North Korea's border trade getting busier

That North Korea is or will soon be on the verge of collapse is a cherished hope in influential White House circles. But here at the biggest trading point between China and North Korea, few believe that will happen.

For Chinese flooring and seafood salesmen, drivers, brokers, and local officials who deal with the North, the economy across the river is getting better.

Each morning trucks line up on either side of a narrow "friendship bridge" across the Yalu River, between Dandong's high-rise world and the stunted skyline of sister city Sinuiju. The 225 daily trucks cross into Korea from China, making up 70 percent of the North's imports. And the traffic is increasing. North Korea's trade has risen 20 percent a year, to $1.2 billion, and it doubled in the last quarter of 2004.

This traffic visible on a recent trip to the border, as well as conversations in Asian capitals and in Washington, all suggest that the position of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is not weakening, and that the uptick in economic activity represents a new lifeline for the regime.

The cargo trucked between the two worlds is a study in contrast: Korean open-bed trucks bring in scrap iron, crushed rock, sacks of mineral powder. Freight trucks are empty save a few boxes rattling inside. But Chinese trucks to Korea hold electrical equipment, stainless steel goods, gleaming appliances. Ocean-ship containers marked "GenStar, San Francisco," and from Europe, ride on flat beds. One mammoth vehicle sports 82 commercial refrigerators. Destination: Pyongyang.

North Korea is enjoying new investment as well. The Chinese have built a glass factory and revamped two steel factories. Chinese investors hoof it around the North as China imports coal and encourages trade. South Korea's Kaesung industrial park in the North is one of many small new cash sources from Seoul.

With North Korea declaring itself a nuclear state in February, and with the six-party talks on hold now for 10 months and in an unclear status, the stability of the North is a crucial question. US policy has been dominated by "collapse theory" advocates who argue the North is on the brink of chaos. Last December Western media buzzed with reports of Kim Jong Il's pictures being removed, and with talk of grumbling among the North Korean masses.

Yet barring a disaster or unforeseen crises, the assumption of a North Korean collapse appears wishful, and is a scenario taken less and less seriously by US partners in the six-party talks. Indeed, it now appears the theory of collapse held by influential voices in the Bush administration has itself collapsed among US officials and analysts working closest on North Korean issues. Critics say the US doesn't yet have a Plan B.

In reporting this story, a senior Pentagon intelligence official, State Department sources, diplomats living in Pyongyang, and a variety of other experts - suggest that to pin US hopes on a collapse of the North, or on persuading Beijing to induce collapse, is folly.

"I would love to see the North collapse," says a senior US diplomat. "But I don't think hope is a substitute for policy."

Neither China nor South Korea see it in their national interest to allow North Korea to collapse at this point, and both are tacitly committed to keeping the reclusive regime of Kim Jong Il, stable.

"In the US, collapse theory still has a lot of adherents and may be the dominant policy prescription," says Timothy Savage of the International Crisis Group in Seoul. "The problem is, the theory relies on the cooperation of the two countries least inclined to cooperate, China and South Korea."

The regime of Kim Jong Il is one of the most reclusive states in the world, and has often been compared to a huge cult, since the 23 million inhabitants are required to worship Kim, and to serve him through a complex ideology called Juche. Experts point that the central contradiction of the North is that to expose the North society to the outside world would also expose the fallacies of Juche and the structures of control.

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