“Where to stay?” The skinny North Korean customs officer looked at the computer screen in front of him without lifting his head.
“Yanji City, a certain neighborhood, a certain unit, a certain number.” I said.
“Which way?” .
I was so flustered that I had to repeat the address, show him my most sincere naive smile and give him a look that I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.
After so many years of interviewing, playing dumb is a basic skill. He flashed his passport, you’re not from Beijing? I was a bit dizzy, how can I do this, I had to explain that I do business in Jilin, settled in Yanji. Luckily, the Korean-speaking sister next to me helped me out and asked me a few questions, so I could tell him my address in Beijing.
They could see that I was a bit flustered, and the North Korean governor said it didn’t matter, just tell me your address. At this time, I only had one address in my head, the one on my ID card, so I blurted out, XX Road, XX District, Beijing. I regretted it after I said it. If this address is targeted by Taepodong, who can I talk to? I didn’t want to realize that the officer’s Chinese was really limited, and road names were a bit too profound for him. He asked me to repeat it a few times, and when he got tired of it, he said, “Forget it, forget it,” and stamped it for me. Long live the great sir, Simida.
There are six hurdles to go through at North Korean Customs, such as health stamps, cargo stamps, etc., and the most dangerous one is registering my address, while the computer and cell phone photo checking at the back can be hidden by technical means. Of course, the officer if I as a key object of investigation, it will be very troublesome. My new passport, the only visa record is South Korea, there is a suspicion of collaborating with the enemy. This kind of thing is quite delicate, not too big, not too small. Well, anyway, I got through the first hurdle of entering North Korea.
Chinese passports have become more and more useful in recent years, and the biggest advantage is the ability to go to North Korea. Thanks to the institutional advantages, the friendship between China and the DPRK has been put into practice, making other countries jealous. There are statistics to prove how good the relationship between the two countries is. Although there is no way to count how many Chinese people go to North Korea every year, the number of trips from North Korea to China can be extrapolated backwards. According to publicly available data, from 2005 to 2009, the number of North Korean visits to China did not change much. However, after 2009, the number of visits to China increased year by year, and in 2013, the number of visits to China from the DPRK was already twice as high as in 2009. Similarly, North Korea’s openness to trade with China has increased accordingly. The trade cooperation between China and North Korea was of course finalized by the lords of Beijing and Pyongyang, and it has changed the fate of countless people.
Overview of the number of people from the DPRK traveling to China, 2006-2015 (note: some data for 2007 are missing)
On the long-distance bus to the port, I met a team of couples from Heilongjiang, specializing in the clothing trade. Two people listened to a friend’s flimsy, thought with a passport can be directly across the border to North Korea to visit, carrying luggage will catch the car. They are a little reckless, but also have the boldness to venture. The couple wanted to go to the big market in Rojin City. It is probably the most open market in North Korea now. It is not surprising that the couple was attracted to Rojin.
Eighty years ago, Rozin began to attract the attention of the outside world. At that time, the landscape of Northeast Asia was still under the control of the Japanese, and Rajin was the new star in the map of Japanese-occupied Northeast Asia. Originally a small fishing village in the northeastern corner of the Korean Peninsula, Rajin became the first modern city on the Korean Peninsula when the Japanese established a natural harbor, and by the mid-1930s it was connected by rail to Changchun, the capital of Manchukuo. The harbor was connected by ships to mainland Japan and the southern docks of the Korean Peninsula. In those days, it was much closer to travel from Changchun to Tokyo by way of Rajin than by way of Dalian.
There are two large and two small islands off the port of Rozin. The islands block the wind and waves of the outer sea and form a sheltered harbor with the coast. The coast is perpendicular to the sea, and the depth allows large ships of the time to dock. This, together with its location at the junction of the Korean Peninsula and the Eurasian continent, made it the most favorable location for connecting the mainland of Japan with the continental portion of Northeast Asia. At the time, Japanese expectations for the development of Rojin were similar to those of Dalian. Japanese journalist Keitaro Kasai wrote specifically about the fact that Luotsu would become the second Ginza where Hyungyo shines. In the minds of Chinese scholars at the time, Luotsu and Dalian would become the two chains that would lock Japan into Northeast Asia.
