Xi Jinping is feted in Pyongyang as Kim Jong-un swivels to Moscow

Beijing: On a dais in Pyongyang’s public square beneath giant posters of their airbrushed faces, Xi Jinping was feted with a colourful spectacle of Soviet-era agitprop as he met with Kim Jong-un to reaffirm their countries’ deep ties, “forged in blood” in the Korean War.

The two-day summit is the Chinese leader’s first visit to North Korea in seven years, during which time Kim has powered ahead with his nuclear weapons program and grown emboldened by shifting his country’s centre of gravity toward Moscow.

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Xi’s visit has drawn the attention of analysts because it is his first overseas trip this year and comes as he reduces his travel and increasingly delegates international summits to lower-level officials.

His decision to make the journey east – officially to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the China-North Korea mutual defence treaty – is being widely interpreted as Beijing’s bid to remind its neighbour and the world that it remains Pyongyang’s biggest economic lifeline and hedge against US influence in East Asia.

Kim, meanwhile, will be looking for Beijing’s assurance that it has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state, and will not seek denuclearisation goals in talks with other foreign powers.

“Ideally, it will obtain China’s tacit recognition of its nuclear status, which the Russians appear to have given behind closed doors,” says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow with the Stimson Centre’s Korea Program, a US think tank.

“China’s stance on denuclearisation remains much more dubious, and the North Koreans seem set on clarifying that during Xi’s visit.”

Ahead of Xi’s arrival, North Korean media published a statement from Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, vowing the country would never relinquish its nuclear weapons, saying in a statement that its “status as a nuclear weapons state is the line of no retreat”.

Officially, Beijing remains committed to a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula – a goal the Trump administration claimed the US president discussed with Xi when they met in Beijing last month. The Chinese side has never confirmed this and has dropped all references to denuclearisation from its official messaging since 2024, including in a defence white paper issued last year, breaking with past practice.

To welcome Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan on Monday, Kim put on a pomp-filled show – broadcast through the sanitised lens of the world’s two most controlled media apparatuses.

Thousands of cheering masses packed into Kim Il-sung Square (named after Kim’s grandfather, the country’s founding dictator), waving flowers and balloons against the backdrop of buildings draped in the national flags of both countries.

North Korean soldiers goosestepped in perfect unison in the shadow of the massive hammer and sickle emblem of the Workers’ Party of Korea – the political authority of the Kim regime’s one-party state – as members of the honour guard shouted: “We wish Comrade Xi Jinping good health.”

It was followed by talks between the two leaders and later a banquet, with Xi declaring China’s “unwavering support for the socialist cause of the DPRK”, using North Korea’s official name. Kim hailed the relationship with Beijing as his nation’s “most important and primary strategic undertaking”, according to a readout by Chinese state media Xinhua.

More talks were expected on Tuesday, but so far, there has been no mention of North Korea’s weapons program and denuclearisation in any of the official statements.

Despite all the exhortations of solidarity, there is no papering over Kim’s newly forged alliance with Vladimir Putin since the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine.

Kim has netted as much as $US10 billion in selling munitions and weapons to Moscow, according to a think tank aligned with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. After signing a mutual defence treaty with Putin in 2024, Kim dispatched at least 12,000 troops to join Russian soldiers on the frontline, condemning many to become cannon fodder in a foreign land they knew nothing about.

In return, Russia has shifted to implicitly backing North Korea as a nuclear-weapons state, the one thing Kim prizes above all else, while vetoing the UN body charged with monitoring sanctions against Pyongyang, effectively dismantling it.

“North Korea has more to gain from Russia at present,” says Lee, but “it also understands that Russia cannot fulfil all of its needs”. Putin’s war-ravaged economy, for one, means Pyongyang is still reliant on Beijing for its survival, including for about 90 per cent of its trade.

Chung Min Lee, a former South Korean diplomat and expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, says this poses a quandary for Seoul and Tokyo in the age of Trump’s America First agenda.

“They continue to rely on America’s extended deterrence when it is becoming weaker and less dependable just as North Korea’s alliance with Russia deepens,” he says.

As for Donald Trump, he has occasionally mused about reviving the summit talks with Kim that captivated the world during his first term and made him the first US president to cross the Demilitarised Zone into North Korea, albeit with no concrete outcomes.

But with the war in Iran sucking up US attention and resources, this idea has faded into the distance. Ironically, Kim now points to Iran and its failure to secure a nuclear shield as the ultimate validation for his decision to reject US “sweet talk” and charge ahead with securing its own.

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