Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea - US-Korea ...

Silent Partners: Chinese Joint Ventures in North Korea Transcript 28
cable but basically, you’ve got a desperate North Korea that’s looking to get whatever advantage
they have.
One of the takeaways from interviews with not just North Koreans, but I also spoke to a couple
of people who are traders with North Korea who are not really captured in this report but they do
give you a sense of what it’s like to do business with North Korea, and these guys don’t think
long-term. They’ll have something that they’ve looted, scrap metal or maybe they’ve got a
shipment of ore that they’ve somehow wrestled from somebody, so they have something of
value, hard currency value, that they then shop to their sources in, most often, Dandong. And
basically, and this guy says, “And then the cell phones start ringing on our side.” And he’s like,
“This is not a big town, I know all the guys that are doing business with them, these guys, they
change their name, they change their company, but by and large, within a few minutes, you can
figure who they’re representing, never seen this guy before but you know he’s KPA or he’s
Cabinet or he’s Party.” You pretty much know whatever it is that they’re selling, where they got
it from, and who their backing is. And he says, “Yeah, we play this game where they try to
collect deposits from everybody.” So they’ve now collected, you know, 15 percent of that
shipment from 10 different people, which means they’re now good, but then they want to get the
other 85 percent for actually delivering. So this guy will say, yeah, so, I end up being the winner
and I get this trainload of whatever it was he just paid for, I think he was getting gold ore was the
story he was telling me, so he just got this trainload of rocks containing some percentage of gold
that he’s now going to ship off to a refiner. And he says, you know, and it’s like, you know,
transaction at the border as I’m counting the trains crossing the bridge and then handing over
duffle bag after duffle bag until eventually there are no more cars and, you know, they stopped
bringing duffle bags. And then he said the next day, I’ve got phone calls from all these very
angry friends of mine who also paid 15 percent down for this trainload. And he says, the next
time, I’ll be one of those guys. You know, in other words, I can build a relationship with them
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