As John Kerry arrives in Beijing, China continues to flout United Nations sanctions in order to prop up Kim Jong-un's regime, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
There was never any clue from the outside that a cheap apartment on the 16th floor of a tower block in the Chinese city of Dandong was in fact North Korea's lifeline to the outside world.
But for nearly a decade, 1602 Huiyou Gardens was the Chinese office of an organisation described by American investigators as a "key financial node in North Korea's weapons of mass destruction apparatus".
Since it founded its Chinese branch in 2004, the Kwangson Bank, otherwise known as the Foreign Trade Bank, helped channel billions of pounds of valuable foreign currency to Pyongyang, money that was used to finance North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programmes.
So when the Chinese authorities shut down the branch office last month, 10 days after the United Nations Security Council imposed fresh sanctions on North Korea, it seemed a clear sign that Beijing had finally lost patience with Kim Jong-un's truculent, unpredictable, and increasingly belligerent regime.
"It is a big hit for North Korea! China is implementing the UN Security Council resolution," wrote one Chinese government-owned newspaper in Hong Kong.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9991907/China-breaking-UN-sanctions-to-support-North-Korea.html
