Amid the resumption of person-to-person travel between North Korea and China, North Korean officials are rotating out some of the North Korean trade officials who are assigned to work overseas. Those movements are leading some to predict that North Korean imports to and exports from China will pick up this year.
At the same time, North Korea is tightening its grip on trade representatives working overseas for fear of ideological backsliding. Daily NK has learned that the North Korean authorities are stepping up their ideological policing by subjecting trade officials to random searches of their mobile phones and homes.
A North Korean trade representative in China told Daily NK in a recent interview that the authorities’ surveillance makes it hard to even meet with Chinese traders. Agents from the Ministry of State Security are always following him around to monitor everyone he meets and everything they talk about.
Furthermore, the trade representative said he has to pay onerous customs duties even though he is importing goods desired by the authorities, which makes it tough to turn a profit in his business.
Read on for Daily NK’s interview with the trade representative.
Daily NK: We’re curious about what kind of Chinese items you usually import to North Korea.
“We get whatever the state wants and send it home [to North Korea]. We’ve been handling a lot of farming equipment since the end of last year, but there are any number of things: automobile parts, televisions, and computers. We’ve also been moving a lot of electronics recently after receiving orders for electronic goods. The most imported items change all the time. We were moving a lot of edible stuff—rice, alcohol, fruit, and processed food—through early 2023 and the middle of the year. But nowadays, we aren’t importing a lot of things to eat or drink. That’s because the government wants a lot of machinery and electronics.”
Daily NK: Is this your first time overseas?