At the bridge’s mouth, they could linger for photographs or choose from the plentiful North Korean trinkets — Kim pins were selling well — and gaze into the distance at the drab buildings and scrubby hills on the other bank.
If China had fears about an imminent collapse of the North Korean regime, it was doing a good job of hiding them.
“What’s dangerous about this? Our relationship with the North Koreans has always been friendly,” said Hu Xin, a man visiting from Shanghai with a bulky zoom lens on his camera.
That has been the message from the Chinese leadership since Kim’s death was announced. The government has also pledged its support for Kim’s successor, Kim Jong Eun, and made clear that it wants stability in North Korea above all else.
Beijing has long worried that a disintegration of the North Korean regime could unleash a surge of refugees on its doorstep. The fact that the Chinese government appears to be relatively relaxed now stems from its judgment that the father-to-son power transition need not be immediately destabilizing — and from its confidence that it has already gone a long way to locking down the 880-mile-long border.
Frozen solid and just 50 yards wide, the upper reaches of the Tumen River in previous Decembers once made a perfect crossing point for refugees from the desolation and starvation of North Korea. Analysts say the numbers probably peaked in the late 1990s. But double layers of barbed-wire fences on the Chinese side and patrol towers dotting the North Korean side — many of which locals say were recently built or reinforced — have made the illegal crossings harder than ever.
“I used to pick them up fairly regularly on the streets. You could spot them by their clothes,” said Wang Yanqing, a taxi driver. “They wouldn’t speak any Chinese but would give me papers with place names, and then someone would greet them and pay the fare. But there basically haven’t been any over the last two or three years.”
In Yanji, a nearby city, representatives of four separate churches said that some of their members helped North Korean refugees in the past, but that it had become too dangerous, with the government regularly checking up on them.
Without a doubt, Kim’s death has prompted a heightened military alert at some points along the border. On the highway just south of the city of Tumen, near a particularly narrow stretch of the river, two armored vehicles and 15 soldiers had set up a checkpoint — though their sole activity for the moment was blocking foreign journalists from proceeding.
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