Since the early 1990s, China’s borderlands have played a crucial role in the central government’s “opening-up” program. However, starting in the mid-2010s, at the same time as the Belt and Road Initiative was supposed to accelerate China’s opening-up to the rest of the world, Beijing also began to harden the security of its borders—a trend intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic.
This third episode examines the tension between prioritizing openness and maintaining security, with contributions from Professor Victor Konrad (Carleton University, Canada) and Professor Alessandro Rippa (University of Oslo, Norway).
Materials cited or referenced in the recording
Zhuang Rui [庄芮], Song Huike [宋荟柯], Zhang Xiaojing [张晓静], “Strategic Considerations on China’s Border Opening-Up: Historical Logic and Forward Direction” [我国沿边开放战略思考：历史逻辑与推进方向] Chinese Economy and Trade, no. 7 (2021).
“More Indulgence, My Dear Friend? Why China Is Grudgingly Mending Ties with North Korea,” Economist, September 27, 2025.
Glossary of Chinese terms used in the recording
Xibu dakaifa 西部大开发 Great Development of the West / Great Western Development
Recommended additional readings
Zhiding Hu and Victor Konrad, “Repositioning Security Spaces of Exclusion, Exception, and Integration in China-Southeast Asia Borderlands,” Regions & Cohesion 11, no. 2 (2021).
Thomas Ptak et al., “Understanding Borders through Dynamic Processes: Capturing Relational Motion from South-West China’s Radiation Centre,” Territory, Politics, Governance 10, no. 2 (2022).
Thomas Ptak, Jussi P. Laine, Zhiding Hu, Yuli Liu, Victor Konrad, Martin van der Velde, “Understanding Borders Through Dynamic Processes: Capturing Relational Motion from South-West China’s Radiation Centre,” Territory, Politics, Governance 10, no. 2 (2022).
Alessandro Rippa, Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Alessandro Rippa, “Mapping the Margins of China’s Global Ambitions: Economic Corridors, Silk Roads, and the End of Proximity in the Borderlands,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, no. 1 (2020).
Zhang Zheren [张哲人] and Li Wei [李慰], “Comprehensively Optimizing the Regional Opening-Up” [全面优化区域开放布局], Hongqi no. 16 (2023).
Guo Yinhong [郭垠宏] and Song Tao [宋涛] Sun Man [孙曼], “The Functional Evolution and Temporal Division of China’s Border Regions in the Context of the Security-Development-Opening Up Nexus” [安全、发展与开放关联下的中国边境地区功能演化及时段划分] Geographical Research 42, no. 10 (2023).
Transcript
(Nadège Rolland)
The more we delve into understanding the geostrategic significance of China’s borderlands, the more multifaceted they appear. As we discussed in this miniseries’ previous episodes, one of the Chinese government’s enduring priorities has been to integrate them within the national fabric, to meld them with the rest of the nation, both politically and economically, so as to foster a sense of belonging, unity, and cohesion, with the Han Chinese core. Crucially, the borderlands define China’s contemporary map both as a physical territory and as an imagined nation.
Looking more closely at the borderlands, they also stand out as spaces that both isolate China from the rest of the world and connect China to the rest of the world. They can be seen as spaces where beneficial interactions occur, such as trade and people-to-people exchanges, or as membranes that may bring in items or groups threatening China’s security. Borderlands can alternatively become barriers or gateways, spaces that either seal off China and turn its gaze inwardly, or open-up China and broaden its outlook far beyond the limits of its own territory.
I’m Nadège Rolland, Distinguished fellow for China Studies at NBR, and in this episode, with the help of two eminent scholars that have spent years studying and exploring China’s western and southern borders, we’re going to unpack a tension that keeps emerging as we observe China’s borderlands: the paradox of prioritizing openness while maintaining security.
