Inside Dandong, the Chinese Border Town Where Tourism Peers Into North Korea as Kim Jong-un Crosses a New Bridge

Early in the morning in Dandong, a Chinese border city in the north-east, truck drivers pull over for a short rest in their cabs, a few hundred metres from a four-lane bridge that has just opened to North Korea. On an ordinary day, dozens of trucks bank up here carrying trees, fresh fruit, cement, clothes, plastics, machinery and furniture, all waiting to clear Chinese customs and cross the border.

On Saturday, that traffic stopped. Kim Jong-un made a surprise visit to Dandong and crossed the bridge in his armoured Mercedes Maybach limousine, praising what he called its "historic mission" of uniting the two countries. "Everyone went crazy," said Mr Zhang, a truck driver who crosses the border at least once a week. "Dandong is a small city; we've never had such a high-ranking official visit." Roadblocks cordoned off the bridge district and riverfront hotels booked out mysteriously. The evening before, Chinese Navy divers were seen at the water's edge with oxygen tanks still on their backs, possibly after a security sweep of the river.

The New Yalu River Bridge is not especially new. The three-kilometre, two-way link sat unused for 12 years, held up by North Korea's slow work on customs facilities on its side. It joins Dandong, in Liaoning province, with the North Korean city of Sinuiju, and replaces the single-lane Friendship Bridge as the main trade route between the two countries. Dandong also preserves, as a patriotic site, the US-bombed bridge Chinese troops used to enter the Korean War in 1950. Kim paid tribute at the city's war museum to a friendship "forged in blood", with the visit timed to the 76th anniversary of China's entry into the war.

The politics are layered. China's economic support helps sustain the Kim regime against US-led sanctions aimed at curbing its nuclear weapons program. Kim's trip signals that Pyongyang wants stronger ties with Beijing, which had cooled in recent years, even as it forges a new alliance with Russia and sends troops to fight in Ukraine. Justin Hastings, a professor of international relations at the University of Sydney, says North Korea is "most comfortable playing two patrons off each other" to secure its own autonomy. It was Kim's first visit to China in more than a year, though he did not meet Xi Jinping, as he has on earlier trips. Xi made a state visit to North Korea in June, his first in seven years, widely read as a counterweight to Kim's pivot to Moscow.

Whether trade actually grows is another matter. The bridge can take heavier trucks and two-way traffic, and North Korea already relies on China for almost all its foreign trade, most of it passing through Dandong. But Christopher Green, a Korea studies expert at Leiden University, says politics, not infrastructure alone, will decide. He notes Kim skipped last month's opening of North Korea's first road bridge to Russia, and says that by crossing this one Kim showed his belief in China-North Korea relations and gave bilateral trade his imprimatur. Zhang is sceptical: as long as US sanctions remain, he says, the bridge won't make much difference.

Dandong has long made a business of looking across the water. Twenty kilometres away, tourists on the easternmost stretch of the Great Wall, where the Yalu narrows to a trickle, can see into North Korea, whose border Pyongyang has fortified since the pandemic with concrete, electric fences and watchtowers to deter defectors. On one rooftop, children stripped husks from corn and then chased each other. The village is one of the regime's "model" villages, with new apartment towers replacing homes damaged by floods in 2024, standing amid underdeveloped farmland where workers carry sacks of crops on their backs. The roads are nearly empty. Satellite images recently showed Kim's 80-metre yacht, with a 50-metre pool and waterslides, at the family's Wonsan villa. Green says there is no trickle-down, only patronage networks and spending on weapons.

On Dandong's waterfront, pay-per-use binoculars look at Sinuiju, less than a kilometre away, and some hotels put binoculars in rooms. Vendors sell North Korean banknotes and cigarettes, and cruises run hourly. Mr Liu, in his 50s, swims in the Yalu most days and says, "We have more freedom than North Korea." At night Dandong glows with neon while Sinuiju is dark.

Some are betting on the bridge. A new trading centre showroom near the customs checkpoint is stocked with clothes, blankets, wigs, doors, tyres and alcohol. In a garment factory, a banner in red Korean script urges "revolutionary comradeship". A decade ago local officials claimed 10,000 North Korean workers were employed in the city's factories. Five calls to the factory went unanswered. Whether the bridge brings Beijing and Pyongyang closer, or merely sits between them, is the thing to watch.