Over the course of the last few months, in conversations with Jung at the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum and in Washington, D.C., I’ve asked the 53-year-old activist many questions in hopes of answering only one: Why has he decided to do what he does? What I’ve come to understand is that the trajectory of Jung’s life as he relayed it to me—from his immigration to North Korea as a child to his military service as a young man to his nightmarish ordeals as a political prisoner—is, at its core, a story about the power of information.

With all the focus on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and various provocations, people don’t always recognize “how powerful information can be,” Jung told me through his translator and No Chain colleague, Henry Song. Information conveys “that there is a choice” about how to live one’s life and organize society. Jung argues that it’s this information, this choice, that Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s 32-year-old leader, fears most.

“In recent memory, we’ve had the Jasmine Revolution [in Tunisia], and the Arab Spring,” Jung said. “How come none of that is happening in North Korea? The reason is simple: Because the country’s such a closed-off country, information-wise. People don’t know that the situation they’re in is truly a terrible one.”

“We want to break that ignorance,” he added.

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Jung fled to North Korea before he fled from it. He was born in 1963 in the Chinese city of Yanji, which is near the North Korean border and has a large ethnic Korean population. Like many Koreans, his grandparents had moved to China in the 1930s to escape Japanese rule in Korea. But hardship soon followed the family to China. Jung’s father, who fought for the Chinese during the Korean War and later worked as a teacher, attracted the scrutiny of Chinese authorities by urging Koreans in China to study Korean history. In 1967, as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution targeted intellectuals and minority groups, Jung’s father was branded a North Korean spy and arrested. Two years later, Jung’s mother crossed into North Korea with her four children. Jung was seven years old. Mao’s suppression of information is what brought Jung to North Korea in the first place.

Initially, North Korea seemed like a land of abundance compared with China, where Jung often went hungry. The government was welcoming to Koreans coming from China, and food was relatively plentiful. Jung described his early years in the city of Hoeryong, near the Chinese border, as “trouble-free.” At school, he received a free education, a free school uniform, and gifts during national holidays. “I just remember feeling very grateful to the dear leader, Kim Il Sung at that time,” he said. In the classroom, he imbibed propaganda about the benevolence of Kim Il Sung, who had founded the country in 1948. But he also remembers learning standard subjects: science, arithmetic, even English.