NORTH KOREA CHINESE STYLE
Dandong, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province is a city of rumors and spies. Locals remark “Sometimes in Dandong, you just feel what’s going on.” Dandong is the closest you can get to North Korea without actually visiting.
You may hear a lot of people complain of having the neighbors from hell, but few have to put up with more than the citizens of Dandong. The Chinese city lies in the shadow of North Korea, meaning its inhabitants live with the slightly too real threat of nuclear war continuously looming, with the knowledge that the most erratic nation in the world lies only meters away across the border. However, there is one upside to living next to a basket case; it makes for a surprisingly popular tourist attraction.
Home to 2.45 million people, Dandong sits just across the Yalu River from Sinuiju, the capital of North Korea’s North Pyongan Province. Dandong has adapted itself to be a mecca for anyone curious about their strange neighbors. A trade hub in the north-eastern region of China, Dandong serves as North Korea’s principal portal to the world; and hence an ideal place to observe and gauge North Korea, without actually going there.
However, visiting Dandong can be problematic for anyone with the habit of using the time displayed on their mobile phone as a modern-day alternative to a wristwatch. The city is so close to North Korea that mobile phones intermittently connect to North Korean cell towers. Phones then jump backward and forward between showing Chinese time, and one hour ahead which is the time across the river in North Korea.
For almost everyone on the planet, Dandong is within easy reach. There are regular flights from major Chinese cities, and it’s connected to China’s bullet-train railway system.
But for North Koreans, even though Dandong is just a few hundred meters away across the river, it can feel a world apart. For them, Dandong is a place decades ahead in time. Even for North Koreans privileged enough to travel, this is the only foreign land that many of them will ever see in their lifetime.
Astonishingly Normal
On the first arrival, Dandong seems astonishingly normal. The tense standoff felt at the DMZ on the South, and North Korean border is missing here. Rather than appearing to be on a geopolitical knife-edge, Dandong just like most other Chinese cities, is complete with McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks outlets identical to the ones found everywhere else in the world.
The river, which is the international border, is only a short walk from Dandong’s downtown luxury shopping malls. As you near the banks of the Yalu, you immediately see the famous Sino-Korean friendship bridge that connects the two countries. Across the river in North Korea is an array of what appear to be various dilapidated factories and run-down neighborhoods.
The Chinese riverbank promenade of high-rise apartments, countless cafes, restaurants and souvenir shops gives a seaside feel to this Chinese border town. Looking across this narrow stretch of the Yalu River, it is hard to believe that the other bank is North Korea. Nowhere in the world is there such a difference between what life is like on opposite sides of a river.
At the waterfront, in Yalu Jiang Park, groups of elderly Dandongers gather to play classical Chinese music or to dance. Others meet to watch chess matches played in the shade of the park's traditional Chinese styled circular pavilions.
Domestic Chinese tourists dress in vibrantly colored joseon-ot (hanbok), traditional Korean clothing, and pay for photographs to be taken standing next to an artificial border-marker rock. The weathered fiber-glass rock features inscriptions in Chinese and Korean identifying the location of the tourist snapshot; Yalu River; China–DPRK Border.
As night falls, locals cook and eat clams, a local delicacy. Festive lights are strung up along the riverbank promenade, but across the river, Sinuiju is silent and almost completely dark.
The sense of complacency here on North Korea's western border certainly contrasts the headlines typically presented in the English language media which continually warn of an erratic and potentially trigger-happy Pyongyang regime.
For Dandong’s residents, life in the riverside park, only meters from North Korea is much the same as it is on hundreds of other Chinese waterfronts. The elderly practice tai chi, dog enthusiasts walk their pups, and a group of swimmers take daily, refreshing dips in the river. Everything in this bright, well-lit part of Dandong looks totally normal.
Border Security
At first glance, there is little visible security on the Dandong riverbank border, no armed guards patrolling, no razor-wire fences along the promenade; at least not on the Chinese side.
Across the river, north of the Friendship Bridge, North Korean barbed-wire border fences supported by solid concrete pillars, separate the Yalu from an unsealed laneway. During the day, gates in the border fence are opened, allowing North Korean women to wash clothing in the river and their children to swim. Next to each gate is a watchtower or guarded concrete bunker.
Intermittently along the Dandong promenade, pedestrians are reminded "to cherish a good life and abide by the border regulations." Signs advise that it is "forbidden to engage in smuggling, drug trafficking or other criminal activities." Its also forbidden to damage border fences or boundary markers, throw items across to North Korea, take photographs of North Korean soldiers or climb the barbed wire fence on the other side of the river.
Tall, substantial barricades now block a once unrestricted riverbank walk under the Friendship and Broken Bridges on Dandong's waterfront. Erected presumably, at the time of the war of words in 2017 between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Near the barricades, a police van with blackened windows and a series of motorized cameras on its roof is permanently parked near the Friendship Bridge.
