evidence: For three quarters of a century much of North Korea’s trade with the outside world took place across a Japanese-built single-lane bridge across the Yalu River, connecting its city of Sinuiju with Dandong in Northeast China. Traffic would go in one direction in the morning, the opposite direction in the afternoon. To eliminate that bottleneck, Beijing financed and built a new four-lane bridge, completing it in 2014. Pyongyang was then supposed to build a road connecting the bridge to its highway network. It didn’t. The two countries had their differences. [...] "North Korea began construction work on the road to the New Yalu River Bridge in mid-September last year, but had to put the project on hold in mid-January this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic," said Seoul-based DailyNK.