Kim Jong Un’s frequent Sinuiju visits force Chinese phone users into hiding as crackdowns intensify

By  Seon Hwa

Frequent visits by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to North Korea’s largest greenhouse farm, which was built in a section of Sinuiju that was devastated by flooding in summer 2024, have become a serious headache for users of Chinese-made mobile phones in this border area. Tightened security and signals monitoring have forced many illicit phone users into hiding.

“The leader’s repeated visits to the construction site of the Sinuiju Greenhouse Complex after the 2024 flooding have forced Chinese phone users in Sinuiju to lie low. Phone signals are being constantly monitored on a totally different scale from before,” a source in North Pyongan province told Daily NK recently.

“The consequences of this heightened signal surveillance campaign are now becoming apparent. Former Chinese phone users started disappearing, and now none of their whereabouts are known,” the source said.

Given its location across the border from Dandong, in China’s Liaoning province, Sinuiju is a hub of trade between North Korea and China. As a result, a fair number of Sinuiju residents use Chinese phones to contact the outside world and arrange smuggling operations or remittances.

These phone users have functioned as conduits of information in North Korea’s closed society, but now they have been forced to halt their operations because of Kim’s frequent visits to the city.

After attending the groundbreaking ceremony for the Sinuiju Greenhouse Complex in February 2025, Kim returned nearly once a month in the second half of the year, with visits in August, September, October, and November. The complex remains close to his heart, serving as the site of his first official visit in 2026.

With Kim conducting no fewer than five on-the-spot guidance sessions in Sinuiju in a single year, security in the city has been beefed up. During that process, Chinese mobile phone users who used to communicate with people across the border have become a primary target of North Korea’s state security agents, the source explained.

“Merely possessing the means of communicating with China is now regarded as a risk, rather than an advantage. As the authorities have stepped up their monitoring and policing around Kim’s visits, Chinese mobile phone users are being repeatedly investigated by state security offices,” the source said.

“It’s said that more people have been nabbed over the past year than over the previous decade. Chinese phone users are living in fear because there’s no telling when or how you might get caught,” the source went on to say.

Since Kim’s official visits are cloaked in secrecy, friendly agents in the state security service are unable to tip off Chinese phone users as they often have in the past. That means Chinese phone users have no way of knowing when they need to be extra careful, the source said.

Fear of being caught is heightened by the fact that bribes or connections are not enough to get you off the hook in matters directly connected to the supreme leader’s security.

Given these circumstances, Chinese phone users have apparently halted their business activities and are lying low to avoid being caught in the dragnet.

“Since remittance brokers are nowhere to be found, the flow of money has ground to a halt. These people are unlikely to resume their usual level of activity for some time even after the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Sinuiju Greenhouse Complex,” the source said.

“This former wilderness has been veritably turned into an island of golden potential to drive regional development and improve people’s material conditions,” Kim was quoted as saying during his on-the-spot guidance, expressing great satisfaction about the construction of the large-scale greenhouse farm.

But Sinuiju residents are reportedly less impressed.

“With so many visits by the supreme leader, people are annoyed about facing so many restrictions and being required to contribute funds and provide community service for these events. Some people cynically wonder what they stand to gain from the state’s vaunted greenhouse project,” the source said.