As vehicles pass under the border rail bridge on Binjang Middle Road, there is a flash of light as an automatic camera records license plates. Perhaps this is for innocuous traffic management purposes, or perhaps to record the comings and goings near the border.
Regime Curios
In the warmer months, tourists, mainly domestic Chinese and South Korean (Westerners are seldom seen) stroll along the promenade on the Chinese bank of the Yalu River. Capitalizing on the pleasant atmosphere, Dandong street vendors are busy frying shellfish, crabs, and squid with roasted millet buns on their barbecues late into the evening.
Near the bridges, street vendors display North Korean curios. The most common items are sets of North Korean currency and postage stamps hawked as mementos. North Korean flags, toy rockets, plastic army tanks and books detailing the “brilliance” of Kim Il Sung are laid out on mats to tempt visitors.
North Korean tobacco is a favorite souvenir. Smugglers say that cigarette factories are one of the few booming businesses in North Korea. Their tobacco industry is continually rolling and packing over 120 different varieties of cigarette. Counterfeits of the most desirable brands are traded at a price naturally too reasonable to be true; however authentic originals of what is rumored to be Kim Jong Un’s favorite brand, “7.27”, can sell for up to 200 yuan, a little over $29, for each cigarette. In Pyongyang $5 would buy you the whole pack of "7.27".
Not on public view, and hidden in sacks are what the hawkers claim are "special items." The red enamel “Kim” badges worn by North Koreans seem to be too sensitive to be laid out on mats with the other trinkets. All of these Kim badges at the riverfront are counterfeit; purchasing an authentic badge requires some familiarity with the shadier underbelly of Dandong commerce which is carried out in places deeper buried in the city away from the promenade.
Crossing The Divide
While visitors enjoy Dandong as a window to another world, its status as a trading hub makes it North Korea’s lifeline. More than two-thirds of China’s trade with the regime passes through here, all crossing on the Friendship Bridge that connects North Korea to the outside world.
At just under a kilometer long, the bridge has a shared single-lane road and rail line. Being so narrow, when a train crosses the bridge a siren sounds on the Dandong end, and all road traffic halts. The bridge is even too narrow to allow passing road travel, so there is a timetable of slots for the transport trucks to travel in each direction. Trucks from North Korea usually cross the bridge early in the day and then loaded with goods return to North Korea in the afternoon and early evening.
From dawn, the trucks start over the bridge from North Korea. They arrive into a central customs compound in downtown Dandong. Entry and exit to the compound is by passing under an imposing salmon colored arch. Until recently the arch was not guarded but displayed signs that warned against using cameras in the area. By mid-morning, the compound is full of trucks, often covered in the dust of North Korea's roads, banked-up while their cargo manifests are inspected. In the afternoon, trucks queue in the streets in Dandong, waiting to pass under the entry arch before heading back over the bridge in a never-ending stream of daily crossings.
Even with the restricted export capacity constrained by the Friendship Bridge bottle-neck, estimates indicate that at least half of all the road traffic entering and leaving North Korea crosses the border here.
Dandong’s truck compound is the primary point of legitimate North Korean import and export. Its also suspected that the majority of contraband goods entering or leaving North Korea have also passed through this compound.
When North Korea and China had a more relaxed trading relationship before the current round of sanctions, Dandong customs officers would only check documents for details of a shipment.
North Korean sources claim that until the early 2010s, customs declarations were just a mere formality. The Chinese would only stop the trucks that were overloaded. The sources claim the Chinese became "especially concerned with finding items that could be used for making weapons, like certain metallic items and chemicals.” They also started opening suspicious boxes after x-ray scans, and this has sometimes caused trouble with North Korean traders.
China installed state-of-the-art, x-ray and imaging equipment in late 2018. Now each truck, regardless if it is North Korean or Chinese is being scanned at the entry arch.
Because North Korea is the world’s most closed country, and the regime doesn’t allow the freedom of travel to its citizens, most people in the world never get a chance to meet people from there. But Dandong is different.
Not everyone from the insular regime is blocked from leaving. Pyongyang will allow carefully selected North Koreans to travel abroad to serve the purposes and benefit of the regime in its constant need to collect hard-currency. Dandong is full of North Koreans; party officials; businessmen, laborers, and government-contracted waitresses, all securing Dollars, Euros, and Renminbi.
Dandong sells North Korean culture to the tourists down at the waterfront, but actually, the best chance to find North Koreans themselves walking the streets is in another part of town. They are often together in clusters, usually smoking, strolling along in the few city blocks beyond the wooden Korean-style arches on Erjing Jie, nicknamed in English as "Korea Street."
Shops and restaurants here cater to the local ethnic Korean Chinese and visiting North Koreans, dispatched across the border for the regimes trade or work. Here North Korean laborers dressed in drab colored work clothing can be spotted wearing small red lapel pins bearing the face of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Un. In the afternoon they are seen buying quick eats and snacks before they cross back over the border after their stint of working in China.
