A passenger train from China arrived in the North Korean capital on Thursday, state media said. after a six-year hiatus after the service was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic.
China is North Korea’s largest trading partner and a vital source of diplomatic, economic and political support for the isolated nuclear state.
Train travel between the East Asian neighbors was halted in 2020 under strict border closures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said a train that left Dandong, a northeastern city bordering North Korea, arrived in Pyongyang on Thursday evening.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported earlier that a train was seen crossing the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge over the Yalu River.
China Railways said in a separate statement that regular train services will also resume between Beijing and Pyongyang on Thursday evening.
AFP reporters on the K27 train departing from Beijing to Pyongyang on Thursday saw carriages reserved only for passengers traveling to North Korea.
Several people at the station gathered around the departures board to photograph the “Beijing to Pyongyang” list.
The overnight train is set to make several stops, including in the port city of Tianjin, before heading northeast to Dandong on the border.
A rail enthusiast at the station told AFP he was only taking the train one stop and would get off at Tianjin.
“It’s good that this line is reopening because there are very few international rail connections in China,” he said, before undergoing an identity check by plainclothes police officers.
Change trains
Cars from Beijing carrying passengers bound for Pyongyang are then attached to another train in Dandong, taking them across the border to the nearby North Korean city of Sinuiju, said Rowan Beard of Young Pioneer Tours, a company specializing in North Korean travel.
Those wagons, as well as domestic North Korean wagons, will then join a new train bound for Pyongyang, he added.
Trains will run in both directions between Beijing and Pyongyang every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, China Railway said.
The Dandong-Pyongyang service will run daily, he said.
Travel agents for an official ticket booth in Beijing told AFP on Tuesday that anyone with a valid visa can now buy train tickets to the north.
This includes Chinese working and studying in North Korea, as well as North Koreans working, studying and visiting family abroad.
Entry and exit procedures will be completed at the Dandong border crossing and at Sinuiju in North Korea, China Railway said.
Tickets are currently available for offline purchase in some Chinese cities, he added.
‘Re-normalization’
The resumption of the train link symbolized a return to a stronger bilateral relationship, said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
It signaled greater access to the “largest trading nation on Earth” for North Korea, Lim told AFP, while also being important for China’s “periphery diplomacy”.
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said Thursday that “maintaining regular passenger train services is of great importance to facilitate personnel exchanges” between the two countries.
Beijing has been an essential lifeline for North Korea’s ailing economy.
China has fully reopened its borders since the pandemic, but North Korea has been slower. Direct flights and train services with Russia resumed last year.
While the resumption suggests a “re-normalization” of contact between China and North Korea, it does not necessarily mean increased support from Beijing, said Associate Professor Chong Ja Ian of the National University of Singapore.
“Much of the previous limit on contact appears to be due to Pyongyang’s concerns about wider contact, which has been reduced,” Chong told AFP.
