From restaurants with singing waitresses, to secluded traders in back alleys, North Korean businesses in Beijing face a precarious start to the New Year with a looming, sanctions-linked January deadline to shut up shop.

Accounting for 90 percent of North Korea's trade, China is a major outpost for what little financial and economic interests its secretive ally has abroad.

But Beijing -- fed up with Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests -- has given North Korean businesses and non-profit organisations until January 9 to shut down in accordance with United Nations sanctions, the commerce ministry told AFP.

In visits to a dozen North Korean companies in the Chinese capital, AFP found that many owners and staff were unsure whether they would have to leave.

Near the North's massive embassy complex in Beijing, where a red propaganda banner proclaims "Long live dear supreme leader Kim Jong-Un," four trading companies are run out of ground floor shop fronts in a back alley.