30% fewer N. Korean companies exhibiting at trade fair in Dandong

Yonhap attributes this to chillier relations between China and North Korea. That may be, and it may also be that the network of North Korean vendors uprooted by Jang Song Thaek’s purge hasn’t fully recovered. A third possible explanation is that China may prefer to avoid repeating the embarrassment of another revelation by the U.N. Panel of Experts that it was allowing North Korean companies involved in proliferation to exhibit openly at another trade fair last year. The knowledge that there are gweilos with cameras about may have changed their perspective.

Also from Dandong, CNN reports that there are still smugglers operating there, but that it has also become a nest of North Korean regime spies.