{"id":722701,"date":"2026-06-08T09:09:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T09:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/722701\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T09:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T09:09:12","slug":"xi-jinping-set-to-meet-kim-jong-un-in-north-korea-as-china-seeks-to-revitalise-relationship-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/722701\/","title":{"rendered":"Xi Jinping set to meet Kim Jong-un in North Korea, as China seeks to revitalise relationship | North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Xi Jinping visits North Korea<\/a> on Monday for a two-day trip, his first in nearly seven years, as China\u2019s president looks to revitalise ties with his junior ally.<\/p>\n

Xi is expected to meet North Korea\u2019s leader, Kim Jong-un<\/a>, in Pyongyang. North Korea is China\u2019s 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\u2019s increasingly close relationship with Russia.<\/p>\n

Xi\u2019s trip comes ahead of the 65th anniversary of the signing of the friendship and mutual assistance treaty between China<\/a> and North Korea, a pact that is still China\u2019s only defence agreement with another country.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and in 2024 Moscow and Pyongyang signed a mutual defence pact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin North Korean propaganda, there are really over the top paeans to the closeness with Russia<\/a> forged in fighting a war together. Whereas with China it\u2019s kind of nostalgic,\u201d said John Delury, a senior fellow for the Asia Society.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t want to let North Korea\u2019s closeness with Russia outpace the ties with China too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Xi, Kim and Russia\u2019s president, Vladimir Putin, stood side by side<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un at a military parade in Beijing in September 2025. Photograph: \ufffd\ufffd\ufffdn\ufffd\u0290m\ufffd\ufffd; \u671d\u9bae\u901a\u4fe1\u793e\/AP<\/p>\n

Xi\u2019s visit to Pyongyang comes less than one month after the US president, Donald Trump, visited Beijing for a highly anticipated summit<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In recent years Beijing and Washington have departed from their previously united front of opposing North Korea\u2019s 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 \u201cconfirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea\u201d after their meeting in May, Beijing did not confirm this statement.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, Kim Yo-jong, Kim\u2019s sister<\/a> who wields considerable power within the regime, called claims that Xi and Trump discussed denuclearisation \u201cfalse\u201d.<\/p>\n

Last week North Korea unveiled a new nuclear material production factory and Kim called for an \u201cexponential\u201d expansion<\/a> of the country\u2019s atomic arsenal.<\/p>\n

A bigger priority for Xi than nuclear talks will be defending China\u2019s own security interests in north-east Asia, most likely the threat he sees from Japan.<\/p>\n

Xi is understood to have become unusually animated when discussing the issue of what China sees as Japan\u2019s increasing militarism with Trump, and with the UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who visited Beijing in January. Japan rejects the claim<\/a> that a more proactive defence policy amounts to the \u201cnew militarism\u201d described by China.<\/p>\n

Delury said any cooperation between Beijing and Pyongyang on Japan was likely to be rhetorical rather than practical.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ally \u2013 just a short flight or even a train journey from Beijing \u2013 and the importance of the bilateral relationship.<\/p>\n

William Yang, a senior analyst the Crisis Group, said: \u201cIn light of North Korea\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Xi\u2019s goal is to \u201cnot let North Korea spin off too far out of the Chinese orbit, which is always something that Beijing would worry about\u201d, Delury said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Xi Jinping visits North Korea on Monday for a two-day trip, his first in nearly seven years, as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":722702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-722701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}