North Korea through Chinese eyes

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: The place often seems like a black box from which the occasional horror (like a nuclear bomb) emerges without warning or welcome. North Korea certainly deserves its nickname, the hermit kingdom. Visitors are tightly controlled and only a trickle of Westerners admitted. Yet even North Korea needs dollars, and tries to get them by attracting Chinese tourists, who go for the gambling, and the bizarre allure of a bygone era. Joining a group of 60 visitors, this is what you find.

The North Koreans can put on a good show. In April and May, no fewer than 100,000 performers went through a series of synchronised gymnastic displays at the May 1 Stadium in Pyongyang, the capital. Even a few hundred Western tourists got a peek (many from the arch-enemy, America, whose tourists are normally kept at bay). To Chinese visitors, the show, known as Arirang, was reminiscent of extravaganzas in Beijing during the days of Mao Zedong. “Nowadays I doubt whether we could do it,” says one, wistfully. Next year’s Olympic Games in Beijing, he suggests, might prove an exception.

In the late 1990s, the North Koreans allowed investors from Hong Kong and Macau to set up casinos in their closed world. One was in Rajin-Sonbong, a failed investment zone close to the Chinese border; another lurked in the basement of an isolated hotel for foreigners in Pyongyang. North Korea reckoned that, since gambling is banned in China, these would be a big attraction (gambling is also banned in North Korea for ordinary citizens, but the government allowed Chinese to staff the casinos).

As China saw it, the casinos proved rather too popular, drawing huge numbers of corrupt officials. Two years ago, China cracked down on cross-border gambling—appealing to neighbouring countries to close down casinos, banning travel agents from offering gambling tours, restricting foreign visits by officials—after one official allegedly embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars of government funds and gambled the money away at the casino in Rajin-Sonbong. This has now been closed. The one in Pyongyang is open, but is beyond the range of weekend holiday-makers. These days you find few gamblers there, mostly Chinese tourists betting a few tens of dollars to help relieve the tedium of endless mind-numbing tours of political monuments.