It was not until the late 1980s, with the warming up of China’s relations with the Soviet Union and the normalization of its diplomatic relations with several of its Southeast Asian neighbors, that trade resumed across China’s northern and southern land borders. But the Chinese government didn’t begin actively engaging with its neighbors until 1992, the year 88-year-old Deng Xiaoping made his famous tour in China’s southern provinces—a tour which resumed the implementation of his “reform and opening-up” program after it got paused in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. In March 1992, the State Council first approved the opening of four border cities in China’s Northeast borderlands (Heihe and Suifenhe in Heilongjiang, Hunchun in Jilin, and Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia). In each of them, the Chinese government encouraged the active expansion of border trade and local trade with Russia and other countries belonging to the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States, through the establishment of so-called ‘border economic cooperation zones.’ Later that year, the State Council decided to open five additional border cities in the Southern borderlands: Wanding, Ruili, and Hekou in Yunnan, and Pingxiang and Dongxing in Guangxi. The borderlands open border towns and their corresponding economic cooperation zones, together with several other cities the government opened alongside China’s coasts and main rivers, kick-started what Chinese commentators sometimes describe as a “comprehensive opening-up strategy.”
China-based experts usually emphasize that the launch of the One Belt One Road strategy generated a new round of opening-up for China, of similar magnitude to that of the early 1990s. In late 2013, at the same time as Belt and Road was announced, Xi Jinping, speaking at the central conference on China’s periphery, emphasized the need to accelerate the opening-up of China’s border regions and the building of infrastructure connecting to neighboring countries. As a result, over the following years, both the central and provincial governments started implementing a series of measures meant to promote further border development and opening up.
Looking at a map of China’s border cities and the corresponding economic cooperation zones that have been opened over that period, it certainly looks like the border line has been punctured in multiple places. It’s as if a dense row of gates is now stretching along China’s northern borders with Russia and North Korea, and also along its southern borders with Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. By contrast, there are only few open towns that border Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to the west; and only two that connect with Mongolia, while there is none along Tibet’s borders.
Three scholars from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing summarize the crucial role played by China’s borderlands in a paper published in July 2021 as follows:
(Narrator)
“As crucial bridgeheads for our country’s in-depth opening-up to the outside world and coordinated development at home, border regions need to gradually become the forefront of China’s opening up to the outside world, and play a significant role in building a new pattern of all-round opening up.”
(Nadège Rolland)
The terms ‘bridgeheads’ and ‘gateways’ will come back often in our discussion today. What becomes clear rather quickly however, is that not all border regions are equally easy to open and connect to the outside world, as Victor Konrad, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Carleton University, in Canada, reminds us:
(Victor Konrad)
China has borders with 14 different countries. It’s one of the most bordered countries in the entire world. And all of these borders are lengthy. Many of them, of course, are in relatively underpopulated regions, but some of them are in among the most populated regions on the globe. And so we’ve got the border between North Korea and China, which has its own set of problems and issues and so on. We’ve got the borders with Russia, which have always been disputed and constantly there’s been energies of migration across that border and all sorts of other things happening. And then we’ve got the border with Southeast Asia.
Now, this border looks like a line, but to a very large extent, it’s a zone. In the past, particularly up to the end of the 20th century, there was a lot of malleability, a lot of permeability in that border, partly due to the fact that it’s remote, partly due to the fact that it’s in a region that is quite mountainous and in some instances quite inaccessible. So between Myanmar and China, for example, there are many lengths of border where you really don’t know whether the border exists there at all, because it’s through the top of some Himalayan mountain ranges, or it’s in jungles, or it’s in areas that are very difficult to get to because the indigenous people who live there are involved in the drug trade, and so it’s inaccessible to a large extent. So that has been a hallmark of that border, particularly into the early part of the 21st century.
(Nadège Rolland)
Like Professor Konrad, Alessandro Rippa, a social anthropologist working at the University of Oslo, has regularly visited China’s border regions over the past few years. He also underlines the permeability that exists along China’s southern border. A situation that contrasts with its western border:
(Alessandro Rippa)
In many areas of the China-Myanmar borders, at times it was almost difficult to know exactly where the boundary itself was. And perhaps more significantly, there was simply just a lot more movement across the boundary, both formal but also informal. In places like Ruili, for example, or other border towns, there are significant—on the Chinese side—there are significant migrant labor from different parts of Burma, for example, which is something you don’t really see in Xinjiang or in the case of Pakistan. You have a lot more movements of goods, you have also common languages that you don’t really find to that extent in the case of the Xinjiang-Pakistan border area. You have kinship relations, you have kids with Burmese documents who go to Chinese boarding schools in some areas in Yunnan. And these are things that I’ve personally never really seen happening in Xinjiang. To a less extent, of course, there are connections and I’ve tried, in my work, to trace those connections that really go back a long time and that are enduring in very peculiar ways for very specific communities and even individuals on both sides, not just with Pakistan, but also in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. But you also have, in the case of China and Pakistan, a geography that is less conductive of those connections. There is more separation, there is simply a more complex geography that prevents this sort of high degree, I would say, of connections that you really have, very much in your face, when you travel or when you happen to work in the China-Myanmar context.
