China’s President Xi Jinping hailed an “invincible friendship” with Pyongyang on arrival in North Korea, his first trip abroad this year after hosting back-to-back summits 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 multiple international sanctions.
Military officers lined a red carpet as an Air China plane carrying Xi arrived yesterday for his first visit since 2019, video from Xinhua showed.
Kim and his wife Ri Sol-ju welcomed Xi, who was accompanied by his wife Peng Liyuan.
The two leaders shook hands and children presented flowers to Xi and Peng, while a banner reading “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping” and hailing the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship” hung below Chinese and North Korean flags.
Xi makes the trip after hosting US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin separately in Beijing and as North Korea’s nuclear talks with Washington remain deadlocked.
Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University, 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”.
China has “always prioritised stability and is currently having to manage its relations and differences with the US”, Ku said.
Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center, also said Beijing is shifting towards “underwriting regime durability” rather than seeking to coerce North Korea into denuclearisation.
“China’s broader regional strategy benefits from a stable, heavily armed and aligned buffer state that absorbs US and allied military bandwidth,” he said.
North Korea has repeatedly declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear state since Kim and Trump’s 2019 summit collapsed over the scope of denuclearisation and sanctions relief.
Kim has also been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Moscow after sending troops to fight alongside Russian forces.
Some analysts say the summit could be Xi’s way of countering Russia’s growing influence over North Korea, but DePaul’s Ku stressed that “overall, Moscow is not a major power like China”.
“Moscow-Pyongyang power relations are more equal than Beijing-Pyongyang; Moscow needs Kim for their war in Ukraine as much as Kim needs technology sharing and food from Russia.”
In an article published on the front page of North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper, Xi pledged closer cooperation.
“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. — AFP
