Chinese companies in fake North Korea documents scam
by Michael Rank
Chinese traders are using fake documents to export goods to North Korea, the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang warns on its website.
The terse, two-sentence statement dated April 4 gives no details of the forged “[North] Korea export licences” scam, but says the North Korean authorities have confirmed the documents are fake and urges “relevant companies not to be easily deceived.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang has a website at all, and a fairly active one at that. It has plenty of links, on Chinese-North Korean economic, cultural and educational ties, speeches by the ambassador and that sort of thing but not a lot of hard news or useful information.
There is no Chinese comment on the recent North Korean missile test, which is perhaps eloquent in itself, though there is a profile of the current ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, who spent much of the 1990s in the Chinese embassy in Washington (he was minister counsellor 1998-2001) and also in the North American section of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
There’s also a list of all Chinese ambassadors to the DPRK since 1950, with photographs and brief biographies.
The Chinese website is here and there’s even an English version though it hasn’t been updated since February.