(Nadège Rolland)
Geography and demography certainly influence the degree of interconnections and permeability across borders but also shared historical experiences.
(Alessandro Rippa)
The longer and shared histories are also the histories of the last 20 years that preceded the economic opening up of China, when you had the Communist Party of Burma controlling large parts of this territory in northern Burma that now features at the at the very boundary of the country. And at the time, of course, Chinese authorities were very much supporting the Communist Party of Burma. This was an open border, in fact. And you also have people who were born on the Chinese side in those years, who volunteered during the Cultural Revolution, who went on to Burma to help and support and to fight for the Communist Party of Burma, who then stayed on, who then became established themselves in different ways within the Communist Party of Burma first, and then with the various political entities that resulted from its collapse. And so again, you have these histories that are also very personal. And the other way around, I’ve encountered many people who were born within Burma, within Myanmar, who then grew up, perhaps speaking Mandarin, moved to Yunnan at a fairly young age, established themselves in business and so on, and now have Chinese papers and have kids in Chinese schools with Chinese citizenship and so on. So, you have these histories that is simply, to a large extent, absent in the case of China and Pakistan.
(Nadège Rolland)
The Chinese central government’s pursuit of a comprehensive opening-up in the early 1990s had an instant impact on the cross-border connections with Burma/Myanmar. Now that the massive Chinese market had made itself available, the cross-border trade that existed before at a small, localized level, expanded rapidly. And with trade came the construction of new transportation infrastructure, new factories, and increased cross-border flows of labor force, which, taken altogether, ended up reshaping the southern borderlands’ entire landscape.
(Alessandro Rippa)
What really, really changes here is the scale of those investments. It is not so much this level of local petty cross-border trade, but it’s especially the largest investments in the timber concessions, for example. I call it the “gateway resource” in this particular context. The timber was fundamental in reshaping the infrastructural geography of those borderlands. And alongside timber, you have all kinds of other natural resources: you have jade, you have gold, later on, you have Chinese investments in plantations. Later on, you have Chinese entrepreneurs starting to move some factories, for example, onto the Burmese side of the border, but you also have Chinese businessmen setting up factories on the Chinese side of the border, but employing Burmese labor, which is, of course, cheaper, quite often labor displaced by the war, and so on. So, you have a whole frontier economy developing around these borderlands that is very much driven from, not just from the outside (there is a lot of the Yunnanese entrepreneurs that are involved here, don’t get me wrong) but that is certainly at a different scale than what has happened before.
(Nadège Rolland)
Professor Rippa’s field work followed this evolution in more detail in the border county of Tengchong, in Yunnan province, an area which opens up directly onto some of the region’s richest timber resources, especially precious redwood, that was logged in the Kachin Mountain forest, in the northeastern-most section of Myanmar.
(Alessandro Rippa)
And what you have in Tengchong in the 1990s is a very interesting story, I find, because it was at the time timber traders and private entrepreneurs who took it upon themselves to open up roads into Burma. And in a couple of cases, from the city of Tengchong itself onto some of the border areas within China, which were not until that time served by proper roads. So, it’s quite interesting how there was a lot of private initiative who defined very much those spaces. And quite often—not always, but quite often—the government came in afterwards. And so, you have these roads that were built by timber companies to access particular patches of forest on the other side, who then, after they were built, only after, the government would take over, would perhaps maintain them, would pave them, and then in some cases even set up border infrastructures around them in particular cases. That’s what I meant earlier when I said that it was very much the timber trade that really defined the infrastructure geography of the area. Because those roads, not all of them, of course, you know, there were like hundreds, thousands of roads and logging roads that were built and most of them ended up being taken over by the forest again. But it was some of those early roads that then became more permanent arteries, both within China, but also inside of Burma.
