Adam Cathcart and Christopher Green

Political relations between China and North Korea frequently make headlines – for the latest example, see the exchange of letters by Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un in late March, just ahead of a North Korean ballistic missile test. We hear less about the economic side of the partnership, and still less about the impact on the lives of people living in the Sino-North Korean border region.

The new book “Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands” seeks to rectify that by looking at how the relationship plays out on the micro-level, on either side of the China-North Korea border. In this interview, two of the volume’s editors, Adam Cathcart of the University of Leeds and Christopher Green of Leiden University, discuss their thoughts on North Korea and China’s approaches to the border region, and the impact on ordinary people.

How does North Korea approach trade with and investment from China? In particular, how does it balance the economic advantages of a more open border with the potential loss of control?

Christopher Green: This question identifies the essential dilemma of North Korea’s leaders: How to maintain authoritarian control over society whilst simultaneously developing the economy to a degree that allows for maintaining the regime’s power. For decades, this dilemma has manifested as a cyclical process of economic opening and retrenchment.

That is not necessarily a conscious decision, but it does have a certain natural economic and political logic to it. Pro-China officials rise and fall, and with them comes and goes pro-Beijing advocacy within the corridors of power in Pyongyang. Yet, while being demonstrably pro-China is treated as a moral failing for a senior North Korean official, that can be set aside when economic conditions demand. Relatively greater openness to China fills the state’s accounts – the more open the country becomes, the more hard currency flows in – but such investments, as time passes, begin to look to the “police” in the police state like unacceptable risks. It goes without saying that North Korea’s leaders also have a very unpopular tendency to spend a significant slice of GDP on weapons programs that antagonize not only the U.S. and its allies, but also the Chinese government. The higher the country’s GDP, the more capital is available for such programs. And if North Korean nuclear tests end up rattling the windows of schools in the Yanbian region of China, how could cross-border trade disruptions not be an outcome?

North Korea shut down its border with China at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. What impact is this having on border communities in North Korea?

Green: One result of this natural cyclicality in North Korea’s policy toward China – and to a lesser extent vice versa – is that it causes quality of life to rise and fall markedly in the country’s border communities. Such communities disproportionately experience the highs and lows of policy decisions taken further south in Pyongyang. It is what makes the region so dynamic, a leading indicator of change elsewhere, and such an important one to watch. When cross-border exchanges of all types flow smoothly, border communities reap the economic and social harvest. When they don’t, those same communities suffer. The fluctuations are large, and visible to outsiders. 

Consider these examples. First, trade. Many of the wholesale traders who bring in goods for sale in Pyongyang and elsewhere are based in Sinuiju. All along the border are the smugglers who go out at night to bring in products – including illicit ones – that aren’t available any other way. Second, remittances. Given that a very significant majority of the North Koreans who have resettled abroad after escaping the country hail from border provinces, it stands to reason that remittances from that diaspora flow disproportionately into border communities, too. 

With much of the prosperity of border communities riding on fluctuations in cross-border exchanges, it is obvious that the pandemic era has been very tough for these same communities. They lack resilience, and of course there is no evidence of a “work from home revolution” in North Korea. Instead, incomes are down whilst market prices for some key staples are up, in some cases dramatically so, as with corn. North Korea lacks a welfare state, and so the bottom 20 percent in society always suffer when conditions deteriorate. There have been rumors of starvation in border towns; these rumors are perhaps not especially credible, but it seems clear that money is tight and getting tighter, and that there is food insecurity all throughout the border region today. 

It is not clear whether – or to what extent – food insecurity on the border has much impact on policy decisions taken in the center. But what does matter is the Kim family’s capacity to maintain the patronage networks that underpin the ruling coalition. It is more than a year since North Korea’s borders closed to wholesale trade. Although key items are almost certainly flowing across the border in small quantities, it remains to be seen how long the country can sustain its present mode. Today’s economic problems may not be affecting the top 1 percent yet, but they are causing problems in the economy of the capital.

What are China’s ambitions for cross-border trade and connectivity with North Korea? In particular, how does North Korea factor into the broader Belt and Road Initiative (if at all)?

Adam Cathcart: On the Belt and Road, Christopher Green and I published a paper in 2017 which showed “genuine discord between Xi’s rhetorical strategy and the responses of North Korea to the BRI framework.” But to say that this discord has resulted in actual sparks or overt disagreements between the two states would be an exaggeration – in general the Chinese Communist Party seems fine with North Korea not really playing the BRI game, and as in so many other economic initiatives, the energy has flowed to South Korea instead (along with other unique forms of economic pressure). As for local officials in Dandong and investors in Shenyang and Dalian, meetings with North Korea were going ahead prior to the pandemic, but almost never with any reference to Belt and Road.

Of course before there was the Belt and Road Initiative, there was [former Chinese Premier] Wen Jiabao. Wen’s battery of investments and projects along the border, unveiled after his October 2009 visit to Pyongyang, lay out a very ambitious baseline for economic interactivity between the two states, ranging from SEZs to infrastructure. From 2012-2014 these agreements weren’t followed by implementation and the execution of Jang Song Thaek threw a spanner into the works. But even a battery of U.N. sanctions in 2016-2017 did not dampen China’s enthusiasm for cross-border infrastructure, so the groundwork has been laid for a more updated border.  

China is often accused of skirting U.N. sanctions on North Korea. To what extent is this a deliberate policy decision, versus a lack of control over on-the-ground realities in the border area?

Cathcart: This is a really difficult question, and one I would love to ask of the Liaoning and Jilin provincial heads. Propaganda from the Public Security Bureau and PRC Customs Bureau certainly encourages us to believe that China has got a firm grip on corruption, border security, and organized crime in the border region – so surely the ability to hammer any illegal cross-border trade is ostensibly in their grasp.  However, having a more holistic look at the border region, vs. just the Dandong interchange, can be helpful – I recommend Chapter 3 in our new book, which is a tour up and down the subregions that make up the border. 

As common sense would indicate (and as defector accounts tend to confirm), there are loads of points along the border where small-scale exchanges could take place off-book. And when China infiltrated a quarter of a million troops into North Korea, they did it largely through the Ji’an-Manpo corridor. So there is a lot of hard-wired ability to move stuff and people over the border without it ending up on a government spreadsheet, even if we did take PRC Customs Bureau data at face value. 

The American frustration over sanctions enforcement along the border, I assume, isn’t going to relent much over the next four years. After the COVID-19 pandemic finally unhooks its fangs from the region (the “when and how” of which is a huge open question at the moment, given the poor state of public health in peripheral areas of DPRK) it does seem clear that from the top down, China’s tendency is going to be to do whatever it takes to hold up their neighbor and ostensible comrade, and any brushback to North Korea for more questionable cross-border activities is going to remain in-house.