Michael Spavor is the latest in a series of businessmen, aid workers and missionaries to run afoul of authorities in the tense border region
C anadian entrepreneur Michael Spavor’s arrest this week in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong shines a light on the precarious existence of foreigners who live and work along the ultra-sensitive border between China and North Korea.
Spavor, a prominent North Korea watcher and founder of Dandong-based NGO Paektu Cultural Exchange, is the latest in a series of businessmen, aid workers and missionaries to run afoul of authorities in the tense, heavily surveilled border region.
The 43-year-old fluent Korean speaker, one of the few Westerners to have met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, is under investigation by authorities in Liaoning province for “activities that endanger China’s national security”.
“He’s been at the North Korea game a long time, and based in China, so he’s of course on their radar, as any foreigner [would be who’s been] living on the border for that long,” said a friend of Spavor’s on condition of anonymity.
Idealist with high hopes brought crashing to earth in China
China’s Dandong, which faces the North Korean city of Sinuiju across the Yalu River, is the main hub for trade and travel between the two countries. Before the tightening of sanctions against Pyongyang, about 70 per cent of cross-border trade was estimated to go through the city – most of it textiles, coal, iron ore, and seafood.
It is home to thousands of North Korean workers and about 150 of the country’s foreign trade firms – more than any other city in the world, according to a previous estimate by Russian scholar Andrei Lankov.
Spavor, whose NGO organises business and cultural projects in North Korea, was taken into custody on the same day as former diplomat Michael Kovrig, another Canadian national who was detained on Monday in Beijing on similar charges.
While observers widely suspect that both men are being held in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver earlier this month, it is far from the first time China has targeted foreigners on its border with North Korea.