(Nadège Rolland)
As China’s economy began to take off, narrowing the development gap between the country’s coastline areas and the interior provinces became a more pressing priority for the government. In late 1999 (the same year it started its “Going Out” strategy encouraging Chinese companies to invest abroad and grow their overseas markets) the government launched the “Great Development of the West” (or xibu dakaifa) program. A few years later, in 2004, it launched the “Northeastern Revitalization” program. Both aimed at better integrating the borderland regions into China’s export-oriented transnational economic networks, an integration that first took the form of massive investments in infrastructure building in China’s borderland regions.
(Alessandro Rippa)
And in the Yunnan case, this was declined specifically through what local academics in the nineties and local government officials called the “Bridgehead Policy,” so, the idea that Yunnan was China’s bridgehead into Southeast Asia, so not just Burma, but also Laos and Vietnam, and from then on into Thailand and so on. And the “Bridgehead Policy” very much materializes infrastructurally, as very much the xibu dakaifa did predominantly in Western China. And by that, I mean that government officials had the possibility and the resources to develop and to invest predominantly in connectivity infrastructure.
And the story is quite similar to what happened 20 years later, because I wasn’t around in the 1990s, but I was in Tengchong when the Belt and Road Initiative was launched. And quite similarly – I mean, I had chats with local government officials in Tengchong and they were telling me about projects that they had in the pipeline maybe for a number of years, you know: a special economic zone at the border, a logistics centers in town and so on… These were all projects that, some of them had taken off, some of them had been stalled, and they were all now reframing them, rebranding them as Belt and Road in order to attract government fundings. And they were telling me that this is what has happened for a long time, you know: before it was the xibu dakaifa, now it’s the Belt and Road Initiative. Those various initiatives were declined locally in infrastructural terms, and more specifically, various kinds of connectivity infrastructure.
In Xinjiang, there is even more emphasis—as compared to Yunnan, where you have this “Bridgehead Policy”—in Xinjiang, there is a lot more emphasis on the Silk Road. And something that happens in both areas is that some of those investments also go into tourism projects, which are mostly framed around local minorities and so on. So, you definitely have a lot of overlaps. What happens in Xinjiang and doesn’t really happen in Yunnan is that there is a lot more concerns with security in Xinjiang.
(Nadège Rolland)
Whereas the southern border had been managed rather loosely for decades, things started to change visibly in the mid-2010s.
(Alessandro Rippa)
What happens in Yunnan is that for decades, the management of border areas had been left into the hands of Yunnanese authorities, at the provincial level or even at the prefecture and county level. It allowed for certain ambiguities to proliferate. So, you would have all of these spaces (and timber is one of those spaces, but you have others, such as plantations that were developed a little bit later on, and even extraction of other minerals) where you have these grey areas in which the trade in itself formally is illegal, but this illegality is very difficult to nail down, because the whole border area has been left somewhat open to different kinds of interpretation.
And there is a point where the managing of some border crossings, that until the early 2010s was managed by local level authorities – quite often people with ethnic backgrounds, not Han Chinese, quite often individuals, and I’m speaking of very specific individuals who had, you know, hailed from the area, who had connections of friendship, but also of kin on both sides of the borders and so on – those are replaced by the army.
So, I recall very well the Dulong Valley, for example, up in northwest Yunnan, we’re very close to the border with Tibet here, an area that I visited repeatedly between 2015 and 2019. Until 2018, it was still possible to cross the border informally. And as of 2018, the army came in and they set up a proper border infrastructure with customs and so on, which made it de facto impossible to cross without proper papers.
And I think this is part of broader ambitions that characterize the Xi Jinping administration. So, the ambitions of more widespread control, but also ambitions of a different global presence for China, which I think materialized in the Belt Road Initiative, but also in a lot of other initiatives under Xi Jinping. And I think as part of those ambitions, the borderlands became one of the places that witnessed that kind of change and that more centralized control.
(Nadège Rolland)
In other words, at the same time as Xi was promoting the Belt and Road as a means to accelerate and deepen China’s opening-up process, the central government was also increasing the military presence and hardening the security at the Chinese side of the border. Starting with the Covid-19 pandemic, for the most part, China’s borders were sealed off. Victor Konrad witnessed the dramatic change:
(Victor Konrad)
So, what we’re seeing in China is, in the years after the pandemic, what was already moving quite progressively in terms of a heightened level of security, that was accelerated. In places that I visited from 2013 through to about 2019 (which was the last time I was there before the pandemic), we were still seeing a fair amount of cross-border integration, cross-border cooperation. These were, of course, the halcyon days of the Chinese efforts to establish this massive worldwide trade network and the various pathways that they were developing through Myanmar, into India, into Thailand, and so on. So, this Belt and Road Initiative was still very much in the minds of people until the pandemic came along.
