Dandong’s Friendship Bridge, which straddles the Yalu River between North Korea and China, was decorated this week with color-changing LEDs across the full length of the structure, photos obtained by NK News show.

Lights were tested on the normally poorly-lit North Korean side of the bridge over the weekend, with the full structure eventually illuminated in rotating pink, green, blue, and cyan colors by Monday evening.

“They’re brand new lights,” an informed source told NK News. “They’ve been installing them during the evening when there’s no traffic for the past month”.

“This is Chinese government-related for sure,” the source speculated as to where backing has likely come from.

The development is the latest in a series of changes which suggest greater cooperation between the two countries, with NK Pro analysis in November flagging China’s role in improving infrastructure at eight locations along the border.

View between the bridges | Picture: NK News

One North Korea observer said the development should, therefore, be seen as part of the broader trend.

“We should not read much into the current repair – it is largely cosmetic – but this cosmetic job has some political message, nonetheless,” Dr. Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group, told NK News.

“The PRC-DPRK relationship is now better, or, to be more precise, China is again willing to foot North Korean bills – some of them, at least,” he said. “Hence, the lights are on.”

The Friendship Bridge – which in 2015 was said to represent some 60% of all China-DPRK trade – was previously a lot darker by night.

“For many years, the bridge was a symbol of North Korea’s sorry state: the Chinese side was brightly lit, and the North Korea side was as dark as it gets,” Lankov explained.

But while a January 2017 photo clearly shows a difference in lighting between the two halves of the bridge, a September 2018 photo revealed just a few bulbs illuminated along the entire stretch of the bridge’s main road/railway.

And the informed source told NK News that during the worst days of late 2017’s Maximum Pressure campaign, faulty lights on the North Korean side of the bridge were extremely slow to be repaired, meaning the bridge grew progressively darker.

From time-to-time, the 1943-era Dandong Friendship Bridge has been closed totally for repairs.

Striking photos from both November 2017 and September 2015 showed the damage that heavy-traffic and related-accidents had caused the structure.

But by fixing lights only at night, backers of the project will have been able to avoid any extended and costly shut-downs of the bridge.

Because of the bridge’s narrow design, it is only suitable for one-way road and rail traffic, meaning the direction of traffic typically changes every two hours.

“So first North Korean trucks drive into China, and then it comes time for Chinese trucks drive south to North Korea,” wrote Dr. Andrei Lankov in a 2015 column on the subject.

“Due to the technical conditions of the old bridge, the maximum size of trucks is limited to 20 tons, and their speed must not exceed 5 km an hour. It means that only about 300-500 trucks combined cross the border per day in both direction.”

“It seems that trains are the real mover of cargo between the two sides,” Lankov added. “Given the sorry state of North Korea’s motor roads, this is not surprising.”

A modern, USD$350 million bridge connecting Dandong to an area near Sinuiju in North Korea was completed in 2014 but is yet to be opened.

Satellite imagery indicates that the North Korean side is yet to connect any infrastructure to it.

No official reason has been given for the delay in opening the new bridge, but some analysts previously suggested it may have been linked to the cooling of relations between Beijing and Pyongyang which followed the purge of Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, in December 2013.

Main picture: NK News