Tens of thousands of North Koreans were assigned to places such as clothing factories in China, logging camps in Russia and North Korean restaurants from Dubai to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The U.N. Security Council says that this all must end Sunday, when sanctions take effect that ban countries from hosting the North’s regime-directed workforce, and that those workers must all be sent back. The U.N. clampdown seeks to block a steady flow of revenue back to Kim Jong Un’s ruling clique.

The United States vetoed a proposal by China and Russia to roll back the planned sanctions and allow workers to remain.

But Russia appears to be bypassing the United Nations by allowing workers to remain on tourist or student visas, immigration data suggests, while diplomats say Chinese state-owned companies continue to hire North Korean workers.

A 2018 book by the Leiden Asia Center in the Netherlands called the system “forced labor on a global scale” and criticized the companies employing North Korean workers.

But Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, says work abroad is one of the few opportunities North Koreans have to save money and move up in society, potentially giving them enough to start a small business back home.

It also allows them a chance to see the world – even on a limited scale – outside North Korea’s borders. Some eventually make their way to South Korea and defect.

– – –

Na Min-hee, 28, worked in the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, making clothes for the Giorgio Armani label in a Chinese-owned factory. She said it was grueling work, initially from 7 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. and later reduced to 11-hour shifts. The North Korean regime took about 90% of her earnings, leaving her with take-home pay of about $160 a month. She had been so desperate to get the job that she had paid hundreds of dollars in bribes to secure a post.

She left her country in 2014 as a loyal believer in the regime. But in Malta, she said, her eyes were opened. She ended up fleeing to Germany in 2015 to defect.

“One day, I borrowed a smartphone from my Vietnamese colleague. I watched YouTube on my bunk bed beneath my comforter,” she said.

“Unbelievable things” appeared when she entered a search for the North Korean ruler, and she faced the dawning realization that people in most countries were allowed to express their antipathy toward political leaders.

“That was when my faith in the system just collapsed,” she said. “It’s funny how it takes a long time to build up that belief system, but it collapses at once.”

“In Pyongyang, the people who had been abroad play a huge role in delivering information from the outside to locals,” she added.

Growing up in Pyongyang, she could spot the “fashionable” women who had worked in China. She had seen fathers of friends return from working in Russia with enough money to move to better homes, and she was determined to make a better life for herself.

Na applied to go to Malta, paying the bribes, passing rigorous checks to ensure her family was loyal to the regime, undergoing long indoctrination sessions and a stringent health check.

“You can’t leave if you are shorter than 155 centimeters (5-foot-1),” she said. “Apparently it’s embarrassing for North Korea’s national image to have someone so short represent our country.”

When she first crossed the border into China and was “blinded” by the lights, she thought it was a Chinese propaganda trick to use all their electricity to show off to North Koreans.

“That’s how thoroughly indoctrinated I was,” she said. “The night I got to Beijing, I couldn’t sleep a wink, reminding myself, ‘I am the party’s light-industry warrior in an enemy country.’ ”

But she quickly saw the difference with Chinese and Vietnamese colleagues at the factory in Malta. They didn’t have to surrender their earnings to their governments and could wander around town on their own. They had no weekly indoctrination or self-criticism sessions as she did.

In 2015, she escaped from Malta and sought asylum at a South Korean consulate in Germany.

– – –

Yeo Yu-jin, 42, paid about $100 in bribes to get permission to do construction work in St. Petersburg, where he maintained old buildings and repaired family homes between 2011 and 2015.

Working at least 12 hours a day, starting at 8 a.m. and finishing at 10 p.m., he had to earn enough money to meet a monthly quota of between 15,000 rubles in the winter and 25,000 rubles in the summer (approximately $500 and $800 at that time) – which was all handed over to North Korea’s External Construction Bureau.

Yeo was allowed to keep any extra income he earned but only saved a few hundred dollars a year.

“Safety conditions were very poor. There were several accidents every month,” he said. “One co-worker died when he was struck by a falling object. His body was sent home with $4,000 in compensation.”

Yeo found that the work was physically and mentally draining, but he said he never regretted his decision to go abroad. People in St. Petersburg always had electricity and running water, and enough food, he realized, compared with the people he had left behind at home.

He said he met an old man once who complained to him about former Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin and told him that life in Russia was better now.