Patterns change and old dreams, knowledge and careers go up in smoke. There are places that were once glorious, and there are still some monuments and stories left for future generations to admire. Rajin, on the other hand, clearly belongs to a zone that has not yet grown into its own and has already faded away. Although it was the first special zone to be opened by North Korea, Rajin’s value in today’s Northeast Asian landscape has yet to be realized, and there is still only limited room for it to flourish. Today’s Chinese border dwellers have a completely different imagination and understanding of Rojin’s geographic endowment. A border trader once told me that a few years ago a Chinese fortune-teller reportedly went to Luotjin to look at the feng shui, and said that why do most of the people who go to the Emperor’s casino to gamble lose their money? It was because the two islands outside the harbor blocked the outflow of seawater, which was a sign of keeping wealth. Even if you win money at the casino, you can’t take it with you. I wonder what Kasai Keitaro would have thought if he had heard that.
Life is a stranger, the coach to the port in addition to gamblers are businessmen, naturally become the couple’s intelligence station. They asked me where I was, I think Beijing is a bit eye-catching, casually said Hebei. I didn’t expect the couple to look happy. The man said in a Harbin accent, where in Hebei you? “Baoding”. “Oops, me too. My hometown Ding County, our hometown ah, which county you?” Well, I can not pick up this conversation, can only change the subject to talk about going to North Korea to do business things.
Now that we’ve become old-timers, we have to be there for them. Honestly, I think it’s better for them not to go through than to go over. Getting the formalities to go to North Korea is only the first hurdle for businessmen, and there are many more risks to come. Listening to my friend’s flimflam, I don’t check the internet and come directly to the country, which is basically considered to be a gift of money. In the past few years, I’ve been running along the border between China and North Korea, and I’ve heard all sorts of strange stories about fraud and deception. Without a complete system and social foundation, the best and more legal provisions are just for show. Fish in troubled waters can make a fortune there, that is very few. Most of them become the food in the belly of the fish.
North Korea’s opening up of special zones and the system’s loosening up for the community triggered business opportunities. This is very similar to the opening of Shenzhen. I have carefully thought about, in fact, China and North Korea heard the story and the story of Shenzhen’s early years are similar, the same belongs to a category of social change inevitable interlude, the tune, notes, the beginning and end is almost the same. But the roles have changed. In North Korea Chinese businessmen playing fishermen, in Shenzhen in those years, Chinese people are mixed water fish.
The crossings between China and North Korea are separated by the Tumen River. This river and the Yalu River to the south form the basic outline of the border between China and North Korea. The old bridge over the river was built by the Japanese in the 1930s and is only a single-lane road. 2009, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited the DPRK, it was decided to widen the bridge and build a road. To put it delicately, the agreement reached between China and North Korea at the time was to reinforce the bridge and expand it into a two-lane road, which would have cost little more than building a new bridge.
The day after the ceremony to reinforce the bridge, I ran over to cover it. The center line of the bridge is the demarcation line between China and the DPRK, but Chinese workers started construction at the North Korean end, so technically I had already stepped on North Korean territory. The North Korean soldiers at the border were just a few meters away, watching me without a word. I don’t think that was the only pair of eyes staring at me. It was March, and the first warm days of the northeast were still cold, when a North Korean water buffalo walked on the ice of the Tumen River, and if the ice hadn’t melted close to the Chinese shore, it might have slipped through and caused a minor diplomatic dispute.
I also saw earlier on the bridge that there was a large white tree growing in the center of the river with only the crown exposed to the water and the entire root frozen under the ice. I purposely looked for it when I crossed the bridge, but I didn’t see it. The Harbin couple was stopped at the Chinese customs and had to turn around to figure out what to do. I, on the other hand, followed the group inside and made it through customs.
The final hurdle at customs was to check the cell phone. I purposely brought my new Hammer phone, which has its own system that hides an entire screen of software, paired with some private software to hide the original photos on the phone. The actual check was much more lenient than I would have liked. The North Korean official did nothing more than tap on the little icons for photo videos and albums to see if he had captured anything prohibited. He probably checks hundreds, if not thousands, of cell phones every day, so naturally he doesn’t take it that seriously. Of course, the situation may have changed a bit before because of the release of the American blockbuster The Assassination of Kim Jong-un. At the time, there were reports in the South Korean media that this movie was being checked heavily within North Korea.
Technically speaking, this manual firewall is relatively backward. They should introduce Chinese technology and set up search functions for keywords and key image recognition. All cell phones should be connected to computers and automatically searched, which is obviously much more efficient than going through them one by one by hand and identifying them with the naked eye. I’m sure if North Korean officials are willing to spend the money, there are Chinese businessmen willing to do this for them.
