A bridge that China finished building in 2014 and then left to sit empty for more than a decade finally opened to traffic on Thursday, as North Korea and China inaugurated the New Yalu River Bridge linking the Chinese city of Dandong with North Korea's Sinuiju.

Trucks draped in Chinese and North Korean flags crossed the four-lane, roughly three-kilometer span in both directions as crowds gathered on the Dandong riverbank to watch. An opening ceremony began at 10 a.m. local time, China's Xinhua News Agency reported, with Chinese Premier Li Qiang and North Korean cabinet chief Pak Thae Song each delivering video addresses rather than appearing in person.

The bridge's structure has been finished since around 2014, when it was expected to open within the year. But North Korea never built the connecting roads and customs facilities on its side at Sinuiju, leaving the span unused for more than 12 years — a delay so conspicuous that even the Communist Party-affiliated Global Times reportedly carried unusually blunt frustration from Dandong residents who had hoped the crossing would bring an economic lift to the border city.

Why it sat empty so long

Analysts have floated several explanations for the holdup, according to reporting from the scene: Pyongyang's wariness of deepening economic dependence on Beijing, lingering anger that China backed United Nations sanctions targeting North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, and disagreements between the two governments over the crossing's exact location. Until now, the decades-old Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge — a one-lane-at-a-time crossing dating to the 1940s — has carried more than 70 percent of official China–North Korea trade.

The timing is notable. The new crossing opens barely a month after North Korea and Russia inaugurated their own new road bridge, part of a deepening military and economic partnership in which Pyongyang has supplied troops and conventional weapons to support Moscow's war in Ukraine, Western officials say. Kim Jong Un spent the past few years visibly prioritizing ties with Vladimir Putin, but he has recently moved to draw closer to Beijing again — a shift analysts read as an attempt to revive North Korea's strained economy and shore up an alignment against Washington. China remains North Korea's dominant economic lifeline: roughly 98 percent of the country's external trade last year was with Beijing.

Neither government has published trade or customs figures tied to the opening, and officials in Pyongyang and Beijing did not respond to requests for comment from international outlets covering the ceremony. Analysts expect the bridge to gradually boost bilateral trade and ease logistics bottlenecks, though international sanctions will continue to constrain how much economic activity North Korea can actually generate from the new route. For Dandong, a city that has waited over a decade for this moment, the real test now is whether the traffic — and the money — keeps coming.