China Detains U.S. Aid Worker Who Assisted North Koreans BEIJING - A Korean-American aid worker who lived in China on the border with North Korea for more than a decade has been detained by the Chinese authorities, his lawyer said Thursday. The aid worker, Peter Hahn, who is 73 and escaped from the North many years ago, is suspected of embezzlement and possession of fraudulent receipts, said the lawyer, Zhang Peihong. Mr. Hahn ran a Christian aid agency in Tumen City, a trading town across the border from North Korea in northeast China, where he had a school and provided supplies for the poor in North Korea, Mr. Zhang said. His detention on Tuesday came three months after the Chinese authorities detained a Canadian Christian couple, Kevin and Julie Garratt, who had lived in Dandong, also on the border with North Korea, since 1984. At the time of the Garratts" arrest, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the couple was "under investigation for suspected theft of state secrets about China's military and national defense research." The local authorities began visiting Mr. Hahn in April, asking questions about his life and his humanitarian work, Mr. Zhang said. In July, the police closed his vocational training school and his five-story building in Tumen, the lawyer said. The police then began questioning Mr. Hahn about his life, the lawyer said. In an effort to satisfy the police, Mr. Zhang, who is based in Shanghai, visited Mr. Hahn in Tumen in September and advised him to write a long document detailing his escape from North Korea, his life in the United States and his return to China to help people in North Korea. The document was translated into Chinese and handed to the authorities in the nearby city of Yanji two weeks ago, the lawyer said. "When I visited him in September, plain-clothes police were stationed outside his building, and it was sealed," Mr. Zhang said. Mr. Hahn seemed in good health, he said, adding, "His health was O.K., but if he's fit for detention, I'm not sure." Mr. Hahn's wife, Eunice, 65, said in an interview from the South Korean capital, Seoul, that the Chinese authorities froze the couple's bank accounts in early July and confiscated their personal cars and a delivery truck, leaving them with a bare minimum. "They stripped away all our finances, took away all our money," she said. We're not even able to pay our employees. I'm very upset about that. All the vehicles have been taken away by the government, except the bicycles. We only have bicycles now. Two of her husband's colleagues, one Korean and one Chinese, have been detained since August, she said. Mr. Hahn has suffered several strokes, and she is worried about his health, she said. When I was with him, I would always take care of his food and medicine. Now he is in jail, obviously they're not going to take care of his health even though they say they have a doctor there. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has offered no reason for the apparent crackdown on Western Christians living in the border towns. China's traditionally warm relations with North Korea have cooled since the isolated nation's young leader, Kim Jong-un, came to power, and Beijing has joined recent United Nations sanctions against the North. But China would still prefer that North Korea remain intact and separate from South Korea, most analysts agree. Above all, China fears that instability in North Korea could result in a flood of refugees into the northern region of China where Mr. Hahn and the Garretts lived and worked. The detentions come during a period of tightened political control in China under President Xi Jinping. Both Mr. Hahn and the Garretts, who ran Peter's Coffee Shop near the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, which leads over the Yalu River to North Korea, were devoting themselves to helping the impoverished North Korean population. The coffee shop served as beacon of information for adventurous travelers who would often drop by for Western food and conversation about North Korea with Mr. Garrett, 53, a former pastor. Mr. Zhang, the lawyer, said he planned to visit Mr. Hahn again on Sunday. The suspicions about Mr. Hahn are groundless, he said. Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, who said Mr. Hahn had no political agenda, also said Mr. Hahn was being persecuted by the Chinese authorities. "Peter had been doing this humanitarian work for years," Mr. Robertson said. He had been allowed to do so by the North Koreans, and the Chinese looked the other way. Something has changed. The detention of Mr. Hahn and the closing of his agency, he said, meant the end of one more lifeline into North Korea.