China\u2019s President Xi Jinping hailed an \u201cinvincible friendship\u201d with Pyongyang as he arrived in North Korea on Monday, his first trip abroad this year after hosting back-to-back summits in Beijing.<\/p>\n
China, Washington\u2019s chief geopolitical rival, has been North Korea\u2019s main trading partner by far for decades and a key source of diplomatic and economic support for the country hit by multiple international sanctions.<\/p>\n
Military officers lined a red carpet as an Air China plane carrying Xi arrived for his first visit since 2019, video from Xinhua showed.<\/p>\n
A banner that read \u201cWe warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping\u201d and hailing the two countries\u2019 \u201cunbreakable friendship\u201d hung below Chinese and North Korean flags at the airport.<\/p>\n
Xi made the trip after hosting US President Donald Trump and Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin separately in Beijing, and as North Korea\u2019s nuclear talks with Washington remain deadlocked.<\/p>\n
The White House said last month that Xi and Trump \u201cconfirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea\u201d during their summit in Beijing.<\/p>\n
However, leader Kim Jong Un\u2019s powerful sister said on the eve of Xi\u2019s arrival that North Korea\u2019s nuclear weapons programme was \u201cthe line of no retreat\u201d.<\/p>\n
Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University, told AFP that \u201cBeijing probably has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state\u201d but Xi \u201cwill probably tell Kim that China wants stability more than anything\u201d.<\/p>\n
China has \u201calways prioritised stability and is currently having to manage its relations and differences with the US\u201d, Ku said.<\/p>\n
Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Centre, also said Beijing is shifting towards \u201cunderwriting regime durability\u201d rather than seeking to coerce North Korea into denuclearisation.<\/p>\n
\u201cChina\u2019s broader regional strategy benefits from a stable, heavily armed, and aligned buffer state that absorbs US and allied military bandwidth,\u201d he told AFP.<\/p>\n
Elevated status
\nNorth Korea has repeatedly declared itself an \u201cirreversible\u201d nuclear state since Kim and Trump\u2019s 2019 summit collapsed over the scope of denuclearisation and sanctions relief.<\/p>\n
Kim has also been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Moscow after sending troops to fight alongside Russian forces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China\u2019s President Xi Jinping hailed an \u201cinvincible friendship\u201d 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\u2019s chief geopolitical rival, has been North Korea\u2019s main trading partner by far for decades and a key source of diplomatic and economic support […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18435,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18436,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18434\/revisions\/18436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}