China’s President Xi Jinping hailed an “invincible friendship” with Pyongyang as he arrived in North Korea on Monday, 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 the country hit by multiple international sanctions.
Military officers lined a red carpet as an Air China plane carrying Xi arrived for his first visit since 2019, video from Xinhua showed.
A banner that read “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping” and hailing the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship” hung below Chinese and North Korean flags at the airport.
Xi made 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.
The White House said last month that Xi and Trump “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea” during their summit in Beijing.
However, leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister said on the eve of Xi’s arrival that North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme was “the line of no retreat”.
Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University, told AFP 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 Centre, 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 told AFP.
Elevated status
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.
