DANDONG, China -- There are two bridges here at the Yalu River. The older one stops midway across, where American planes bombed it into ruins 52 years ago at the height of the Korean War.

Nearby, a span carries cars and trains between this trading center in northeastern China and the bleak, impoverished countryside of North Korea. The bridge hints at the tangled relationship between the two Communist states.

China, on the west bank of the Yalu, has focused its energies on economic growth and strengthening ties with other states. North Korea, on the east bank, has remained sealed off from the world by political design. From across the Yalu, North Korea is smokestacks, a couple of nondescript buildings and a few flickering lights.

Now, North Korea says it wants to develop Sinuiju, its desolate border city, as an economic zone in the mold of China's booming port cities in the south, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

North Korea is promising to open this window as it continues its unpredictable brand of diplomacy elsewhere, with admissions of Cold War abductions and a secret nuclear weapons program.

If the government carries out its plans in Sinuiju, the city may yet match the brightly lighted shore on the Chinese side of the river.

Dandong is growing quickly on a foundation of tourism and trade. A four-star hotel overlooks the river. The feel of history is maintained strictly for tourists, from the bombed-out bridge, opened to tourists in 1994, to the rhetoric attacking American imperialism at the local museum honoring the "War to Aid Korea and Resist American Aggression."

Korean ties

Hemmed in on three sides by low mountains, the city of 700,000 is by force of geography linked more closely to North Korea than to the rest of China.

There is a sizable Korean minority, and Korean is the language of trade and business.

Officially, commerce between the two countries consists of North Korean fishermen in small boats, Chinese sightseers who pay about $2 for a ride on the river and a look at North Korea, and business and trade deals struck in restaurants within view of the Yalu.

A second, parallel set of ties exists, too -- an underground of spies, smugglers and refugees.

About 30 miles south, where the river empties into the Yellow Sea, Chinese and North Korean boats meet in open water for transactions that have a distinctly local flavor.

One Chinese smuggler said his most recent deal involved bartering packages of instant noodles for a ton of scrap metal -- food for a North Korea that depends on aid to feed its people, raw materials for an enterprising trader who will turn a profit of about $35.

Business at sea

"The business on the sea is kind of halfway open," the Chinese trader said, after asking that he not be identified. The scrap metal he gets could be anything, even broken pots and pans. "They steal the scrap metal from state-run factories. They've stolen some of the factories bare, so there is not as much metal lately."

Some North Koreans reach the Chinese side of the river as refugees. By leaving home, they are risking their lives.

Others who cross are well-connected North Koreans arriving to conduct business. Still others bring North Koreans to work in service jobs under close supervision. A last group, many suggest, consists of agents sent to spy on the Chinese.

"This is sort of a strange place where many peculiar things go on," said Aidan Foster-Carter, a Korea specialist at Leeds University in Britain, who has visited Dandong several times. "Someone compared it to Vienna in the 1940s, sort of the Third Man era. Everybody's spooks are running around there."

Chinese traders and tour guides who have made frequent visits to North Korea describe a social and political environment there that they compare to China's during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1960s and early '70s.

Food is scarce. North Koreans remain desperately poor and averse to discussing politics or their leader, Kim Jong Il. Those who try to escape are said to be treated brutally if captured.

According to rumor, some North Korean refugees are punished with steel hooks being pushed through their collarbones.

Chinese tour guides on day trips to North Korea by bus give tourists strict instructions: "Don't talk to the locals. Don't discuss politics."

Unique region

The Sinuiju Special Administrative Region, as North Korean officials described it in September, would have its own executive branch, legislature and judiciary.

A wall would be built around the area to keep out uninvited North Koreans.

"If they do open up, it would be good for the whole region, good for the economy, especially for trade in Dandong," said Qu Yi, 23, who works for one of the legitimate trading outfits here. He earns $150 a month helping move livestock and coal across the bridge in exchange for machine parts, metals and wood from North Korea.

Two months ago, North Korea announced that it had picked a Chinese tycoon, Yang Bin, to run the Sinuiju zone.

Less than two weeks later, Chinese authorities, apparently miffed that they had not been consulted, detained Yang for investigation into charges of inflated earnings at his company and tax evasion. He remains in custody.

Weapons program

Sinuiju's future is further complicated by North Korea's acknowledgment last month that it had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program despite having pledged in 1994 to abandon the project.

People in Dandong are skeptical that such a program could exist in the country they glimpse across the Yalu.

"I think North Korea doesn't have enough money right now to develop those kinds of weapons, no matter what the news releases say or the Americans may make up," said Xu Chenyang, 21, who is studying Korean at the local teachers college. He and his classmates were more interested in what happens with Sinuiju.

"We are all Korean majors, and if Sinuiju opens up, there will be more jobs for us in Dandong," said Gong Dan, a 20-year-old student. But she expresses no warmth toward the North Korean people.

"I don't like North Korea, the people or the country," she said. "Here in Dandong, we are prosperous and open, while on the other side of the bridge, there is nothing going on.

"Although we are under similar systems of government and share the same geography, we are very different."