Features

Dandong: Window of opportunity

31 Oct 2015 by Tamsin Cocks
China is North Korea’s largest trade partner, and Dandong, on the northern bank of the Yalu River, is the city best placed to exploit the potential of this relationship. Dandong, in northeast China’s Liaoning province, has always been a frontier town. The Great Wall’s end point – spiffily restored as a tourist attraction – is a 15-minute drive eastward from downtown. The city’s 2.5 million people are predominantly Han, but with significant ethnic minorities: Manchus and, most visibly, Chinese-Koreans. Much city signage is in Korean and Chinese script. Dandong has a small airport, Dandong-Langtou, first used as an airbase during the Korean War. It services mainly domestic fights flying to and from Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other Chinese cities. The airport also services international flights to Seoul. The city is easily reached from the provincial capital, Shenyang, by road (three hours by coach) or by the new high-speed rail link, which opened in September and takes just one hour. According to a CCTV report, Dandong is the key Chinese hub for trade, investment and tourism to North Korea and the high-speed rail link is part of a national initiative to boost trade between Northeast China and Eurasia. Trading hub Physically, Dandong is no thing of beauty. Its bustling downtown and commercial districts lack architectural charm. What is attractive is the broad Yalu, flowing gently toward the Yellow Sea. There is a downtown swimming zone in the river, and downstream, endless rows of upscale new apartments are rising along the waterfront, with brands like Moon River and  Singapore City. And 440 metres away, on the south bank of the Yalu, stands the North Korean town of Sinuiju – low-rise, immobile and mysterious. Between Dandong and Sinuiju passes some 70-80 per cent of North Korea’s trade with China – an estimated 40 per cent of its trade with the world. This does not make Dandong a Rotterdam or a Singapore. On any given morning, no more than 40 North Korea-bound Chinese trucks, loaded with everything from noodles and consumer goods to truck tyres and construction gear like cable and steel rebar, can be seen in Dandong’s Customs House. North Korea buys almost everything it needs from China. In return it offers cheap, disciplined staff (increasingly being exported to Chinese factories and work sites), raw materials ranging from coal and gold to rare earths, foodstuffs from seafoods to mountain vegetables, and a handful of manufactured products, including cigarettes, traditional tonics, pharmaceuticals and alcohol. The excellent Taedonggang beer may be Asia’s finest lager, and could become North Korea’s first international brand. It’s sold at the same price as Heineken in Dandong. Bewitched by the spectacle of the dictator in Pyongyang, with his legions of goose-stepping troops, nuclear arms and strategic missiles, global media have barely registered an extraordinary transformation under way. North Korea’s economy has mutated from top-down socialist control to bottom-up market capitalism. Free markets Free markets (jangmadang) took hold in North Korea as a survival mechanism during the murderous famines of the mid-1990s, offering food and household goods from China. Since then, belying its iron-fisted reputation, the regime has proven unable to bottle the genie, to the point where experts say many North Korean businessmen now trade in markets nationwide. Today, these use multiple currencies and offer fashion items, furnishings and electronic goods. The state-controlled economy is also going capitalistic. Farmers have been permitted to sell increasing shares of their crops in markets; state-run factories are operating increasingly autonomously; some 24 special economic zones have appeared nationwide; and a new elite of investors (donju) has emerged, engaging in public-private partnerships with government to build such things as ski resorts and water parks. These are the changes Dandong, and other Chinese towns along the frontier such as Tuman and Hunchun, are leveraging, with ethnic Korean-Chinese as the ideal middlemen – they are bilingual and bicultural. According to CCTV, there are more than 600 enterprises conducting trade with North Korea in Dandong, and a 400-strong delegation from North Korea attended the China-North Korea expo in October. However, the full economic potential is restrained by politics. North Korea is heavily sanctioned by the global community, and Beijing-Pyongyang relations cooled following the 2013 execution of North Korea’s point man on Sino-North Korea relations, Jang Song-thaek.Bridging the gap Still, there is optimism. China has built an impressive, new cross-Yalu bridge – so far unconnected to the road and rail network on the North Korean side – serviced by a new smoked-glass and concrete Customs House. Dandong is even home to an elite boarding school, Eaglebridge International. Some 15 per cent of its students are children of North Korean businessmen, apparently happy to pay premium prices for an American education. As regards sightseeing, Dandong offers a huge statue of Mao outside the rail station, but the best-known tourism offerings are Korea-related. Most iconic are