North Korea's porous 1,416-kilometer border with China is its lifeline to the outside world. About 39 percent of its trade last year was with China, which, critically, supplies it with 80 to 90 percent of its oil. Trafficking in money transfers and human beings also flourishes.
By contrast, North Korea's border with Russia
is 18 kilometers and heavily guarded; the 241-kilometer-long
demilitarized zone with South Korea has hundreds
of thousands of soldiers on each side. Until
now, the North's ships have regularly visited
Japan, from which relatives sent cash and goods,
but North Korea's nuclear test is expected to
end that trade.
For China, the bottom line is to erect the right
number of fences, as it did along the border
city of Dandong recently.
Build too few and you invite instability in
China. Build too many and North Korea collapses.
A collapse is clearly something Beijing doesn't
want, and why it is lukewarm toward harsh sanctions.
A collapse might send
more North Koreans into China than the 100,000
to 300,000 estimated to have flooded the
border during the North's great famine in the
mid-to
late-1990's. (Paradoxically, the famine also
opened trade links when local North Korean
groups
formed to barter raw materials for Chinese
grain.) (From: The New York Times)
By Norimitsu Onishi
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已發行電子報
