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North Korean workers boarding a plane bound for Pyongyang at Vladivostok International Airport on Dec. 20. (Yonhap News)

North Koreans dispatched by their government to work overseas were supposed to return home, as mandated by a UN Security Council resolution, by Dec. 22. Half of the estimated 100,000 North Koreans working overseas are estimated to have been repatriated, which is likely to impact North Korea’s ability to earn foreign currency. But a substantial number of North Koreans in China, the country that has hosted the largest number of these workers, are thought to have gotten new visas, allowing them to remain there.

While most of the North Korean restaurants in Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Dandong are still operating as normal, some of them have recently closed their doors. Some of the remaining restaurants have hired Chinese workers to replace the North Koreans, but others reportedly still have North Korean employees.

Reports indicate that a substantial number of North Korean workers are still on the assembly line at factories in Dandong and other cities in northern China, near the border with North Korea. These workers appear to be sidestepping sanctions by replacing their previous work visas with visas for studying or official business or by getting a border permit that allows them to commute from North Korea to China every day.

According to US and UN estimates, around 100,000 North Korean workers were living in 29 countries before sanctions were imposed, earning about US$500 million a year. Resolution No. 2397, adopted by the Security Council in 2017, required UN member states to repatriate North Korean workers by Dec. 22, 2019, in order to cut off a source of funding for North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile development. The UN Security Council’s committee enforcing sanctions on North Korea reported that, as of Dec. 16, 48 member states had submitted reports about their implementation of sanctions, and that at least 23,000 workers, including 18,533 from Russia, had returned to North Korea. In addition to this, China said it had repatriated more than half of the guest workers in its territory by the end of last year, though it didn’t provide an exact figure.

Experts estimate that the number of North Korean workers residing in China has decreased by about half recently, from 50,000-80,000 to 30,000-40,000. On Dec. 17, China and Russia submitted a draft resolution to the UN Security Council calling for a partial relaxation of sanctions on North Korea, which would have suspended the repatriation of North Korean overseas workers. The issue of repatriating those workers could become a source of conflict between the US and China after Mar. 22, 2020, which is the deadline for submitting the final report about sanctions implementation.

By Park Min-hee, staff reporter, and Jung In-hwan, Washington correspondent

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