The whole clearance process took just half an hour, and I breathed a sigh of relief, resisting the urge to take out my cell phone and take a sneak peek. Although I’ve been covering North Korea for a few years now, this was my first time in the country. But honestly, I’m not looking forward to seeing anything beyond my imagination. The stories that are happening here, haven’t they all happened in China?
2.
△ Highway near Rason, a city in the northern part of the DPRK
From the crossing to the city it was an hour’s walk up the mountain. The mountains are covered with coniferous forests, which somewhat surprised me. Previously repeatedly in the literature, the North Korean mountain trees to cut down for food, now seems obviously inaccurate. These mountains are not big, there is no high steep peaks, not much bigger than the hills a few numbers. The mountains are rolling like waves, similar to the mountains along the highway from Yanji to Hunchun, and similar to the mountains along the northeast coast of Japan. I had walked among the mountains in Tohoku, Japan, during the earthquake there in the early spring of a year ago. At that time, the leaves of the coniferous forests on the mountains were brown, and they were unforgettable because they were a little reddish where the sunlight hit them. Every time I traveled from Yanji to Hunchun, I would think of the mountain scenery in Japan. This time, on the way to Luotsu, I saw a similar landscape. Only the season was not right and the leaves had not yet turned brown. If I had come a few months later, I might have seen the same scenery as Japan. I don’t know who should be blamed for the same scenery, but the local people’s way of living is so different.
△Mountain scenery in the northern part of Korea
The road used to be a potholed mountain road, a three-hour drive. Thanks to Wen Jiabao’s visit to North Korea in 2009, the two sides agreed to build the road, with China contributing money and men. I once had a friend, Lao Cao, who built the road here back then. At that time, I heard him tell a lot of anecdotes about North Koreans. I remember him saying that there was a group of young North Koreans around him who liked to go to the mountains to eat barbecue and play the guitar and sing. One girl even asked Cao to bring strings from China. Sounds a bit like a Jiang Wen movie. Cao lived in a sanatorium by the roadside for half a year, and met thieves who stole from warehouses in the middle of the night, North Korean veterans who sang songs of the volunteer army, and peeped into the democratic election of the local village. Of course, this kind of election is just a formality. When Cao got acquainted with the local community and snuck into his North Korean friend’s house for a drink, he was theoretically repatriated if he was caught by cadres from the Ministry of Defense.
△ Young soldiers in North Korea
Sitting in the car, a few businessmen with Jiangnan accents discussed new projects, repeatedly mentioning that they can’t bring goods into North Korea without seeing money. I looked out the window and wondered where the sanatorium where Lao Cao lived was. Outside the window was a field of green wheat and corn. In previous interviews, I had heard that the wheat on the other side of the river was sown two weeks later than on the Chinese side, and that the crops did not grow well due to the lack of chemical fertilizers. But the crops along the driveway looked like they were in good shape. In the field, there are wooden poles, all cubic, like giant chopsticks, which are probably very old, probably left by the Japanese.
As the car was approaching Luotsu, the roadside passed by an oil refinery, with smoke still coming from the chimneys of two workshops. In front of the refinery, there were also workers pushing bicycles in and out. I heard that the factory had been contracted by a Chinese businessman. Looking closely at the hillside opposite the factory, you could see bunkers, and a long gun barrel protruded from the bunker in the direction of the factory. I don’t understand how useful this gun could have been if the war had been fought here.
The driver yelled a few times and asked if anyone was going to Pioneer. No one answered, so he decided to bypass Pioneer and drive directly to the terminal city of Rozin, which would save 10 minutes. Pioneer is also a small seaport. In the early 1990s, Rojin was the first to open up as a special zone, and after a few years Pioneer joined in, merging with Rojin to form a special city. In comparison, Pioneer is smaller than Rojin, with one less floor of buildings, and not as lively as Rojin. Perhaps for the sake of balance, the square in the center of Pioneer held an international trade fair every year, which was attended by Pyongyang and foreign sellers. Unfortunately, I did not catch, and later heard that Hunchun City, the supermarket went to a large part.
Later I still went to Pioneer to have a look around. There were a lot fewer cars on the streets than in Rozin, and the Chinese were basically nowhere to be seen. I’d heard that a couple of factories here had been chartered by the Chinese, but unfortunately I couldn’t find them. I skulked along the road, and deep in the city there was a three-story building that looked like a meeting place, with sporting events on the walls, looking particularly like a set from a Chinese movie from the 80s. The fishy smell of the sea, on the other hand, came from its side. I walked over to see that it was a trail leading to a seaside park. There was a monument standing in the park, and I wondered if it was an inscription from a leader. As I walked to the entrance of the park, two military men in dark brown sitting on the side of the road looked to be in their mid to late 50’s in age and bowed their backs, kind of like the old military leader who was partnered with Lin Chong in Water Margin. They gestured to me, told me not to go over, their faces were pleasant, and they had no intention of sending me to the public security organs.
