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China's border
barometer
By Yun Fan
HONG KONG - For a barometer of how things
are going between China and North Korea, a visit
to their long shared border offers a unique
insight beyond the political posturing that goes
on on the international stage.
Relations
between the countries have see-sawed over the past
few years, primarily as a result of China's role
in trying to bring North Korea back to the
six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear program,
which have been suspended for more than a year.
 This week saw a
breakthrough - one which could have been
anticipated following a visit to the border.
North Korea told the United States, after
a meeting between envoys in New York, that it was
willing to return to the talks. China's ambassador
to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, said the
talks should be held "the sooner the better". "It
would imply the next couple of weeks," he said.
But back to the border. Asia Times Online
reporters toured several important border towns
recently and detected no signs of tension.
Ji'an, located in Jilin province in
northeast China, which shares an approximately 500
kilometer border with North Korea, has a
population of 230,000, including about 10 ethnic
groups. Ji'an is one of three major points open to
North Korea by railway, and it's a landscape city
of ancient Korean ethnic civilization.
Cross-border tourism in Ji'an is bustling.
Local travel agencies, authorized or not, receive
more than 10 clients a day, signing up for either
three-day or week-long package tours to Manp'o,
Mount Myohyang or Pyongyang in North Korea. These
tours cost from 1,000 yuan (US$120) to 2,000 yuan
a person from Ji'an, International Travel Service
revealed.
A taxi driver said the number of
visitors from China and abroad wanting to go to
North Korea began to rise in February -
incidentally, soon after Pyongyang's worrying
announcement that it possessed nuclear weapons and
had decided, once again, to suspend the six-party
talks sine die.
Tourism is also
booming in Dandong, an important border town in
eastern Liaoning province and separated from North
Korea by the Yalu River.
On a clear spring
day a couple of Chinese ladies dressed in Korean
ethnic costumes can be seen taking pictures
beneath a battered railway bridge that spans the
river. The bridge is a noted sight that attracts
numerous visitors to Dandong. According to a local
travel agency, the daily tourist traffic from
Dandong to North Korea averages over 100 people,
and a boat trip on the Yalu River is another
popular choice.
Across the river opposite
Dandong lies North Korea's Sinuiju Special
Administrative Region (SAR), which gives off an
air of tranquility, despite all the talk of
"regime change".
Founded in 2002, the SAR
follows in China's footsteps of economic reform
and opening-up, beckoning overseas investment and
multinationals. Yang Bin, a Chinese tycoon of
Dutch nationality, was officially appointed in
September 2002 as the first chief executive of
Sinuiju, but he was soon arrested by Beijing for
tax evasion and financial fraud in China. Later, a
ministerial-level "economic cooperation committee"
was established to reign over Sinuiju.
Things have not always been calm on the
border, though.
In October 2003, Asia
Times Online ran an exclusive series on China's
massive military buildup near the border shared
with North Korea (North Korea: On the borderline). After
the first round of six-nation talks over the North
Korean nuclear crisis more than two years ago,
China started to increase its garrison troops in
Dandong. As per the Chinese military deployment
system, a city is usually guarded by a force of a
division. This was significantly increased, and
North Korea responded by reinforcing its border
defenses.
At this time, Sino-North Korean
ties became very strained, and the border
townsfolk certainly noticed. "The number of
tourists is declining, and so are exports to North
Korea. My little brother runs a cross-border trade
business, and he still remembers the peak season
for trade at this time of past years," a taxi
driver in Dandong told Asia Times Online in the
fall of 2003. "I've noticed that vehicles bound
for North Korea have also decreased. I bet that it
has something to do with the military buildup," he
added.
By January 2004, an estimated
150,000 servicemen were garrisoned in China's
northeastern provinces, making security tight. In
Tonghua, a city of strategic significance in Jilin
province, police guarded the railway station and
frisked passengers. In Shenyang, the capital of
Liaoning province, hundreds of recruits and their
officers were seen waiting for trains bound for
Tonghua. Despite concrete evidence to the
contrary, Beijing denied reports about any
military buildup, saying it was only a routine
garrison replacement mission, with field soldiers
relieving the paramilitary police.
About
four weeks later, China's defense minister, Cao
Gangchuan, who is also vice chairman of the
Central Military Commission, met with top brass in
northeast China, stressing that territorial
security and integrity must be safeguarded at all
costs. The General Staff Department of the
People's Liberation Army, chief officers of
Shenyang Command, as well as Liaoning, Jilin and
Heilongjiang provincial officials attended the
meeting, which shed some light on the nuances in
the formerly cast-iron Beijing-Pyongyang
fraternity.
The flow of China's
reinforcements increased in the wake of
Pyongyang's threat to opt out of the six-party
talks scheduled for September 2004. In August of
that year, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander
Downer paid a visit to North Korea, urging the
latter to return to the negotiating table. After a
four-hour meeting, however, Downer's North Korean
counterpart, Paek Nam Sun, did not give his word
to attend the September talks.
Along with
China's frontier military buildup was a ban on
border tourism. In April last year, the Jilin
provincial government released an urgent notice to
deny access to tourists, citing ongoing
closed-door refurbishment of local Korean relics.
Any travel agency that organized package tours to
Jilin would be penalized or prosecuted, the notice
warned.
Rumors of a Beijing-Pyongyang spat
spread wider and faster when reports said that
North Korea, too, was refusing to grant Chinese
tourists entrance permits. On August 22, Fazhi
(legal system) Evening News disclosed that the
North Korean Tourism Administration had informed
China's Liaoning province by fax that it had to
stop receiving Chinese visitors temporarily, for
the first time since the 1990s, because of some
unspecified "domestic situation".
This ban
slowly eased, though, over the following months,
and the tourists started to come back. Then, on
the first day of China's Lunar New Year this
February 9, Pyongyang made its announcement that
it possessed nuclear weapons and had decided to
suspend the six-party talks.
Sensational
as this was for the international media, and even
China appeared publicly miffed, the border area
remained open to tourists, although the troops
remained in place. When the tourists are stopped,
only then, maybe, is it time to start worrying.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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