DANDONG, China — The first trucks across the New Yalu River Bridge on Thursday were wrapped in flowers and flanked by North Korean flags. What they carried, and how many will follow, neither government has said.
The four-lane crossing between Dandong and the North Korean city of Sinuiju opened to traffic after a joint ceremony, Xinhua reported, four months after Xi Jinping’s Pyongyang summit reset the neighbours’ relationship.
Capacity is the point. Xinhua said the older Yalu River Bridge, a combined road and rail crossing, took trucks of no more than 20 tonnes and allowed road traffic in one direction only. The new cable-stayed span has a 28.5-meter-wide deck with four lanes for two-way traffic and clearance for vessels of up to 3,000 tonnes. Dandong hosts China’s largest border trade port with the DPRK, Xinhua noted.
Premier Li Qiang, speaking by video, said the bridge “is bound to become a new landmark symbolizing the traditional friendship between China and the DPRK,” Xinhua reported. In Xinhua’s rendering, he said relations were “entering a new stage and opening a new chapter,” and repeated Xi’s pledge that “firm support for Kim in leading the DPRK’s socialist cause will remain unchanged,” one of the three assurances Xi gave on the anniversary of the China-North Korea alliance in July.
The practical questions were put to the Foreign Ministry a day earlier. At Wednesday’s briefing a reporter asked how much extra trade Beijing expected, what it hoped for tourism, and whether reports in North Korea that the bridge is open only for cargo were true. Spokesperson Mao Ning replied that it “will serve as an important infrastructure for bilateral connectivity and further facilitate the economic, trade and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries,” according to the ministry’s transcript. She gave no trade figure and did not address the cargo question.
Trade is the number that matters, and it is thin on provenance. CGTN reported that bilateral trade last year “reached more than 2.7 billion US dollars, according to official data,” most of it squeezed over the old bridge, without saying whose data. Lyu Chao of the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences told CGTN that Dandong “can hardly meet the current cargo transportation needs relying solely on the single-track China-DPRK Friendship Bridge, which was built in 1943.”
Construction began in 2010 and the main structure was finished in 2014, CGTN said, which makes this a bridge that waited twelve years. Neither CGTN nor Xinhua says why. Nor has anyone published what Pak Thae Song, the North Korean premier who visited Beijing in July, told the ceremony; Xinhua records only that he gave a video speech.
Whether anything but cargo will cross is the one question nobody with authority has yet answered.
