A network of North Korean money launderers and weapons program suppliers operates in China with the tacit approval of Chinese authorities, according to a senior State Department official.
“China was supposed to have expelled these representatives years ago, consistent with the U.N. Security Council resolutions,” State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary Alex Wong said Tuesday. “But it hasn’t done that. And it’s not because the Chinese government is unaware of them. The United States has provided China with ample actionable information on the ongoing U.N.-prohibited activities occurring within its borders. But Beijing has chosen not to act.”
That’s only the most “brazen” example of China’s refusal to comply with international sanctions on the pariah state, Wong emphasized. Chinese officials allow a wide range of sanctions-busting, from the hundreds of illicit coal shipments — traffic that flows too publicly to warrant the name of smuggling — to the continued employment of North Korean laborers, which reflects a pattern of Beijing “seeking to undo the U.N. sanctions regime” against North Korea.
“The examples of this chronic failure are numerous, growing, and worrying,” Wong, the East Asia bureau’s lead official for North Korean affairs, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
China has long insulated North Korea from the full blast of international sanctions, but President Trump’s apparent willingness to approve a military strike on the regime’s nuclear weapons program spurred a temporary tightening of the sanctions enforcement in 2017. China relaxed that enforcement after Trump agreed to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in 2018, as the summit-planning process practically removed the threat of force.
“I’ve spoken with enough Chinese diplomats to understand clearly what course of action the Chinese government is advocating,” Wong said. “They are seeking to revive trade links and revenue transfers to the North, thereby ensuring Chinese reach into the North’s economy. And they are seeking this all without the North Koreans engaging in serious and substantive negotiations, without an agreed road map, and without the DPRK as of yet taking any concrete steps toward denuclearization.”
Some of those links have been renewed already despite China’s legal obligation to cut them. U.S. observers have documented 555 separate instances of “ships carrying U.N.-prohibited coal or other sanctioned goods from North Korea to China,” including 400 involving ships that flew the North Korean flag into Chinese waters, practically “ringing the doorbell and literally announcing themselves” to their hosts.
“There is no excuse for Beijing’s failures,” Wong said. “It has the resources to implement its U.N. sanctions obligations in its coastal waters. But, again, it chooses not to.”
North Korean officials rattled U.S. allies by unveiling a massive new intercontinental ballistic missile in October as part of a bristling array of new weapons systems.
“Sanctions are working just well enough to cause the North Koreans to go to extraordinary, extensive lengths to evade them,” as U.S.-Korea Institute visiting scholar William Newcomb, a former U.S. government economist who monitored the North Korean economy, put it after Wong’s address. “The other unfortunate conclusion is that sanctions have failed to stall any progress … in the WMD and ballistic missile programs. And we saw good evidence of that in the recent parade.”
Yet, those advances couldn’t wholly hide the country’s economic struggles, which have been exacerbated over the last year by the Kim regime’s decision to fight the spread of the coronavirus pandemic by means of “a self-imposed blockade imposed by North Korea’s own armed forces,” Newcomb added.
“This substantial trade shock is likely leading to an accelerating decline in national income that’s going to be difficult to slow and reverse in the near term,” he said. “You’re going to have cascading shortages throughout the economy, and that, in itself, disrupts supply lines and so forth.”
China’s economic support for North Korea undermines Western attempts to capitalize on that economic weakness, but Wong pledged that the U.S. will look for ways to tighten the sanctions on the regime in order to gain the leverage needed to press Kim to dismantle his nuclear arsenal.
“The United States will also continue to impose sanctions on any individual or entity perpetrating sanctions evasion, including individuals and entities within China’s jurisdiction,” he said. “These actions aimed at implementing sanctions and the ongoing enforcement efforts of our partners around the world are tough actions. But make no mistake. They are vital to our ultimate objective of peace.”