△Rojin-Pioneer Municipality Street View
This way was not possible, so I headed back towards the square in the center of the city. On the way, I met a beautiful young woman in black and white lolita style with her child, who looked like a local upper class. She spoke Chinese, so I chatted with her on the pretext of asking for directions. I felt nervous inside, but she was very polite and friendly to foreigners. For a moment, it all made me feel a little guilty. Because honestly, the group of Chinese businessmen I saw locally was not that decent. Most of the garbage on the road is made by Chinese people.
There is a big shadow wall in the square, which is supposed to be a slogan like building socialism in all aspects. Under the shadow wall sat young girls in military uniforms carrying wooden fake guns, kind of like the toys they used to play with when they were little.
The fair is over, and there are still several brand new medium-sized plows in the square, all shipped from China. When some people came to try the machines, the Chinese businessman told them to be careful not to plow the ground. He has donated a lot of charity funds to the North Korean government for his business, but the machines have not been sold yet. However, he is not in a hurry, if the North Korean farms can introduce this kind of machine, there will be a lot of business. Next to the exchange of peers, said that this kind of machine in China is a large-scale farms, suitable for North Korea’s communes. If North Korea’s agricultural reform is to allocate arable land to individual farmers like in China, smaller equipment will have to be introduced. “Think how many units that would take.” The businessman said as he handed me a cigarette. Not to mention, when I sat down at the food stall at the edge of the square, some North Koreans really did ask me quietly what the price of this kind of machine would be in China. Looking at their attire, they were definitely local cadres. They are not from the Rason area, but they refused to say where they are from.
△ Agricultural machinery in Korea
The conference hall on the square is kind of like a smaller version of the Great Hall of the People, with dozens of steps, and is clearly a replica of the Soviet-style building. If I had come a few days earlier, I would have been able to see the bustling exhibition, but unfortunately I didn’t make it and had to call it quits. The hall of the synagogue was empty, with a few empty stalls left, some with Pyongyang XX Club written on them in Chinese characters. It seems that people from the capital also came over to do business.
The imported glass counter had some local souvenirs, nothing new, and looked crudely made. It was a wooden model of a turtle ship, not a small piece. I tried to ask for the price, but the salesman didn’t care.
Then I wandered around Pioneer again and found it uninteresting, so I took a taxi back to Rozin. The driver was quite interesting, he had a tattoo on his arm, but unfortunately it was too blurry. But for sure it wasn’t a Labor Party emblem or a Chairman’s quote or anything like that.
The main street of traditional Rojin, running roughly east-west, has the train station at its western end, with statues of former ex-leader Kim Il Sung and former leader Kim Jong Il on the station. Outside the train station is the city hall. There is the only traffic light in the city that is activated. This is an area where the Chinese don’t usually go through, and I just squinted. The area where the Chinese move is at the far eastern end, farthest from the city hall, but the highway leading to the crossing meets the city at exactly the eastern end.
Along this highway into the city are several lodging hotels and a Chinese trading town. The road is at its busiest after 2 p.m. every day, with vehicles with Chinese photographs coming and going. These vehicles are loaded with goods that have just been purchased in the morning and are rushing through customs at 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. to be shipped to the country.
The Trade City is a higher-end distribution market, divided into stores of one or two hundred square feet. Each store is staffed by a Chinese owner plus a North Korean shopper. General daily necessities and foodstuffs can be bought, such as shoes and pants that cost a few dozen dollars. Of course, the styles are not as colorful and diverse as those in China, and I’m afraid the quality is not as good as in China. The most expensive item I’ve ever seen is a new electric car, which costs more than 2,000 yuan. Not to mention the fact that this is a huge amount of money in North Korea, it is also surprising to see whether the city can guarantee a stable and relatively adequate power supply. When I was there, Rojin basically had power for a while in the morning, no power in the afternoon, and then a few hours in the evening, and then lights out at 10:00 pm. Hey, this kind of life hasn’t been lived since I graduated from college.
