Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday made a rare visit to North Korea, where he met an emboldened North Korean leader Kim Jong-un who has drawn closer to Moscow while expanding his country’s nuclear weapons program.
Xi’s trip to Pyongyang was his first since 2019 and came after he hosted a series of world leaders including US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing.
China, Washington’s chief geopolitical rival, has been North Korea’s main trading partner by far for decades and a key source of diplomatic and economic support for a country hit by international sanctions.
Photo: AFP
However, Kim has boosted an alliance with Putin over the past few years, securing critical support from Moscow after sending troops to fight alongside Russian forces.
In an article published on the front page of North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, Xi underlined the special relationship between the two sides.
“No matter how the times change or how the international situation evolves, the traditional friendship between China and North Korea is always invincible,” Xi wrote.
Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan (彭麗媛), were met at the airport by Kim in a red-carpet welcome complete with military salute and cheering crowds.
Huge portraits of the two leaders loomed over Kim Il-sung Square during a grand welcome ceremony, where Xi and Kim inspected the honor guard as a military band played their national anthems, Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television showed.
While the two countries are quick to talk up their friendship, North Korea’s commitment to its nuclear program has been a thorn in the relationship.
Beijing has said it wants to see a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, but North Korea has repeatedly declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear state, particularly after Kim and Trump’s 2019 summit collapsed over Pyongyang’s weapons program and sanctions relief.
China-North Korea exchanges faced a further blow soon after, when Pyongyang shuttered its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Xi’s trip came just weeks after he held talks with Trump, during which the White House said the leaders “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearize North Korea.”
However, Kim’s powerful sister said on the eve of the visit that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was “the line of no retreat.”
Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said that “Beijing probably has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state,” but Xi “will probably tell Kim that China wants stability more than anything.”
Beijing is shifting toward “underwriting regime durability” rather than seeking to coerce North Korea into denuclearization, said Lee Seong-hyon, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center.
“China’s broader regional strategy benefits from a stable, heavily armed, and aligned buffer state that absorbs US and allied military bandwidth,” he said.
Xi last met Kim in September last year, when he invited the North Korean leader and Putin to a military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
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