Sino-NK

Cadres from the Badaogou Border Security Station partake in disaster response drills amid the threat of flash floods, summer 2025. | Image: Badaogou Border Security Station, reprinted in Pengpai Xinwen (The Paper).

Changbai Korean Autonomous County in the PRC’s northeastern Jilin province stands at the forefront of any future crisis with the DPRK, lying a stone’s throw across the shallow waters of the Yalu River from the North Korean city of Hyesan.

Located near the source of the Yalu at Changbai Mountain less than 50 kms away, the river at Changbai narrows to just 30 meters in some sections. Chinese onlookers are so close as to be able to look directly down streets in Hyesan, and can watch and even hear activity on the North Korean side of the river, and vice versa.

This proximity situates the geographically peripheral county centrally within imaginative renderings of potential Armageddon, be it prompted by nuclear catastrophe – Changbai is just 75 kilometres from North Korean nuclear testing facilities at Punggye-ri, and former PLA generals have not been shy of lamenting the threat this poses – or otherwise provoked regime collapse. However, most Changbai-Hyesan interactions are less existential.

Changbai-Hysean Ties

Trade, both licit and illicit, has long been active along the border, though it is the latter – navigating abundant grey areas – that predominates, controlled by the North Korean state. The smuggling of narcotics, amongst less nefarious commodities including North Korean cigarettes, frequently provokes crackdowns by Chinese border authorities.

Readers of Sino-NK will already be aware that Changbai serves as a gateway into China for North Korean refugees fleeing the Kim regime, as well as those who find themselves the victims of human trafficking. Occasionally marauding and often hungry KPA border guards effect a different form of cross-border contact with China, muddying Kim Il-Sung’s revolutionary footprints in the process. Inversely, Hyesan has previously offered an entry point into government-controlled North Korean markets for aspiring Chinese capitalists.

Seeking to look beyond the myopia of a catastrophe-crime binary, Sino-NK has previously analysed PRC open-source media about Changbai, examining the county’s experimentations in issues of social insurance and residency rights for its undocumented North Korean-nationality residents.

Students of Chinese-North Korean relations and the border region can benefit from taking opportunities to learn more about Changbai. Although this ‘interior border’ city is smaller than the more famous dyad of Dandong and Sinuiju at the mouth of the Yalu –whose railway bridge Kim Jong Un recently traversed as his armoured train chugged from Pyongyang to Beijing – it is more kinetic in its cross-border interactions. A brief look at recently published PRC open-source media outputs concerned with natural disaster preparedness in Changbai, as well as public security education in the county, provides such an opportunity.

Border Security

On 21 July 2025, the Badaogou Border Security Station, under the Changbai Public Security Bureau, expressed concern that “flash floods” could strike and cause serious damage to Highway G331, the most important road artery running along the border near Changbai recognised by the Jilin Provincial Committee as central to bolstering borderland tourism and security. In response, the Badaogou Border Security Station organised a contingent of police to carry out preparation work, and conduct disaster readiness drills simulating scenarios involving torrential rain, rising water levels, and trapped villagers. The report,published on the Changbai County PSB’s WeChat account, reinforces the utility to researchers of the departments productive microblogging habits.

Notably absent from the PSB’s reportage, however, was any mention of coordination with their colleagues on the North Korean side of the hypothetically swelling river.

A student delegation from Jilin Medical College alongside police from the Malugou Border Security Office in Changbai County, July 2025. The top banner reads: “Build a wall of security at the foot of Changbai Mountain –protect the homeland amid modernisation”. The lower banner reads: “Secure future”. | Image: Zui Tiyu, reprinted by Sohu.com.

While their activities were less oriented toward a specific potential crisis, Changbai’s Malugou Border Security Office likewise had several busy days of note, accommodating students from Jilin City.

The Beijing Fazhibao (Northern Daily) has a piece from 25 July, also published a day prior to Sohu.com under the idiosyncratically named pen name of Zui Tiyu (literally, “drunk on sports”), showing university-aged students being inculcated with border security precepts via field trips to sites along China’s Northeastern frontier with North Korea comprising one facet of their public security education.

The report follows a group of students from Jilin Medical College, who travelled to the region under the auspice of a somewhat unwieldly to translate group called the  National Security Modernization Construction Socialist Implementation Team [智安未来”国家安全现代化建设社会实践团队]. Police from the Malugou Border Security Office informed the students of border regulations and work styles, and as the story notes, “explained in detail how to identify border signs, respond to emergencies, and matters that need to be paid attention to in border areas”.

Had any North Koreans been watching, or listening, to this group from across the river, they would have heard lustily sung patriotic anthems such as “My Motherland and Me”. The Chinese journalist covering the affair was effusive in describing the evocation of competitive harmony and mutual admiration between the students and police, laden with chengyu or four-character aphorisms:

The police were not to be outdone, and their performances of grappling and fighting showed their excellent skills and majestic image, which amazed the college students; they also sang “People’s Police March Forward” loudly, allowing the students to see their loyalty and love for their careers.

Jilin City Youth along the Border

Those seeking a more comprehensive account of the outing may look to a post published on the WeChat account of the Jilin City Committee of the Communist Youth League on 28 July. The post explains that on 11 July, the 14-member delegation travelled to Changbai with the mission of “investigating how science and technology can enhance national security”.

Their five-stop itinerary included:

1. The Malugou Border Police Station: learning how “technology enables more precise and efficient border management”, and listening to an anti-fraud lecture.

2. The Guoyuan Folk Village Committee: delivering their own anti-fraud lecture to local residents, “using easy to understand language and real-life examples”.

3. Malugou Middle School: organizing a “National Security Modernization in My Heart”-themed drawing activity for seventh grade students.

4. The Changbai Entry-Exit Border Inspection Station: understanding “national border culture” – one image shows a student talking to a woman wearing  traditional Korean clothing – and conducting fieldwork to obtain “valuable data for examining the “final kilometre of national security modernization”.

5. The surrounding areas of the Ershiyidaogou Border Checkpoint: participating in patrols alongside local authorities (at which point the aforementioned musical theatrics likely occurred).

The near five-hour drive from their college in Jilin City to the border region was no doubt some exertion for the student delegation, the purpose of whose visit extended beyond border authority work shadowing. On 14 July, the college’s news bulletin announced that the delegation, led by Professor Han Liqin, Deputy Secretary of the College Party Branch, had signed a cooperation agreement with the Changbai Border Management Brigade to “deepen collaboration between the college and police, promote national public security education, and assist in the modernization of the border region”.

The Jilin Medical College delegation and members of the Changbai Border Management Brigade have their picture taken after signing a cooperation agreement. | Image: Jilin Medical College.

The visit of the Jilin Medical College delegation to Changbai fits neatly into an ongoing trend of active cooperation between higher education institutions and border authorities on public security education. Shortly before their arrival, a smaller cohort from the China University of Geosciences undertook a similar, though less extensive, fieldtrip at the Changchuan Border Inspection Station further downstream on the Yalu River close to Linjiang.

A propagandistic current of border-strengthening and community-building flows through each of these recently published Changbai-focused articles. Their publication on Wechat, China’s most widely used social media channel, indicates the extent to which news media and local authorities appear motivated to disseminate information on disaster preparedness, and serves as comfort to local residents that, in the event of flooding, help is at hand.

Although flash floods have not struck Highway G331  since July and August of this year, Changbai County PSB did on several occasions implement traffic control measures amid heavy rainfall. Drivers caught in the rain – and reduced speed limits – will have had time to gaze across the Yalu River, the grey haze of Hyesan receding from view.