PRC Ambassador Liu Hongcai in Rason, July 2-4, 2014. Photo via Chinese Embassy, Pyongyang.
The Chinese-North Korean relationship is hardly in full comradely bloom, but neither is it in a state of total breakdown and acrimony. Rason, the port/SEZ in the extreme northeast of the DPRK and a relatively short drive from China and its Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, is a good case in point.
One month ago, Liu Hongcai, the Chinese Ambassador in Pyongyang, made a trip around the Rason Special Economic Zone which went essentially unremarked upon. Xi Jinping was in Seoul on precisely the same dates. But Xinhua did not report on the Rason visit, and was thus in line with global media outlets (like the Guardian, for whom I wrote a piece on the dominant theme) in emphasizing how Xi’s visit was an explicit rebuff to North Korea and in fact indicated that relations were worsening.
As Choson Exchange has argued in a couple of useful translations from the Chinese media, things in Rason seem to be going just fine. And, spanning further along the border, Hankoryeh points out that the story about some Chinese oil “shut-off” to North Korea is completely overblown when put into its proper economic context. From the North Korean standpoint, trade with China is still huge, and Rason remains an important (if still under-utilized) node in that trade relationship.
