BEIJING — Amid sharply rising tensions over North Korea’s nuclear arms program, China said on Thursday that its trade with the country had expanded, even though it had complied with United Nations sanctions and stopped buying North Korean coal, a major source of hard currency for Pyongyang.>
<But imports of coal dropped 51.6 percent in the first three months of 2017 compared with the first quarter of last year, said Huang Songping, a spokesman for the customs agency. Coal has been the biggest hard-currency earner among North Korea’s fairly limited menu of exports.
China agreed to stiffer United Nations sanctions last November, after the United States said Beijing’s coal purchases were helping to pay for the North’s nuclear weapons program. The coal, used in China’s steel mills, earns the North about a billion dollars a year, according to economists.>
<“It’s hard to ban normal trade that is not prohibited by U.N. resolutions,” said Yang Xiyu, a former Chinese diplomat who led China’s delegation to the so-called six-party talks on the North’s nuclear arms development in the mid-2000s.>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/china-north-korea-trade-coal-nuclear.html
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