Along China’s border with North Korea, residents are more worried about feeding their families than the possibility of nuclear war.
Along China’s border with North Korea, residents are more worried about feeding their families than the possibility of nuclear war.
In Hunchun, a city of about 230,000 people near China’s shared frontier with North Korea and Russia, protests briefly broke out last month after the United Nations Security Council approved sanctions banning exports of seafood and other goods from Kim Jong Un’s regime. Dozens of wholesale stores were shuttered, dealing a blow to the packagers, distributors, drivers and restaurateurs who depend on the trade.
“Many people are unemployed now,” said Liu Guanghua, 41, who owns one of the few businesses still open on what’s known as Seafood Street. “Sanctions should be against the North Korean government, but this impacts regular people in China and North Korea.”
Towns on the southeast fringe of China’s rust belt were already struggling with the decline of heavy industries such as steelmaking and coal mining before becoming collateral damage in the U. S.-led push to isolate North Korea. The risk of social unrest due to job losses is a sensitive issue for Chinese President Xi Jinping, particularly as the Communist Party prepares for a twice-a-decade reshuffle of top leaders next month.
The ability to deliver robust economic growth helps underpin the Communists’ legitimacy in the country’s one-party system. So while U. S. President Donald Trump has threatened a trade war if Xi doesn’t use his economic leverage to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, authorities in Beijing need to also weigh the domestic cost of implementing sanctions.
The provinces of Jilin (home to Hunchun) and Liaoning haven’t had much success finding new drivers of growth after Beijing began scaling back its support for state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, paving the way for entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The central government has showered the region with subsidies and investments for the past decade, but few factories have opened to take the place of the shipyards and petrochemical plants that once powered growth.
Liaoning, where officials recently admitted they falsified economic statistics for years, saw output shrink 2.5 percent last year — the only one of the 31 provinces administered by Beijing to register a contraction.