In 2015, a colleague reported Yeo to North Korean security officials for watching South Korean TV shows on a smartphone he had secretly purchased. He realized he could never return to North Korea and sought asylum from the South Korean consulate in St. Petersburg.

“I had been a young Pyongyangite faithful to the regime, but going to Russia really opened my eyes,” he said.

– – –

Lim Jung-hwa, 32, worked for several years in a North Korean restaurant in China until 2010, serving customers in a traditional hanbok dress and performing propaganda songs.

Like Na, she had seen women return home after working in China, looking chic and with exotic foreign goods, including shoes and plush winter clothes.

But life in China was harder than she imagined, she said. She worked 12-hour shifts, washed her dress every night to take away the cooking smell from the restaurant and often went to work the next day in wet clothes. The interactions with customers also took a toll.

“Customers didn’t hold back from commenting about Kim Jong Il [the North Korean leader at the time] and pointing out how impoverished my country is,” she said. “We were instructed not to confront them and just brush it off with a smile. But that information entered my head and stayed with me when I went onstage to sing songs idolizing our Dear Leader.”

It took six months before she was allowed out on a shopping trip. While such trips became more frequent, she and other North Korean workers always had to go in groups of two or three.

“When I went back to North Korea, I found my hometown stifling. My family was struggling with poverty, and blackouts were common. My life suddenly went dark, and the pink, red and yellow clothes I’d bought from China stayed in my closet. I couldn’t wear them outside because of the ‘fashion police,'” she said, referring to special units that enforce rules banning hairstyles or clothing considered “anti-socialist” by the regime.

Eventually, Lim’s mother stepped in. She told her daughter that she would happier in China. Lim contacted a Chinese man she had met at work, fled across the border and ended up marrying him.

“My everyday life at the restaurant in China was grueling, and I still dream about waiting tables in my hanbok dress,” she said. “But I don’t regret the decision I made as a young girl. It allowed me to see the world beyond North Korea.”

Turning his attention to Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., the widow of former congressman John Dingell, the president suggested that rather than looking down from heaven, as Debbie had previously told him, perhaps John was “looking up” from hell.

The crowd murmured, the crowd grimaced, the crowd groaned. There were cheers and applause, too, but the pockets of hesitation from some of his most loyal supporters underscored a striking note of discomfort with the president’s mean streak.

Trump backtracked slightly, saying, “Let’s assume he’s looking down.”

Over the past dozen days or so, the president has spewed forth an advent calendar’s worth of cruelty – new barbs popping out almost daily, like so many tiny bitter chocolates – underscoring the instinctual nastiness that is central to his brand and casting doubt on claims from his aides that Trump is merely a counterpuncher.

In addition to taunting John Dingell as his widow prepared for her first holiday season without her husband of 38 years, Trump also ridiculed everyone from climate activist Greta Thunberg to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

Others in his orbit exhibited similar callousness this week. Sarah Sanders, the former White House press secretary, came under near-universal condemnation Thursday night after sending a tweet that mocked former vice president Joe Biden’s stutter, after he brought it up during a Democratic primary debate. She later deleted, and apologized for, her tweet.

“Trump is the worst within us, and he markets that worst as admirable,” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican operative and frequent Trump critic who was a senior adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “He appeals to our darkest angels, not our better angels.”

After Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish teenager with Asperger’s syndrome, was named Time’s “Person of the Year,” Trump dismissed the choice as “so ridiculous.”

“Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend!” he tweeted. “Chill Greta, Chill!”

Trump was similarly cutting with Pelosi and Schiff, two of the chief Democrats he blames for the House impeaching him on Wednesday. Over the weekend, Trump – who has publicly called Pelosi “crazy” – privately claimed with no evidence that she is deteriorating and requires the care of her aides, and also tweeted that her “teeth were falling out of her mouth.”

At his Michigan rally, Trump said he will no longer “talk about the looks of a male or female,” before doing just that and critiquing Schiff’s physical appearance. “He’s not exactly the best-looking guy we’ve ever seen,” Trump said.

At the same event, Trump urged security to handle a protester a bit more roughly – “You got to get a little bit stronger than that, folks” – and derided her appearance: “There’s a slob. There’s a real slob.”

A White House spokesman responded to requests for comment Friday by noting that Trump, too, has been excoriated by his critics, and providing a list of nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers who have attacked the president, often in harsh terms.

