China aides North Korean WMD proliferation

A new report from the Wall Street Journal, quoting “U.S. and Asian officials,” says that the Trump Administration is considering “increasing financial penalties on Chinese companies in response to growing evidence of their support for North Korea’s weapons programs.” Such as: In a case that particularly alarmed the Trump administration, a North Korean businessman attempted to use Pyongyang’s embassy in Beijing to export a lithium metal that is used to miniaturize nuclear warheads, according to the U.N. report. [Wall Street Journal, Jay Solomon]

As for that “growing evidence,” this year’s report from the U.N. Panel of Experts monitoring the (non-) enforcement of sanctions against North Korea is packed with so much of it that I couldn’t even jam a Cliffs Notes summary into one post. This post will cover the evidence that China is allowing known, U.N.-designated North Korean proliferators to operate from its territory, often openly. We’ll turn to China’s tolerance for (and abetting of) North Korean money laundering later this week, as soon as I find the time to write it up. Bear in mind, this post itself is a sequel to other posts I’ve written in previous years, also documenting China’s flagrant cheating on the sanctions, or its simple refusal to enforce them.

Read the rest here.

Featured image courtesy of Reuters.