korean army." The paper also quoted Jin Qiangyi, director of the Asian Studies Center at northeast China’s Yanbian University, speculating that North Korea is "taking revenge on China" for approving the U.N. sanctions that followed its nuclear test in February.

According to Yu, his boat is now by the island of Changyon, which hosts a North Korean military base — one would guess that the boat would only be allowed to dock at that island with permission from Pyongyang. According to the website for state radio service Chinese Radio International, Kim Jong Un visited Changyon in 2012 and "expressed satisfaction" at the navy’s state of readiness.

But if the "pirates" were actually members of the North Korean military acting in concert with Pyongyang, why the laughably small ransom? Yu told a Chinese journalist that he can’t pay the "sky-high price" of $100,000 — that may be true, but the sticker price for international incidents is usually higher than that of a luxury car. (By comparison, in 2010, the average ransom demand from Somali pirates was $5.4 million.)

It’s not the first time this has happened. A year ago almost to the day, North Koreans abducted 29 Chinese fishermen; the identity of the North Koreans, or whether they were authorities or autonomous kidnappers, remains unknown. The fishermen were returned and relieved of all their possessions, in some cases even including their clothes and the pencils in their pocket. Is the North Korean army so starved of resources that it would steal writing utensils from Chinese fishermen?

Throughout its  history, North Korea has been more on the receiving end of piracy, as its ships have rarely ventured overseas. In the Historical Dictionary of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, former British diplomat James Hoare writes that Japanese pirate attacks in the 16th century are one reason for North Koreans’ historical hatred of Japanese. 

So far, Beijing’s public response to this latest hijacking incident has been muted. The Wall Street Journal reports that "Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China is in close communication with Pyongyang, without offering details," while China’s Internet universe is understandably angry. ("Americans say, ‘I’ll attack whoever I want,’" writes Weibo user Christopher-Columbia in a typical post. "Us Chinese, we say, ‘whoever attacks us, we’ll just insult them in return,’" he adds.) The Journal also quoted retired general Luo Yuan as writing on his microblog, "North Korea has gone too far. Just because you’re poor, that doesn’t mean you can cross borders and detain people for ransom." Unless China does something, Pyongyang may prove Luo wrong.