The list included Pelosi saying she hoped to see Trump “in prison” and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., similarly saying he should be “placed in solitary confinement.” There were 2020 Democratic candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who called Trump a “white supremacist,” and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who dubbed him “a phony,” “a pathological liar” and “a racist.” And there were Democratic Reps. Ted Lieu of California (a “racist a–“) and Ruben Gallego of Arizona (a “psychopath” and “sexual predator”).

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham also defended Trump’s comments about Dingell on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” saying the president was speaking before a “wild crowd” and merely hitting back.

“He has been under attack and under impeachment attack for the last few months, and then just under attack politically for the last two-and-a-half years,” Grisham said. “I think that, as we all know, the president is a counterpuncher.”

The counterpuncher defense is repeated ad nauseam by Trump allies, including first lady Melania Trump, whose key initiative is an anti-bullying campaign called “Be Best.”

But by definition Trump is almost always punching down. His targets derision are not only less powerful than a U.S. president, but many are among the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. He has mocked and attacked, among others, immigrants, minorities, women and a reporter with a physical disability.

“A dead guy or a widow or somebody who has a physical handicap or the wives of a candidate – the idea that he’s a counterpuncher or a tough guy has been a farce from the start,” said Tim Miller, a Republican operative and frequent Trump critic, who was a senior adviser on Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign.

This is also not the first time Trump has tormented the deceased, since he has repeatedly attacked the late senator John McCain, R-Ariz.

Stevens said the president embodies the “classic abusing spouse trope,” blaming the other person for his own behavior. “The essence of counterpunching is never having to take personal responsibility,” he said.

In the case of John Dingell, Stevens added, Trump’s press secretary was falsely trying to claim that the president was firing back at someone who – having been dead for nearly a year – was incapable of launching the first punch. Trump was specifically furious with Dingell’s widow, for voting in favor of impeachment.

“The absurdity of that is that they’re now claiming he was punched by a dead man,” Stevens said.

Critics of Trump were also swift in their condemnation of Sanders’s tweet mocking the Biden’s stutter. “I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I hhhave absolutely no idea what Biden is talking about,” she wrote, using a stutterer’s cadence to mimic Biden – who suffered from a childhood stutter and who, during Thursday night’s debate, briefly used a stutter for impact as he described children with same challenge approaching him for advice.

“I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter,” Biden responded to Sanders on Twitter. “And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up.”

Sanders first claimed she was “not trying to make fun of anyone with a speech impediment,” before ultimately deleting her tweet and apologizing to Biden.

“I actually didn’t know that about you and that is commendable,” Sanders wrote. “I apologize and should have made my point respectfully.”

Sanders found few defenders, with critics decrying her commentary not just on the merits but as an example of how Trump’s lack of decency has infected his inner circle. Trump’s son Eric has also commented on Biden’s speech patterns, offering a critique of the 2020 field to Fox News in which he opined, “Biden can’t get through two sentences without stuttering.”

“My thought on this week, as it relates to Sarah, is he reveals the cruelty in those around him, or maybe it’s his cruelty rubs off among those around him to such a degree that they don’t even recognize it anymore,” Miller said.

Referring back to the president, he added: “The whole appeal of Trump was his cruelty to the weak.”

The president’s behavior also seems to grant permission to some of his supporters to act in similar fashion. At the Michigan rally, whenever Trump mentioned Pelosi, a man clad in a Santa outfit would shout, “Nancy Pelosi is a ho, ho, ho!”

And when the president attacked Dingell, there were surprised gasps, yes, but there were also the attendees who processed that Trump had just attacked a dead congressman from their home state – and then cheered and whistled anyway.

In many ways, Trump’s casual viciousness is now an inextricable part of his brand, the attribute that many supporters love and that his critics hate.

An August 2016 Post-ABC News poll found that 57% of Americans said Trump “goes too far in criticizing other people and groups,” while 42% said he “tells it like it is regardless of whether or not it’s politically correct.” That same poll found 79% saying Trump does not show enough respect for people he disagrees with, and 58% said this is a “major problem.”

A more recent Pew Research survey this spring found similar concerns with Trump’s language. Seventy-six percent said Trump’s comments often or sometimes make them feel concerned, 70% said confused, 69% embarrassed and 67% exhausted.

