China\u2019s National Tourism Administration has revealed that the number of North Koreans legally visiting the country reached a new high in 2011.<\/p>\n
According to a report carried by Voice of America yesterday, the 152,300 North Koreans who visited China last year exceeded the 2010 figure of 116,400 by more than 30%, and comfortably beat the previous high of 125,800 recorded in 2005.<\/p>\n
Approximately half (75,266) the total number of visitors apparently went for work, while a further 39,042 went for business purposes or to attend meetings. 4,589 were tourists. However, the statistics show that just 99 of the visits were for the purpose of visiting relatives.<\/p>\n
72,885 of the visitors were age 45 through 64, while a further 64,823 fell into the 25 to 44 bracket. Women were heavily outnumbered by men; 21,828 against 130,472.<\/p>\n
It is important to note that while the statistics provide a point of interest and could be used as an indicator of increasing formal bilateral linkages between North Korea and China; however, they do not include informal visits including those made for purposes of defection or smuggling and thus do not come close to reflecting the true volume of cross-border travel. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China\u2019s National Tourism Administration has revealed that the number of North Koreans legally visiting the country reached a new high in 2011. According to a report carried by Voice of America yesterday, the 152,300 North Koreans who visited China last year exceeded the 2010 figure of 116,400 by more than 30%, and comfortably beat the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":151,"featured_media":18372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n