And then when the pandemic came along—I mean, there’s still evidence of the Belt and Road, but all the places I went to in 2024 (my first time back after the pandemic), all of the places that I went to, showed a considerable amount of enhanced security, lack of cross-border labor transfer—a lot of that was cut off, virtually non-existent in many areas now. Whereas beforehand, many of the people from Myanmar, from Laos, from Vietnam, and from countries in behind, Cambodians and Thais and others, they were coming across the border to get good paying jobs in Yunnan province, because all of the major workforce of Yunnan province had migrated to the eastern parts of China, because the wages were considerably higher there. After Covid, that has not been restructured effectively. And I must say, having not been there for a few years and then going back again, the contrast was palpable. You could really see how things have changed.
Now, at the border itself, clearly there’s this massive security buildup. There are fences. There are walls. There are steel barriers. They built this set of structures. In some areas where it’s relatively rural, it’s a series of fences, sometimes electrified if they have a particular problem with cross-border migration in that area; in other instances, these fences are just like barbed wire fences or the concertina wire fences and that sort of things. But they’re there. And this really surprised me because I didn’t see that kind of thing previously.
Prior to the pandemic, what we characteristically found was that the Chinese army was concentrated at a number of strategic, yet far-flung places along the border. In areas where they needed people, like close to Kokang because of the constant problems with refugees and the conflict across the border, there was more of a Chinese military presence and several garrisons located there. But in other places, like close to the border with Vietnam, you’d have one or two places where they would have a military encampment, that would usually be not right in the area, but close enough by so that they could get there quickly, but at the same time so that they wouldn’t have too much of a military presence, as it were, in the area.
And that has changed. Now you find military personnel everywhere.
(Nadège Rolland)
Professor Konrad travelled to Wanding and Ruili, Yunnan’s border towns opening to Myanmar, and found that the previously dynamic economic and tourist activity was now gone, cross-border interaction had significantly decreased, and the cross-border trading zone had been cordoned off, making the entry into the Chinese side much more restricted than before.
(Victor Konrad)
They have a border crossing there, which is relatively unused because Wanding was very important in recent years because of its tourist draw. Now there are very few tourists. It’s mostly locals coming across the border and the security is very intense there. And what they’ve done is they’ve essentially moved the border back from the border, about 100 meters or so, with a new wall, a new gate. You’re not allowed to cross the gate. You’re restricted in the number of pictures that you can take from that location. And so, it’s the epitome of the militarized border.
In Ruili itself, it’s the largest place on the Chinese side in that border region and it has a free trade zone, one of these cordoned off locations where there’s a border inside the border, and there’s a control center there. For Chinese, it’s not that difficult, so going into the trade zone is relatively easy. Coming out of the trade zone, it’s relatively easy if you’re Chinese. You can’t get past that security wall if you’re from Myanmar or from other places; you have to have work permission and all that kind of stuff. So, what we’re finding is a enhanced military presence in those areas.
(Nadège Rolland)
Since 2014, the Chinese party-state has been operating according to a “Comprehensive National Security Paradigm” which prioritizes national security and seeks to prevent and contain any internal and external threats, and positions security as an issue of equal if not greater importance than economic development. Professor Konrad’s description of increased state control over who comes in, to do what, in China’s borderlands, is consistent with the general trend of securitization at the national level.
What seems to be taking shape now in the borderlands, is a more selective opening, one that is directed from the central government in Beijing and that is more fine-tuned to the local and sub-regional realities—and also more strategically focused. Gateways are still standing, but their filtering function has been greatly enhanced. And some of them are more strategically important than others.
(Victor Konrad)
That’s my sense of it. That’s where the investment road is, that’s where the goods are being transferred, that’s where – I mean you see that kind of a pattern in other parts of the world too: gateways. One of the aspects of border studies language has to do with gateways. And the Chinese have been very adept at moving from virtually no gateways prior to the 1990s, you know, there were very few gateways into China. The only gateways that they had historically are through the various European settlements along the coast of China in the 19th and early 20th century. I mean, those were the gateways. Now, they have reinterpreted this sense of a gateway and they made it into a very Chinese-style gateway in which you put your investment on the other side of the border as well as on your side of the border. You buy in, in a sense.