But if Trump’s mercilessness has emerged as core to his ethos, not everyone has responded in kind. Faced with the president’s remarks this week, Debbie Dingell offered a different model.

“I’m preparing for the first holiday season without the man I love,” she wrote on Twitter in a message aimed at Trump. “You brought me down in a way you can never imagine and your hurtful words just made my healing much harder.”

“Mr. President,” she beseeched, “let’s set politics aside.”

The former Portuguese colony has marched on to become the world’s largest gambling hub over the past few decades, surpassing its more rebellious brother Hong Kong along the way. President Xi Jinping is expected to use a visit marking 20 years of Chinese rule over Macau this week to send a message to the protest-stricken financial hub some 30 miles to the east: work with us and get rich.

“Jobs are chasing after Macau people, instead of the other way around,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old human resources worker in Macau, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about her work. “Young people can see a much brighter future here than in Hong Kong. They are indifferent, or even cold toward politics.”

Xi arrived at Macau International Airport aboard an Air China 747 on Wednesday afternoon and shook hands with local officials on the tarmac. In brief remarks, he praised Macau’s “earnest implementation” of the “one country, two systems” framework that governs it, as well as Hong Kong.”The achievements and progress Macau has made in the past two decades since its return to the motherland are a source of pride,” Xi said. “The beautiful blueprint for Macau’s future development needs our joint efforts.”

During the visit, Xi will attend a banquet and cultural performance before delivering a speech on Friday to commemorate the city’s return. He’ll likely highlight a raft of recent policies intended to help diversify Macau’s tourism industry while – in a possible signal to Hong Kong – establishing a yuan-denominated financial market there.

While Hong Kong and Macau share the Cantonese language, a common past as European trading outposts and a similar promise of autonomy from Beijing, they couldn’t look more different to the Communist Party. Today, the enclave of 670,000 people ranks as the world’s second-richest territory in terms of per capita economic output, after Luxembourg, according to data compiled by the World Bank. By that measure, it’s almost 80% wealthier than Hong Kong.

Macau has suffered little of the unrest that has gripped Hong Kong since the latter attempted to pass legislation earlier this year allowing extraditions to mainland China. Unlike Hong Kong, the government passed a Beijing-mandated national security law a decade ago, and hasn’t seen mass protests since the government withdrew legislation fattening the retirement packages for top officials in 2014.

“While Hong Kong people can be mobilized by fighting for abstract value as democracy and freedom, Macau is ‘interest-oriented,’ ” said Ieong Meng U, an assistant professor at the University of Macau’s Department of Government and Public Administration. “Only very few government policies can trigger widespread social grievances.”

Much of Macau’s stability can be traced to its monopoly over casino gambling in China, an industry that accounts for 80% of the government’s total revenue and supports a roughly $1,000 annual handouts for residents. How long that will last is unclear, as slowing Chinese growth and increased overseas competition cut into the returns of operators including Las Vegas Sands Corp., MGM Resorts International and Wynn Resorts Ltd.

Still, Macau’s success would seem to bolster Communist Party arguments that Hong Kong’s problems stem from its yawning wealth gap and outdated national security laws. Macau has been effectively under Beijing’s control since left-wing protesters – and a few Chinese warships – forced its Portuguese governor to sign an apology for his policies under a portrait of Mao Zedong.

Macau’s charter broadly resembles Hong Kong’s, but lacks key provisions such as the goal of selecting the city’s leader “by universal suffrage.” Incoming Macau Chief Executive Ho Iat-seng, who Xi will swear in Friday, was chosen by 98% of the votes cast by a 400-member election committee.

To prevent any of Hong Kong’s protests from spilling over, authorities have tightened immigration checks into Macau ahead of the president’s visit, with the head of the local American Chamber of Commerce branch among those denied entry.

During a similar anniversary visit to Hong Kong two years ago, Xi urged the city to profit from China, not defy it. Growth held “the golden key to resolving various issues in Hong Kong,” the president said at the time.

“The messaging is clear to Hong Kong and the rest of the world, but primarily to Hong Kong – there is a way out, there is an easy and good way out, and it’s called Macau,” said Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute and author of “A Modern History of Hong Kong.”. “But what they completely and utterly fail to see, is that if Macau is the future, most people in Hong Kong will say, thank you very much, you can keep it for yourself.”

