I didn’t end up spending much time in Dandong. Snap judgement: if you had to pick a place to live in China, you could do a lot worse. 

The area is reasonably attractive, the barbecues are phenomenal, spoken Mandarin is fairly standard, the populace seems very active (lots of stuff going on outside, like fishing at ungodly early hours) – and it has the cachet of being right next to North Korea. As a result, it’s going to be one of the most important places in the world sometime during the next decade. Hard to see beyond the current mess, but there’s bound to be a North Korean bubble sometime this century. Need to get in early.