SEOUL, March 30 — China restarted direct flights between Beijing and Pyongyang today for the first time since the pandemic, although for now North Korea is only allowing in travellers with official or other special purposes.
AFP looks at tourism in one of the world's most isolated countries, alongside the shifting relations between Pyongyang and its main economic and diplomatic backers, China and Russia.
Do any tourists go to North Korea ?
Before both countries closed their borders due to Covid-19, there were an estimated 300,000 foreign visitors in 2019 according to South Korea's Institute for International Economic Policy, 90 per cent of them Chinese.
Some 5,000 Western tourists were thought to visit per year pre-pandemic. Washington banned travel following the imprisonment and subsequent death of American student Otto Warmbier in 2017.
The North in 2024 permitted Russian tourists to visit and Western tour operators briefly returned in February in 2025 for tightly controlled visits.
"A couple of times I even had to let (the guides) know when I wanted to use the bathroom," British visitor Ben Weston told the BBC.
Sun-hungry Russian visitors had been expected to descend on a new beach resort dubbed "North Korea's Waikiki" but authorities said last July that foreigners were barred.
Some foreigners visited Pyongyang in April 2025 to attend the city's first marathon since 2019 but this year's edition was abruptly cancelled.
Can Chinese tourists now go?
North Korea's Air Koryo had already restarted flights from Beijing to Pyongyang in 2023.
Rail freight traffic resumed in late 2022 but passenger trains linking the two capitals restarted only on March 13 after a six-year pause.
Those going between the two countries so far are believed to be students, workers, and those with family ties across the border.
But Chinese travel agencies have begun advertising tour packages to North Korea in April -- as have foreign firms like Young Pioneer Tours which previously have brought in Western visitors by way of China.
How are relations with China?
China has for decades been by far North Korea's main trading partner and a key source of diplomatic and economic backing for the country of 26 million people.
This has included exports of Chinese food -- including when famine ravaged North Korea in the 1990s — and energy.
Annual bilateral trade -- a significant component of which is wigs made in the North — has reportedly recovered since the pandemic to almost $3 billion.
But Beijing has historically had a bumpy relationship with Pyongyang with analysts saying that the nuclear-armed North has often been something of a liability.
In recent years volatility stemming from Russia's war in Ukraine and the turbulent second term of US President Donald Trump has raised Kim Jong Un's global profile.
Showing his elevated status, Kim appeared alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Beijing last year.
The war in Iran in particular increases "the need for closer coordination between Pyongyang and Beijing", said Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea's Kyungnam University.
The Middle East conflict has made "solidarity among countries pushing back against US hegemony" all the more important, Lim told AFP.
What about Russia?
Kim has sent thousands of troops to support Russia's war in Ukraine -- Seoul estimates some 2,000 have been killed -- as well as missiles and munitions.
In return analysts say North Korea is receiving financial aid, military technology, food and energy from Russia, helping Pyongyang reduce its reliance on China. Putin visited in 2024.
This is shown by transport links with Russia being opened earlier than with China.
"The reopening of these borders has been driven primarily by Pyongyang's timeline, which challenges the outdated assumption that Beijing dictates terms to a dependent client state," Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Centre, told AFP.
Trump card
Nonetheless China can still point to its influence over North Korea when Trump visits Beijing in May — especially if Xi can persuade Kim to come at the same time.
"It's only logical that Beijing is trying to emphasise its closeness to Pyongyang ahead of crucial negotiations with the US," said Vladimir Tikhonov, professor of Korea studies at the University of Oslo.
Beijing is shifting away from efforts to "coerce denuclearisation" of North Korea and instead moving toward "underwriting regime durability," said Lee.
"By reopening the physical arteries of connectivity, China is demonstrating that a nuclear-armed North Korea is a settled geopolitical reality, not a negotiable variable," Lee told AFP. — AFP
