China has purchased the exclusive rights to the North Korean port of Rajin. The Chosun Ilbo seems to think this could be a boon to trade; I’m skeptical. First, North Korea will always insist on isolating most of its population from outsiders and the things they want to sell. Second, North Korea is corrupt and lacks any reasonable semblance of a court system. Third, North Korea has little infrastructure beyond the port itself. Its rails, roads, mines, and factories are barely functioning. Finally, North Korea has almost nothing to trade. What does North Korea sell that can fill a freighter? A decent-sized shipment of meth or supernotes could fit nicely into a squid boat.
Update: Some very well-informed friends with contacts inside North Korea are not so prosaic about this. They think they Chinese have now grabbed an important part of the regional chessboard that blocks off Russian access to a warm-water port and gives China a much greater degree of control over North Korea’s disintegrating economic components. More later.
[...] Why the crackdown? Because the food situation in North Korea is deteriorating fast, Kim Jong Il’s regime is under an increasingly effective financial attack from the United States Treasury Department, and the Chinese are doing everything they can to preserve their North Korean puppet and partial colony. They may also be seeking to slave-catch their way to a refugee-free Olympics by 2008. [...]
[...] Is it all because of shared ethnicity? Not all of it. Most Koreans have meekly accepted a Chinese veto on Korean speech — as in the Falun Gong, New Tang Dynasty TV, or the Dalai Lama.  They meekly accepted China quite literally stringing North Koreans together like fish on a line and sending them back to the gulags, or using them as comfort women this very day (yet Koreans are still much angrier about Japan’s use of Korean comfort women sixty years ago and about Korean women entering consensual relationships with American men). They swirl with neo-colonial conspiracy theories about Taft-Katsura over a century ago, but hardly care that China has just bought a strategic North Korean seaport. This incident didn’t move many people, either. [...]
[...] Now, a new report claims that China is holding up cross-border rail traffic to the North over an absurd case of hand-biting: North Korea not only demands trainloads of aid, it scraps the Chinese rail cars the aid arrives in (and probably sells them back to China as scrap).  Despite inconsistent statements by some Chinese officials, I rate this report as more credible than previous ones, and I’ll tell you why in a moment: China has reduced rail freight traffic to North Korea in recent weeks, holding up some shipments of humanitarian aid to the impoverished country, an aid agency and rail authorities said on Friday. The move was apparently taken in anger over Chinese rail cars going missing in North Korea, where analysts say they are sometimes disassembled and sold as scrap metal. [...]