However, I was most surprised by the bag sellers, whose bags usually cost 1 or 200 hundred RMB, and whose monthly salary is only 10 or so RMB. Walking down the street and looking at the women’s attire, the difference in class is even more obvious than that of the men. First of all, shoes. Those wearing flat shoes are the poorest. Black high-heeled leather shoes are upper middle class. Clothes are probably all dark colors of black, white, gray, and yellow, but some have lace that you can’t tell unless you look closely. The most comparable statuses, one is a parasol in the sun, very bourgeois mood. One is a bag. I won’t go into the style of these bags, but some have leopard prints anyway.
I should say that business is still good here. I was strolling around inside, watching the local women dressed up in their finery come in and out, and I was told that they got their goods from here and sold them at the Rojin market two blocks next door. There are still a few pieces of land under construction next to the Trade Center, and I don’t know what new projects will be developed in the next year or two. By the way, I heard that the rent of the stores in the Trade City has risen rapidly in the past two years. The first floor is a store, the second floor to live. I don’t understand, they also have the concept of housing prices here, the price of housing per square meter upstairs is also 4,000 yuan, catching up with Yanji.
It’s only when you head into town from Commerce City that you enter the local residents’ neighborhoods. On both sides were seven-story buildings, each room four-square. Unlike in China, these buildings are built on dirt floors. Every balcony on the upper floors was filled with flowers, some of which were fake if you looked closely. There were no clothes hanging on the balconies, but they looked very neat and tidy. I just don’t know where they dry their clothes, do they have a dryer in every house?
The streets are also much cleaner and tidier than those in China, with flower bushes along the side of the road but not a single trash can. Some people hide behind buildings to play cards and do not avoid seeing Chinese people. There are no outdoor billboards or temporary structures like newsstands. There are not many stores, but you can still find a few, basically without a sign. There are clothes sellers and restaurants, but there are no billboards, not to mention no sales, discounts or other promotional information. All in all, it gave the impression of a military camp.
In addition to the row of buildings along the street, behind the buildings are all sub-zoned bungalows. The bungalows are not widely spaced, wide enough to walk a car, narrow enough to pass only a bicycle, much like Beijing’s hutongs. Although it looked much livelier inside than on the street, the kindly Chinese businessman warned me that it was best not to go in there. The most gossipy story I’ve ever heard was about a Chinese man having sex with a local woman in a hutong and being caught by the Ministry of Defense.
The bus terminates at the junction of the main road and the crossing road, where a square the size of a small half soccer field is the center of civic life. There are always 7 or 8 cabs parked in the square, and the drivers are all male. I heard that they had to pay a share of the money to get the job.
On the opposite side of the square is the Tourist Service Center, which sells North Korean handicrafts, souvenirs, and Chinese books. I bought a book about the leader Kim Jong-un and a couple of legal documents about Rason. These documents were interesting, and I could see that some of the legal provisions in them had white strips with new amendments printed on them. Only, I don’t know whether the law was changed or the translation was wrong.
Next to the tourist service center is a photo studio. In addition to photography, there are some foreign trade products, including Korean and Japanese cosmetics. What impressed me deeply was that there was a watercolor mural hanging in the photo studio, on which was a very modern building complex, with a style somewhat similar to Beijing’s Jianwai SOHO, and I don’t know if it was Pan Shiyi’s investment project or not. I later learned from a book I bought that the complex is on Cangtian Street in Pyongyang, and is a project of leader Kim Jong-un’s political achievements. The complex has a big supermarket, a concert hall, and a kindergarten. The Kurata Street complex is almost half a century more advanced than the one in Rojin. In North Korea, it’s not the average person who gets to go to Pyongyang. The residents of Rojin can’t run to Tiananmen Square to take a group photo like their Chinese compatriots did back then, so they take a picture in front of this mural, which is also a kind of human PS, right? This kind of mural, I remember when I was a child in the Chinese photo studio also have.
It is just after lunch every day that the square comes alive. Women ride bicycles, push tricycles, and pull their goods towards the square to converge towards the Lo Tsin Market across the square, their pace no slower than that of the white-collar workers in Hong Kong’s Central area. This market is probably where the Heilongjiang couple I met on the bus wanted to go. That said, it’s probably the most open place in all of North Korea.
From the outside, the market has an arched gate at the street level, like the street gate pagoda in the old Shanghai lane. Inside is a small stream where people clean squid and other fresh produce. The water looks dirty, with green beer bottles and other trash lying in the mud. Over the stream was a small bridge with stalls on both sides, and the official stalls were at the other end of the bridge.
