Like other countries, North Korea has to mitigate the economic disruption of COVID-19 prevention measures and remain vigilant against potential outbreaks of the virus.

In both cases, Northeast China looms large for the DPRK. While the North Korean state has put forward a burnished narrative of perfection concerning their response to the disease, a new outbreak with links to Russia in the adjacent Chinese province of Jilin requires attention. It will also provide justification for those in the North Korean government advocating for ongoing hard border controls.

On May 22, North Korea’s head of epidemic prevention Park Myong Su gave an exclusive interview to Chinese state news media in Pyongyang.

Nearly seven weeks had passed since Park’s last public statement, an interview with AFP in which he made waves by claiming that North Korea had no cases of COVID-19 and that the state’s policy of closing borders was having precisely the desired effect. 

Since that early interview, the North Korean state media has augmented its coverage of virus prevention and steadfastly maintained that the DPRK has a perfect record in that pursuit. Meanwhile, the pandemic has of course evolved significantly in the countries surrounding the DPRK since early April.

China has reduced community transmission, and South Korea as well. In North Korea, some restrictions on diplomats and foreigners in North Korea have been lifted, telemedicine improved, and some moves toward sourcing foreign tests have been taken. Just beyond the Yalu River border, there were signs of a lightening of restrictions in Dandong, a key hub for North Korean traders.

If North Korea were a slightly more conventional country, their head of epidemic responses might face journalistic inquiry about how, after months of border closure, the economic imperatives were being weighted against public health issues; about when the country will be open again; when more robust trade with China will return; or about the new outbreak in North Korea’s neighboring province of Jilin.

Instead, when speaking to two Xinhua reporters, Park gave almost precisely the same commentary on 22 May as he had given to AFP on 2 April: North Korea still had no cases of the virus whatsoever, and its focus on public education and sanitation was preventing the virus from gaining any traction.

Park evoked the Politburo meeting on 11 April, which had maintained the urgency of the DPRK’s response to the pandemic, and pointed to a central epidemic response body to coordinate the consistency of the campaign.

Judging from his remarks, it sounded like North Korea’s response was more propaganda and hygiene than medicine; while he cited sanitizing public transport and providing videos and propaganda on such vehicles, Park did not discuss hospital capacity, ICUs, ventilators, drugs for mitigation, testing, contact tracing, or even social distancing per se.

The only real difference between Park’s interviews is that he did not talk about border closings this time. 

Looking north to Jilin, both Park and the WPK cadre guiding his work have reason for worry.

China’s border with North Korea is far more porous than that with South Korea. If Pyongyang is going to remain closed to international flights and trains, that border region will be especially important for North Korea’s efforts to control the influx of the virus.

How Northeast China deals with and controls the virus is very much related to North Korea’s eventual reopening of its border to more robust trade with China, and economic activity generally, even if quarantines remain in place for a period of time.

In February 2020, I outlined China’s response to COVID-19 cases directly adjacent to North Korean territory. Now nearly three months later, as an April 29 NK News piece put it, a “return to business-as-usual [in Liaoning] could facilitate DPRK confidence in opening the border to trade and much-needed aid shipments.” North Korea has even made moves to prepare a road to a huge transport artery with China which has been both ‘new’ and unused since 2014.

Unfortunately, an outbreak of the virus in Shulan and surrounding Jilin city in early May is likely causing further consternation in Pyongyang.

On 9 May, a small but significant cluster of new COVID-19 cases were reported in Shulan, near Jilin city, resulting in a shutdown of schools and public transport, and the raising of the regional alert system.

Other cases were reported in Fengman district, a sprawling and scenic southeastern region of Jilin city. One further new case was reported in Shenyang (an import from London, another hot spot in April), and the huge northeastern city updated its public guidance for coronavirus precautions on 23 May. 

Due to the outbreak in the northeast, a number of cities in the PRC’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture which borders North Korea were given special notice to seek out and quarantine office workers or officials who had arrived from Shulan since late April; the areas flagged up for attention were Yanji city, Dunhua, and Longjing. Longjing is one of the most heavily ethnic Korean of the Yanbian counties, and it directly borders the DPRK’s Hoeryong city.

In a fairly comprehensive analysis published on 11 May, the finger was pointed at returnees from Russia as being the root of the Jilin outbreak. The story revealed that some 308 residents of Shulan (identified generically as ‘office workers’) had returned to China via Qiqihar or Manzhouli customs ports in April, and that eight of them had since tested positive for COVID-19. 

Although the assertion is not yet backed up by peer-reviewed research, Bloomberg indicated that the virus that had arrived via Russia defied some of the expectations about asymptomatic carriers:

Patients found in the northern provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang appear to carry the virus for a longer period of time and take longer to test negative, Qiu Haibo, one of China’s top critical care doctors, told state television on Tuesday.

Patients in the northeast also appear to be taking longer than the one to two weeks observed in Wuhan to develop symptoms after infection, and this delayed onset is making it harder for authorities to catch cases before they spread, said Qiu, who is now in the northern region treating patients.

As North Korean state media recycles favorable Chinese media treatments of North Korea as a ‘clean land free of infection,’ epidemiologists in North Korea will be devouring pre-print papers and hopefully sharing data with Chinese colleagues in Jilin. In this sense, the long-standing if relatively narrow contacts with Chinese medical professionals will be important. 

More importantly today, if the virus in Northeast China has in fact mutated and arrived back in the area via Russia, the challenge of prevention becomes more acute. 

While China has had difficulties in its border, Hunchun is again receiving shipments of seafood from Russia. One analysis, in addition to stating that Chinese prices up 5% year-on-year for seafood, said that Russia is shipping frozen cod and chum salmon into Hunchun in bulk. This is to say that the transnational and tri-national trade in Hunchun is another mixing spot that bears watching. 

North Korea’s border with Russia has received very little attention in terms of border controls and COVID-19 developments. Russia’s ambassador in Pyongyang recently revealed that oil shipments are flowing again into North Korea.

But judging by the effect in China, it would be foolish to overlook the impact of the worsening situation in Vladimir Putin’s country on the North Korean leadership’s assessment in whether to open its borders again. North Korean workers in Russia will therefore remain in place, as the pandemic has effectively overruled UN resolutions mandating their return. 

As an early research paper about COVID-19’s transmissibility via membranes in the eyes stated, the virus is opportunistic “and may transfer anywhere to find suitable hosts.” That paper was researched and written in Shenyang three months ago, and Northeast China is again the site of new questions about the virus and its transmission.

The North Koreans remain, as they were before, up against a difficult foe. While North Korean public health officials have asserted the state’s willingness to simply wait out the virus until a vaccine is developed, it is very likely going to take more than siege mentality and a load of public health propaganda to get them through.