The Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge connecting Dandong in China and Sinuiju in North Korea, has been a key route for bilateral trade. / Korea Times file

By Yi Whan-woo

China will be using "state-of-the-art" scanners to better crack down on smuggling along its border with North Korea, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said the new scanners will replace x-ray scanners that have failed to detect contraband hidden in boxes or between legally imported goods. They did not elaborate on further details concerning the new scanner.

"New modern cargo inspection equipment is being installed at the entrance to customs here," a source from the Chinese border city of Dandong recently told Radio Free Asia (RFA). "They're going to use it to inspect cargo trucks from North Korea ... It's going to be difficult for anything illegal to slip through the cracks."

The tighter border control comes as the United States and the United Nations step up sanctions aimed at strangling North Korea's economy and halting its nuclear program.

A second source said customs officers at Dandong in the 2000s would only check documents for details of a shipment and did not even use x-ray scans on trucks.

"Until the early 2010s, customs declarations were just a mere formality. They only stopped the trucks that were overloaded," the source said. "Dandong started being more thorough in their inspection in April last year when the U.S. imposed tougher sanctions."

The Chinese customs authorities were especially concerned about finding metals, chemicals and other items that could be used to make weapons. They often had arguments with North Korean traders when they inspected the contents of boxes, even after x-ray scans.

This led to a delay in transporting goods, and the new scanners are expected to "shorten the time of inspection," according to the sources.

Meanwhile, key North Korean exports — ore, minerals and seafood, all banned by the United Nations — are smuggled regularly across the border and still find their way to Chinese markets.

"Everything we have here is from North Korea. We have no Chinese seafood," a merchant at a seafood market in Dandong told RFA.

They said the seafood is smuggled by ship-to-ship transfers in the Yellow Sea, with Chinese business partners paying for the seafood in Chinese currency or rice.

A different source said Chinese dump trucks bring large quantities of iron ore in from North Korea but the smuggling is hard to detect.

The source said North Korean trucks stand ready in Dandong to bring refined oil into the North, which is restricted under U.N. sanctions.

Under the restrictions, Pyongyang is limited to importing 4 million barrels of crude oil and 500,000 barrels of products a year.