Popular with returning North Korean drivers and workers are the polystyrene bowls of South Korea’s Shin Ramyun instant noodle. Erjing Jie shopkeepers half fill the container with boiling water, reseal the lid, and provide a plastic fork. The bowl of ramen together with a bottle of Chinese baiju (clear liquor) are packed in a white plastic shopping bag before the Korean’s rush back to the border compound to join their ride back home.
Hanging around Erjing Jie, you can occasionally spot mysterious North Koreans dressed entirely in black. Always athletic males, they dress alike, feature the same haircut and wear polished black shoes. They are careful to avoid being photographed, passing in the shadows in their ninja-like attire!
They walk swiftly, men on a mission, usually in groups of three or four. At least one of them will be clutching a black satchel bag; contents unknown.
They don’t seem to walk very far when seen on the streets. Exiting buildings in the area around Erjing Jie, they quickly jump into cars with heavily tinted windows intended to obscure the occupants. These cars seem to be synchronized to pass in the street as the mysterious men hit the sidewalk. In the flash of a second, the group has disappeared into the regular traffic flow of busy Dandong city.
North Koreans are barred from working abroad under the 2017 U.N. sanctions. Aimed at punishing Pyongyang for its illicit nuclear weapons and missile programs all foreign North Korean workers were required to be sent home. But in 2018 they appeared once again in Dandong, moving back into China in an apparent violation of restrictions.
North Korean workers don’t necessarily have a passport. Most enter China using a border crossing pass that is issued by Pyongyang and recognized by China.
The "River Crossing Pass" is supposed to be valid for only 30 days, but Pyongyang issues passes valid for up to six months to a year, and it is reported that China does not argue over this extended period of validity.
A broad cross-section of North Korean society finds themselves doing the regime's work in Dandong. They could be officials in the country to meet with their Chinese counterparts, or traders that are hunting in the Huamei wholesale electronics market for new items to haul back home. Others walk down supermarket aisles in the Xinliu Shopping Centre scouting for groceries which will be bought in bulk later from wholesalers.
Some Dandong locals blame the North Koreans for crimes in the city, but the widely held view is that the North Korean's have always been around, and most likely always will be. A shopkeeper on Erjing Jie sells ramen to North Koreans which they eat sitting on plastic stools set-up in the shade of a tree. He remarks, “They from over there...” (He gestures east, towards the riverfront) “… are very friendly. They are hard workers and come to me to buy cigarettes and food”.
Sitting on the stools around three in the afternoon while enjoying an icy cold beer from the shopkeeper is a refreshing way to escape the heat in Dandong's hot summer. You will only have to sit here for a few minutes before the next group of North Koreans arrives to buy snacks.
They will be curious to see a westerner. Briefly silently acknowledging you with a nod of their head, they will almost always offer a North Korean cigarette, but never allow you to photograph them either individually or in their group.
Vital Interchange
After spending even just a few days in Dandong it becomes clear the main attraction in this eastern part of China’s Liaoning Province is not the restored section of the Great Wall, its famous stone-fruit orchards or even the cities abundant fresh seafood; It's North Korea.
As the vital interchange point between North Korea and the outside world, Dandong is expected to continue to benefit from their neighbor; people are increasingly traveling to Dandong to then cross the river into North Korea.
Tourism across the river has become popular for Chinese citizens. Many now take organized same-day tours to Sinuiju, and multi-day trips to Pyongyang and beyond have grown to be so popular that the regime's official travel service; KITC has opened a booking and information office in Dandong.
The US government currently forbids Americans visiting North Korea, and most other Westerners remain unwilling to travel to a country they don’t understand and perhaps fear. That may change if sanctions ease, but regardless of that, Dandong's role as an observation post will continue, not least because of its position as an essential interface for North Korea to the outside world. As Kim Jong Un transforms his nation, Dandong's importance to the regime is expected to sky-rocket.
From ancient times the Dandong region has been a critical interface point between the wider world and the Koreans. Now many are expecting to exploit a North Korean path to modernization and a shift towards a market-based economy. Investors hope that Kim Jong Un’s now frequent meetings with Xi Jinping in Beijing will see China-North Korea trade continue to grow.
The Chinese have invested heavily in Dandong, and it is now the largest city in the eastern portion of Liaoning Province. Beijing has extensively renovated Dandong’s Korean War era airport with rebuilt runways and a new terminal now ready to support a possible future of regular international flights.
In 2017 North Korea's airline, Air Koryo experimented with flights to Dandong twice a week. However, the political tensions of the year resulted in low bookings for the 30-minute trip to Pyongyang. After a few weeks, the flights were suspended.
Until recently Dandong was a long, fourteen hour overnight rail journey from Beijing. In 2015 the cities became connected by fast "bullet trains" twice each day. The trains arrive less than a kilometer from the border and provide a super smooth and comfortable journey reaching speeds of over 300 km/h.
Regardless of what happens to North Korea in the future, Dandong is bound to prosper and capitalize from "their neighbors from hell" in some way.