They did that in Ruili as well. But in Ruili, the emphasis has gone down because the relationship with Myanmar is not what it was before the pandemic. And I haven’t been back to Hekou on this last trip, so I’m not so sure what’s going on with the situation in the far eastern part of borderland. But my sense is that as long as the trade with Vietnam is consistent, then that thoroughfare will work fairly effectively.
But Vietnam is a gateway to Vietnam. Boten is a gateway to Southeast Asia. So you have to look at it strategically and also in terms of what radiation does, like radiation works most effectively when it’s channeled – it’s like a laser.
(Nadège Rolland)
Professor Rippa describes the same idea of flows that are channeled through strategically selected points:
(Alessandro Rippa)
Hinder the flows and communication, at least at the local level, but then favor the other kinds of – I call it the “corridorization” of trade, which is not the nicest perhaps word, but it gives an idea of flows being channeled through particular points instead of being spread out across the border in itself. And so the focus is on bigger projects, the focus is on state-to-state cooperation, the focus is on, in some ways, simplifying what was a very complex situation at the border and making it more legible for state authorities.
(Nadège Rolland)
So where does that leave us with regard to our initial question about the tension between prioritizing openness and maintaining security? Well, perhaps there is a no paradox paradox here.
(Alessandro Rippa)
There is an overbuilding of border infrastructure in the 2010s. You have all of these larger and larger border gates, there is more military presence. And what is also interesting is that, the personnel at those border crossings, once it becomes military then you start to have people who are on yearly rotations or bi-annual rotations and so on, so you don’t have much local personnels anymore, but you have outsiders, right, who come in and who are just sort of doing their job. Whereas earlier on, connections, networks, and this being locally embedded into particular communities, of course, had its role into facilitating or hindering particular kind of cross-border connections. And the infrastructure itself, it materializes.
And I should add that I very much agree in calling this a paradox. But it’s also important to stress that according to Chinese authorities, it is not a paradox. Xi Jinping said it clearly that security and development, you know, are two faces of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. So, Beijing doesn’t see it as a paradox.
(Nadège Rolland)
Although the cross-border interactions have now been significantly reduced or even sometimes halted, the infrastructure that has been built before is still there, ready to be used when the government decides that conditions are again met to expand connections across the border. Victor Konrad visited Houqiao border crossing with Myanmar’s Kachin State, near Tengchong in Yunnan. The area was supposed to serve as a hub for the China-Myanmar corridor, a strategic route that would allow China to secure a quick access to the Indian Ocean, but progress has been stalled by the civil conflict happening in Myanmar.
(Victor Konrad)
One thing is for sure, they have not disassembled the gateways that they had before. For example, there’s a northern one near Tengchong up on the New River. That’s the route that they were going to use for the Belt and Road Initiative, for the main road going into India through northern Myanmar. It was a major infrastructural development by China. They built this massive trade center, they built a huge infrastructure around the border, with many different border crossing stalls, you know, the checkpoints in it, they had murals and explanatory diagrams and so on, on the walls of the structure, explaining how this would accommodate these hundreds of thousands of people going across and all that kind of stuff. What we saw at that time was essentially the Belt and Road Initiative being played out, the investment being played.
I went back there in October of 2024. You could have dropped a pencil or something and heard it ring through the empty halls all around you. It was just unbelievable. There was just nothing. One or two vehicles crossed in about half an hour while we were standing there. Because there’s nothing on the Myanmar side, the infrastructure hasn’t expanded beyond the border. And there’s a problem with the local militias on the Myanmar side. It’s unsafe.
So they’re ready to reinstate. I could see that. They haven’t torn those structures down.
(Nadège Rolland)
The Chinese government may find itself ready to reopen specific gateways at some point, but what if the other side does not want to reciprocate? A reporter for The Economist who recently visited the Chinese border with North Korea noted that…
(Narrator)
“China is building a giant new customs facility near the point where Chinese, Russian and North Korean borders meet. Further south, work has resumed at China’s end of another new cross-border bridge.”
(Nadège Rolland)
On the North Korean side of the border, however, the only sign of construction was for a road bridge connecting North Korea to Russia—not China.
Music Credits
Asia Insight theme music is by Laura Schwartz of Bellwether Bayou.
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