Kim Jong-un has travelled to China over a newly opened bridge marking the North Korean leader’s first known trip abroad in more than a year, South Korean officials have said. A government source told the Yonhap news agency on Saturday that Kim had arrived in the Chinese border city of Dandong, in Liaoning province, after taking a train from Pyongyang to Sinuiju and crossing the New Yalu River Bridge. Yonhap also reported that the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, had travelled to the city. Kim’s trip was not announced in advance…
Tag: North Korea
North Korea has opened up bridges to Russia and China – in which direction will it go?
For more than a decade, local Chinese residents pilloried it as nothing more than an empty bridge that led to a North Korean vegetable patch on the other side. Fast forward 12 years and dozens of trucks are now traversing the bridge linking China to North Korea, boosting trade for the reclusive regime. But it has also triggered concern that it could intensify a struggle for influence over the North between Beijing and the region’s other major power, Russia. map The New Yalu River Bridge connects the north-eastern Chinese city…
France gave the Statue of Liberty. China sends pandas. What do diplomatic gifts mean – and how do you choose one?
It was one of the most potent political gifts of modern times: the Statue of Liberty, a colossal neoclassical sculpture made in France and offered to the American people in the late 19th century.The size and symbolism of Liberty Enlightening the World (the statue’s original name) was intended as a mark of friendship to commemorate the centenary of the 1776 US declaration of independence. Delivered a decade late, it was also a reminder – perhaps a pointed one – of France’s critical role in helping the US break free from…
South Korean President Calls for Easing Sanctions on the North
Breaking with decades of policy on North Korea, the president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, is now urging the United States to ease sanctions on Pyongyang in exchange for an agreement that it freeze its weapons programs. “I believe there is significant value in a trade-off between sanctions — which are not particularly effective anyway — and a stop to the development of additional nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile technology,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday. However unpalatable such a bargain…
Trump Courts North Korea’s Leader, but Might Need China to Reignite the Flame
The overtures from President Trump to one of his favorite dictators came hot and heavy over the summer. In June, Mr. Trump posted a photo of himself strolling through the tropical grounds of a luxury hotel with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, during their historic summit in Singapore eight years ago. Weeks later, he wrote online that the two had a “very good relationship.” In that post, Mr. Trump announced that the American military would dial back exercises with South Korea, shocking the close U.S. ally and handing…
Has World War III Already Started?
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I wrote a column under the headline “This Is How World War III Begins.” More than four years on, I wonder how much I got right. My argument was based on the origins of World War II, which did not simply start with Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Instead, the war was an accumulation of regional wars and crises, beginning with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which gradually gathered into a single global conflict. That gathering, abetted…
U.S. Presses China to Free American Seismologist Accused of Spying
An American seismologist who did contract research for the U.S. government related to nuclear tests in North Korea has been detained in China for nearly two years and accused of spying, his family and supporters said. Youlin Chen, who was born in China, was detained by Chinese state security officers at a Beijing airport in November 2024, when he was about to return to home in Boston. Dr. Chen’s family and supporters said they were making his case public for the first time this week in the hope that the…
Beth McKillop obituary
Long before Korean film, television and music achieved global prominence, the curator and scholar Beth McKillop, who has died of metastatic breast cancer aged 72, was arguing that Korean artistic traditions deserved attention in their own right, rather than as a footnote to the histories of China or Japan. Through her work at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at the British Library, McKillop helped transform how Korean art was understood, introducing visitors, students and researchers to the country’s ceramics, books and design, and helping establish a field that is…
Francis Markus obituary
My friend the former BBC Shanghai correspondent Francis Markus, who has died aged 65 of cancer, was a talented journalist whose compassion for those he reported on led him to spend the last two decades of his life working for humanitarian organisations throughout Asia. After being posted to Shanghai in 2002, Francis demonstrated not just an unerring news sense, covering protests in Hong Kong and social change in China, but a deep interest in human stories, from the suicide-watchers patrolling one of China’s highest bridges over the Yangtze River, to…
Behind the Pageantry in Pyongyang With Xi and Kim
NYT