To Lam (second right) being greeted by children upon his arrival in Pyongyang on Oct 9, 2025. - AP
HANOI: Vietnam’s Communist Party chief To Lam will kick off a three-day state visit to North Korea on Thursday (Oct 9), marking the first trip to Pyongyang by the country’s most powerful leader in almost 20 years.
Lam will attend celebrations marking the Workers’ Party of Korea’s 80th anniversary on Oct 10, likely joining China’s Premier Li Qiang and a Russian delegation led by former President Dmitry Medvedev at a military parade set to showcase Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons capable of striking the US and its Asian allies.
The trip will be Lam’s first visit to the isolated nuclear state as Vietnam’s party chief, following his August trip to South Korea, a country that has long had tense relations with Pyongyang.
Lam was the first foreign leader hosted by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung since he took office in June. The last time a Vietnamese party head visited North Korea was in 2007.
"This fits Hanoi’s ambition to act as a more proactive middle power,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.
"To Lam is positioning Vietnam as a rare interlocutor that can talk to everyone involved in the Korean Peninsula’s peace process at a time when inter-Korean diplomacy is frozen.”
Lam will meet with senior North Korean officials during his trip to discuss ways to strengthen cooperation and deepen bilateral ties, Vietnamese Ambassador to North Korea Le Ba Vinh said on Wednesday, adding that the trip is an important milestone in the longstanding friendship between Vietnam and North Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he hopes relations "will steadily develop in the interests of the peoples of the two countries,” according to an official media report this month on his message to Vietnam’s leaders.
Vietnam and North Korea have shared diplomatic ties for 75 years. Lam’s trip marks only the third visit by a Vietnamese Communist Party chief to Pyongyang since relations were established in 1950, when North Korea became the third country after China and the Soviet Union to recognize Vietnam.
Though ties cooled after the Vietnam War, they strengthened in the 2000s. Kim visited Hanoi in 2019 for a summit with US President Donald Trump during his first term, expressing a desire to boost cooperation with Vietnam in defense, the economy, technology, sports and culture.
Yet, despite their long-standing political ties, trade between Vietnam and North Korea has dwindled in recent years.
Vietnam’s exports to North Korea fell from over US$16 million in 2010 to just under $3 million in 2016, with no official trade recorded since 2017 due to international sanctions and broader geopolitical factors, according to data from the Vietnamese embassy in Pyongyang.
"Vietnam can play a quiet, mediating role and offer a development story Pyongyang understands: market reform without regime collapse,” ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Giang said.
"But sanctions and North Korea’s priorities limit how far Hanoi’s influence can go.”
Separately, China’s Premier Li is set to arrive in Pyongyang on Thursday for a three-day visit, making him the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit North Korea since 2019.
His trip follows Kim’s rare visit to Beijing in early September, where Kim stood beside President Xi Jinping at a parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Beijing has long been North Korea’s primary supporter, providing crucial economic lifelines as the US and its allies upheld sanctions against the isolated regime. Recently, Pyongyang has moved closer to Moscow, with Kim positioning himself as a key backer of Putin in his war against Ukraine. - Bloomberg