The message still carries well in Macau, where rent, restaurants and groceries are all cheaper, according to cost-of-living data from Numbeo. In Hong Kong, an influx of mainland Chinese have gobbled up university slots, driven an expansion of luxury shopping and helped make it the world’s least-affordable housing market for nine straight years.

Although Macau is much smaller – roughly half the size of Manhattan – its residents have been largely insulated from such pressures by policies that make jobs and passports harder to come by for mainlanders or foreigners.

“Hong Kong has long been a metropolitan center, but Macau was just a little city prior to opening up the gaming licenses,” said Simon Sio, chairman of the real estate-and-investment firm Lek Hang Group. “Macanese don’t have enough confidence in ourselves, as we have fewer opportunities in the world compared to Hong Kong. Macau benefits from the motherland a lot. We residents know this well.”

Still, not everyone is satisfied with the local government, as the 2014 protests against retirement perks suggest. Gambling’s dominant role in the economy has also prompted criticism, due in part to the criminal activity it has fostered, from loan-sharking and money-laundering to triad fights and prostitution.

Enough conversations with participants in Hong Kong’s protests will turn up demonstrators from neighboring Macau. That points to a possible source of long-term concern for the Communist Party as casino growth slows.

“In my opinion, the economy of Macau is actually not so stable because the income from the gambling industry has gradually declined since the protests in Hong Kong started,” said Christine, a 21-year-old Macau resident who has participated in Hong Kong protests and wanted to be identified only by first name to reduce the risk of reprisal. “The Communist Party wants to grab out all the money in Macau to maintain their regime.”

Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. The study, which found a wide range of accuracy and performance between developers’ systems, also showed that Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities.

The faces of African American women were falsely identified more often in the kinds of searches used for police investigators, in which an image is compared with sthousands or millions of others in hopes of identifying a suspect.

Algorithms developed in the U.S. also showed high error rates for “one-to-one” searches of Asians, African Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. Such searches are critical to such functions as cellphone sign-ons and airport boarding schemes, and errors could make it easier for impostors to gain access to those systems.

Women were more likely to be falsely identified than men, and the elderly and children were more likely to be misidentified than those in other age groups, the study found. Middle-age white men generally benefited from the highest accuracy rates.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal laboratory known as the NIST that develops standards for new technology, found “empirical evidence” that most of the facial-recognition algorithms exhibit “demographic differentials” that can worsen their accuracy based on a person’s age, gender or race.

The study could fundamentally shake one of American law enforcement’s fastest-growing tools for identifying criminal suspects and witnesses, which privacy advocates have argued is ushering in a dangerous new wave of government surveillance tools.

The FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of state driver-license records and other federal and local databases since 2011, federal records show. But members of Congress this year have voiced anger over the technology’s lack of regulation and its potential for discrimination and abuse.

The federal report confirms previous findings from studies showing similarly staggering error rates. Companies such as Amazon had criticized those studies, saying they reviewed outdated algorithms or used the systems improperly.

One of those researchers, Joy Buolamwini, said the study was a “comprehensive rebuttal” to skeptics of what researchers call “algorithmic bias.”

“Differential performance with a factor of up to 100?!” she told The Washington Post in an email Thursday. The study, she added, is “a sobering reminder that facial recognition technology has consequential technical limitations alongside posing threats to civil rights and liberties.”

Investigators said they did not know what caused the gap but hoped the findings would, as NIST computer scientist Patrick Grother said in a statement, prove “valuable to policymakers, developers and end users in thinking about the limitations and appropriate use of these algorithms.”

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued federal agencies this year for records related to how they use the technology, said the research showed why government leaders should immediately halt its use.

“One false match can lead to missed flights, lengthy interrogations, tense police encounters, false arrests, or worse,” he said. “But the technology’s flaws are only one concern. Face recognition technology – accurate or not – can enable undetectable, persistent, and suspicionless surveillance on an unprecedented scale.”

The NIST’s test examined most of the industry’s leading systems, including 189 algorithms voluntarily submitted by 99 companies, academic institutions and other developers. The algorithms form the central building blocks for most of the facial-recognition systems around the world.

