Xi Jinping visits North Korea on Monday for a two-day trip, his first in nearly seven years, as China’s president looks to revitalise ties with his junior ally.
Xi is expected to meet North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in Pyongyang. North Korea is China’s only formal treaty ally but in recent years their relationship has been strained by a virtual freeze in trade during the Covid-19 pandemic and Pyongyang’s increasingly close relationship with Russia.
Xi’s trip comes ahead of the 65th anniversary of the signing of the friendship and mutual assistance treaty between China and North Korea, a pact that is still China’s only defence agreement with another country.
Chinese and North Korean troops fought alongside each other against South Korea in the Korean war in the early 1950s. But North Korea and Russia have a much more recent history of military cooperation. North Korea has sent more than 10,000 soldiers to fight for Russia in the Ukraine war, and in 2024 Moscow and Pyongyang signed a mutual defence pact.
“Within North Korean propaganda, there are really over the top paeans to the closeness with Russia forged in fighting a war together. Whereas with China it’s kind of nostalgic,” said John Delury, a senior fellow for the Asia Society.
“They don’t want to let North Korea’s closeness with Russia outpace the ties with China too much.”
Xi, Kim and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, stood side by side at a massive military parade in Beijing in September last year. That event projected a show of strength from the would-be leaders of a new, autocrat-led world order. But behind the scenes the men navigate a delicate balancing act to preserve each of their self-interests. More so than Russia and North Korea, China also wants to maintain a strategic relationship, at least when it comes to trade, with the US.
Xi’s visit to Pyongyang comes less than one month after the US president, Donald Trump, visited Beijing for a highly anticipated summit that was framed by China as re-stabilising the fraught US-China relationship. Although the Trump-Xi summit was low on tangible deliverables, the US president later said that that he discussed North Korea with Xi.
There has been some speculation that Trump could have asked Xi to pass on a message to Kim. Trump has repeatedly said he would like to meet the North Korean leader again.
In recent years Beijing and Washington have departed from their previously united front of opposing North Korea’s nuclear build-up. When Xi and Kim met in Beijing last year, their official readouts omitted any mention of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula for the first time, and although the White House said Trump and Xi “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea” after their meeting in May, Beijing did not confirm this statement.
On Sunday, Kim Yo-jong, Kim’s sister who wields considerable power within the regime, called claims that Xi and Trump discussed denuclearisation “false”.
Last week North Korea unveiled a new nuclear material production factory and Kim called for an “exponential” expansion of the country’s atomic arsenal.
A bigger priority for Xi than nuclear talks will be defending China’s own security interests in north-east Asia, most likely the threat he sees from Japan.
Xi is understood to have become unusually animated when discussing the issue of what China sees as Japan’s increasing militarism with Trump, and with the UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who visited Beijing in January. Japan rejects the claim that a more proactive defence policy amounts to the “new militarism” described by China.
Delury said any cooperation between Beijing and Pyongyang on Japan was likely to be rhetorical rather than practical.
The visit is also notable for being a trip abroad for Xi. In recent months he has hosted a flurry of world leaders and now travels internationally less frequently than before the pandemic. That he is willing to travel to North Korea reflects both the proximity of China’s ally – just a short flight or even a train journey from Beijing – and the importance of the bilateral relationship.
William Yang, a senior analyst the Crisis Group, said: “In light of North Korea’s recent waves of missile tests, including the announcement of successfully testing AI-guided missiles, Xi likely sees the need to show up in Pyongyang in person to prevent tension on the Korean Peninsula from escalating.”
Xi’s goal is to “not let North Korea spin off too far out of the Chinese orbit, which is always something that Beijing would worry about”, Delury said.
