Scrap in … North Korea?

The nifty North Korea Zone site has an interesting post reporting that the Chinese have “slowed down rail transport to North Korea in response to the disappearance of Chinese trains crossing the border.” And what, pray tell, happens to those missing cars? According to Reuters and the Financial Times, the leading theory, propagated by unnamed “analysts,” is that they are “sometimes disssembled and sold as scrap metal.”

As the Chinese blogosphere’s resident English-language loudmouth on all things scrap-related, I must weigh in with some commonsense: the North Koreans may be nuts, but they are not imbeciles, which is what they’d have to be if they were cutting up perfectly decent railcars for scrap metal. The value of a working rail car – and especially the precision -machined axles and wheels that are its most expensive parts – is far more than its scrapped value. Leaps and bounds more.

I’ll admit, I’d love for this story to be true. It’d be a hoot. But the more likely explanation (and this bears repeating: I know nothing about North Korea) is that the North Koreans are just flat-out stealing the rail cars for their own use, running them hard, and then scrapping them after they’re broken down and useless. The Daily NK story suggests this is the right exaplanation, with a slight twist:

One individual affiliated with Dandong Station in China said in a phone conversation with DailyNK on the 21st, “We have resorted to every method to retrieve the rail wagons we sent to North Korea, but the situation has not changed at all. Rail wagons that go to North Korea and come back have to immediately be sent to maintenance factories.”

In other words, sending rail cars to North Korea is a bit like lending a BMW to your fifteen-year-old cousin and his friends: it probably isn’t coming back in the same condition, much less by the designated curfew. Keeping that in mind, it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to expect that you’ll next see the BMW in a scrap yard. But that’s neither North Korea’s – or your cousin’s – first intention.[I should note that the real losers in this situation are the impoverished North Koreans who receive food aid via rail from China. Because of the rail car thefts, the Chinese are reportedly (and, understandably) slowing the delivery of cars (and cargoes) into North Korea.]