March 28, 2024
Evergreen

A trip to Yanji, as sanctions begin to bite

Businesses are closing down, laborers are going home, and the border is increasingly monitored

Last week yours truly came back from the Chinese city of Yanji, located in the near-vicinity of the Sino-Korean border. Over the last decade, such trips have typically been a part of my annual schedule, but this time exactly two years had passed since I’d been in China’s remote north-east.

Every trip to Yanji and its adjacent areas is useful, and every visit offers an opportunity to see what is changing. This time, the transformation was especially remarkable: for two decades the area has served as the second largest center of economic interaction with North Korea (the first such center, by a large margin, was Dandong, nearly 1000 km away).

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