the old Yalu bridges. The Friendship Bridge road/rail girder bridge is North Korea’s premier link to China. The other, called the Broken Bridge, is truncated mid-river – collapsed by US bombing during the 1950-53 Korean War. Chinese soldiers, heading into the warscape and awed by the firepower they would face, nicknamed this and other Yalu crossings “The Gates to Hell”. Guarding the entrance to the blown bridge – now a tourist attraction – are old anti-aircraft guns. Along the riverbank, a statue of a Chinese soldier salutes poignantly toward Sinuiju. On a hill overlooking Dandong, the museum of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea tells the story of the Korean War from China’s perspective. It is an epic narrative. In winter 1950, China’s “human wave” routed US-led forces in North Korea’s freezing mountains, saving Kim Il-sung’s tottering regime, astonishing the world and transforming the image of China from “sick man of Asia” to dragon rampant. The cost to Beijing was 187,000 dead sons, and the statuary set around the museum’s memorial tower does not sugarcoat this bloody price. In one of the grimmest war scenes ever sculpted, a handful of Chinese infantry battle desperately against an unseen enemy. One man thrusts downward with a bayonetted rifle, another hurls a boulder. One soldier slumps dead over a machine gun; another embraces a dying comrade. Of special interest to military buffs are the Russian armoured vehicles in the museum’s forecourt. If these tanks could speak, what stories might they tell of their odyssey from the Russian steppes to the Korean mountain passes? Time warp tourism On the riverbank near the bridge, women wearing North Korean dresses and men sporting military tunics provide plenty of photo opportunities. This area is particularly lively after sundown, with musicians, dancers and tai chi groups jostling for space alongside vendor stalls. Across the Yalu, Sinuiju stands dark and silent. Millennial Chinese are as fascinated by the time warp that is North Korea as Western tourists. Just east of the city, at docks along the river, small ferry and speedboat operators whisk tourists across the Yalu to see the ‘Kimdom’ up close and personal. Speedboats idle beside a pair of North Korean skiffs in midstream, where passengers bargain for cigarettes, alcohol, goose eggs and medicinal tonics. (Don’t bargain too hard: The poverty of the boatmen is sadly evident). In a telling sign of the “new” North Korea, these capitalistic transactions take place within 100 metres of an army post. The speedboats also carry you to within a few metres of the North Korean shore, offering glimpses of locals swimming, doing laundry in the river or simply watching the waterborne tourists. The kimdom Chinese tour agencies in Dandong also offer daytrips into Sinuiju proper. The visa application process, handled by the agencies, can take three days. Once across the river and through Customs, friendly North Korean tour guides board your bus, which trundles into the city’s main square with its huge bronze statues of the late dictators Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Here, you can pose for photographs and lay flowers if you wish. After visiting a souvenir shop – offerings include local candies, traditional clothing and embroidery – the next stop is an impressively well-orchestrated children’s theatrical performance at an elementary school. Americans may be amused or discomfited by the scene in which one child playing a GI – complete with rat’s tail – is “defeated” by bold little North Korean soldiers. After a lunch/karaoke session, the bus drives around Sinuiju then plunges into the countryside (more prosperous-looking than news reports may lead you to expect) for a tour of a cosmetics factory, whose products are apparently exported to 18 nations. The final stop is Sinuiju’s art gallery, which, as you’d expect, mostly features paintings of the Kims’ exploits. While cellphones are not permitted, cameras are – but the guides will check your photographs and delete any they deem inappropriate before you rattle back across the Friendship Bridge to Dandong in the late afternoon. Visiting North Korean elites and members of the rising new business class are visible in Dandong’s hotels and (excellent) Korean restaurants, wearing the famed Kim lapel pins. Groups of female labourers working in Dandong’s garment and seafood-processing factories can be spotted in parks, shopping centres and markets. Dandong merchants say around 30 per cent of their customers are North Korean. Most of the city’s Korean restaurants are run by Korean-Chinese, but there are also North Korean state-operated restaurants such as the Dandong North Korean restaurant. Here, for a hefty price, you are served banquets and serenaded by icily gorgeous North Korean waitresses. For a more local dining experience, Dandong’s open-air evening market is the place to people-watch while sipping beer and eating skewers of lamb and seafood at the stalls. Dandong also offers a base from which to explore the ruggedly beautiful Sino-Korean border to the east, notably the famous Mount Changbai (Korean: Mount Baekdu), an iconic dormant volcano with a lake at its summit.
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