The algorithms came from a range of major tech companies and surveillance contractors, including Idemia, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, SenseTime and Vigilant Solutions. Notably absent from the list was Amazon, which develops its own software, Rekognition, for sale to local police and federal investigators to help track down suspects.

The NIST said Amazon did not submit its algorithm for testing. The company did not immediately offer comment but has said previously that its cloud-based service cannot be easily examined by the NIST’s test. Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

Grother, the NIST lead researcher, said other companies with cloud-based systems had been able to submit their algorithms, including Microsoft, which he said “sent us very capable and very reliable software.” Of Amazon, he added: “Our test remains open if they elect to participate.”

The NIST team tested the systems with about 18 million photos of more than 8 million people, all of which came from databases run by the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. No photos were taken from social media, video surveillance or the open Internet, they said.

The test studied both how algorithms work on “one-to-one” matching, used for unlocking a phone or verifying a passport, and “one-to-many” matching, used by police to scan for a suspect’s face across a vast set of driver-license photos. Investigators tested both false negatives, in which the system fails to realize two identical faces are the same, as well as false positives, in which the system identifies two different faces as being the same – a dangerous failure for police, who could end up arresting an innocent person.

Some algorithms produced few errors, but the disparity in accuracy between systems could be enormous. There is no national regulation or standard for facial-recognition algorithms, and local law-enforcement agencies rely on a range of contractors and systems with different accuracies and capabilities. The algorithms themselves – with names like “anyvision-004” and “didiglobalface-001” – are almost entirely unknown to anyone outside the industry.

Algorithms developed in Asian countries had smaller differences in error rates between white and Asian faces, suggesting a relationship “between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it,” the researchers said.

“You need to know your algorithm, know your data and know your use case,” said Craig Watson, a manager at the NIST. “Because that matters.”

But Seoul said that while it represents partial progress, it falls short of being a fundamental solution to the neighboring country’s export curbs.

Under the move, Japan will ease regulations on exports of photoresist to South Korea with limited regulations, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said. Photoresist is used in the production of semiconductors.

The move came ahead of a planned trade ministers’ meeting involving South Korea, China and Japan slated for Sunday in Beijing, and also ahead of those countries’ trilateral summit in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.

South Korea’s Trade, Industry and Energy Minister Sung Yun-mo will meet China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan and Japan’s Economy and Trade Minister Hiroshi Kajiyama for talks on how to accelerate regional free trade negotiations.

It is not clear, however, whether Seoul and Tokyo will meet bilaterally amid tensions over Japan’s export curbs targeting South Korea.

Economic ties between Seoul and Tokyo have been facing an unprecedented deadlock since Japan imposed restrictions on exports to Seoul of three key industrial materials critical for South Korea’s chip and display industries in July. Japan later removed Seoul from its list of trusted trading partners.

It was initially thought that Japan’s actions would have an impact on local industry due to South Korea’s heavy dependence on the three materials controlled by Tokyo — photoresist, etching gas and fluorinated polyimide.

Fluorine polyimide is used to make flexible organic light-emitting diode displays; photoresist is a thin layer used to transfer a circuit pattern to a semiconductor substrate; and etching gas is needed in the semiconductor fabrication process.

“Although Japan’s move is considered progress in the dispute, we still believe that we need more fundamental solutions to the problem,” an official from the presidential office of Cheong Wa Dae said.

Tokyo cited South Korea’s alleged lax export control system for sensitive materials that can be diverted for military use as the reason behind its export restrictions.

Seoul regards the measures as a retaliation against the country’s Supreme Court rulings ordering Japanese firms to provide compensation for Koreans forced into labor during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

South Korea, whose main export products include semiconductors and smartphones, relied on Japan for more than 90 percent of its supplies of photoresist and fluorine polyimide and for 44 percent of its etching gas over the January-May period, according to the Korea International Trade Association.

Amid the deadlock, the two countries have been making efforts to end the trade war, which could potentially hurt both sides’ economies as well as the global supply chain.

Last month, South Korea decided to conditionally suspend the termination of the General Security of Military Information Agreement with Japan as a move toward settling the trade row.

It also promised to suspend its ongoing complaint process at the World Trade Organization.

Earlier this month, South Korea and Japan agreed to continue talks to resolve their monthslong trade row, sharing what they called an “expanded mutual understanding” of each other’s export control system during a meeting in Tokyo. (Yonhap)