How can I put it, the market itself looks quite ordinary. There is a hall in the center of the market, surrounded by several rows of semi-open-air stalls covered with iron sheets. If you were to take a picture of it, you might think it was one of those small commodity markets in the urban and rural areas of China, where everything but the souvenirs are basically Chinese. The problem is that Rojin itself looks like a big military camp, clean but disciplined. From the barracks suddenly into a piece of vibrant crowded territory, and the locals actively wink at you begging you to buy her cigarettes, as well as beggars and thieves, I am afraid that this sense of division only to the scene will feel.
Entering the market through that archway in the street is like entering another world. Only in this world would a North Korean be willing to strike up a conversation with a Chinese person and ask you to buy her or his (the vast majority of sellers are women) cigarettes, souvenirs and even local chickens. But in this world, class attributes are also evident. The market’s prettiest, hippest-dressed women are in the center hall. They peddle oil paintings, cosmetics and so on, some wearing gold chains. Generally speaking, their Chinese language skills are also much better than those of the open-air stalls outside. Honestly, their enthusiasm for business is really no less than the Wenzhou merchants I’ve seen.
I wandered around the market for half a day and ended up buying a North Korean military hat. The hat with the five-pointed star was plastic. When I returned home, I showed it to a friend who studied clothing, and he said that the knitting needles on the hat were quite elaborate. But the most delicate is the fabric. The lining fabric on the inside of the cap had the Adidas logo printed on it.
I’m starting to understand a little bit why the couple from Heilongjiang traveled thousands of miles to visit this market.
The first people to appear on the streets in the evening are office workers. At this time it is not yet dark, you can see officials with black purses and gray shirts leading their wives and children to their homes. By the time it gets dark, the small restaurants and sheds by the square begin to bustle. By this time the market was closed, and one by one, the vendors were pushing their leftover goods on carts and hurrying towards their homes. When they passed me, they no longer greeted me as warmly as they did in the market, but completely ignored my existence as a foreigner. The market is open six days a week except for holidays, and is closed on Sundays. This means that every market opening day, there is a tidal movement of carts on the streets. The driving force behind this movement is the ramshackle market. This atmosphere was probably felt by the Chinese more than 30 years ago.
There was a hotel next to the square, and on top of the hotel’s front door was a large screen. When the city’s few streetlights weren’t lit up, the screen was already on. First there were current events featuring the leader’s inspection trip, then a movie. Being outdoors, the stereo was not too loud. I doubt how anyone staying in this hotel could stand it.
From time to time, local citizens came out of the nooks and crannies, some sat on the back of their bicycles, some brought their own chairs or cushions, or simply sat on the dirt floor to watch the movie on the screen. It was an old movie about a soldier in the People’s Army. The leading man was decent-looking and party-oriented, much like the protagonist in a model theater.
Then the light cast by the screen showed me a pair of loving young people leaning together, the woman wrapping her arms around the man’s waist. I don’t know why, but I was both happy and a little sad about their little lovey-dovey romance. I even wondered how they would feel when they were hiding from the security department and peeking at the drama “You Who Came From The Stars” in their home in the south.
Returning from Rozin, I hitched a ride on a merchant’s return van. In the mountains, from time to time, I could see mountain people poking their heads out of the woods, holding up a big bag of hazelnuts for sale. And the funniest part was encountering the traffic police. There were three curves on the entire mountain road where the speed limit was 30 or less, and on each one we exceeded the speed limit and were met by picketing traffic cops. The first two were very polite and let us go after we had a thorough review. The last one was already an hour’s drive from Rason, and it was a long, flat stretch of 5 or 600 meters downhill. Unexpectedly, we still encountered a dutiful traffic police. This traffic cop actually knew the people in my car.
The back story is really much the same as in China, the punishment is nothing more than asking for money. And I find that almost every car on this stretch of road speeds. If every one of him can receive money, earn tens of thousands of yuan a day without any problem, nothing but regardless of the bus and casino cars is. The good thing is that my friend in the car is experienced, deadbeat, coaxing, so that he felt really can not squeeze the oil water, only to give the release of the line. At first, I went up to hand cigarettes, the police comrade clearly refused. Waiting until the end of the conversation, he suddenly rushed to me to say, smoke, so I was a bit caught off guard.
After the release, the car businessman told me that the traffic police holding the speedometer is a few Chinese trick to North Korea, pitched a lot of their own compatriots. Later, the few Chinese also did not have a good result, on the blacklist of North Korea.
Negotiations with the traffic police took quite a while, and by the time we got to customs, it was almost closing time. This was a good thing, because the customs people also wanted to get off work early, and let us through so painfully that they even forgot to check our cell phones. This made me a little optimistic about the future of Rozin.
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