Friday, October 6, 2017

China Orders North Korean Businesses to Close


learningenglish.voanews.com


Image from article, with caption: A worker sweeps inside a branch of the North Korean-operated restaurant in Beijing. China has said it has ordered North Korean businesses in China to close by early 2018.

Excerpt:
About 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade is with China. The United States believes China’s support is necessary to pressure North Korea to ends its nuclear program.

U.S. officials have praised recent actions by China. Trump recently said China had ordered its banks to stop dealing with North Korea. No public announcement, however, appears to have been made by China.

Wu Fei is a senior fellow at the Charhar Institute, a Chinese public diplomacy and international relations research group. Wu says there may be limits to the pressure sanctions can place on North Korea.

Wu says North Korea has “no industrial products to speak of, and their harvest is pretty much gathered in now. Their demand for basic resources will be pretty low for the next six months or so.”

Wu adds that North Korea’s need for outside resources is limited.

“They don’t rely on the outside world for much, and that includes China. North Korea wants to show the rest of the world how independent it is; this is the impression they want to create,” he says. ...

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