Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting North Korea now?
The Chinese leader is making his first trip to Pyongyang in seven years amid major developments in the North’s military programme. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
The Chinese leader is making his first trip to Pyongyang in seven years amid major developments in the North’s military programme. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang on Sunday is significant for one reason. It’s not that they are meeting: The two men met in Beijing just a year ago when China held a massive military parade to mark 80 years since Japan surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces, bringing an end to the second world war. What’s surprising is that Xi is travelling at all. The Chinese leader has not travelled to Pyongyang since 2019, having steadily cut down his travel in recent years, and world leaders like US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin generally come to him these days. “We need to remember that Xi Jinping has not really travelled abroad that much,” William Yang, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Northeast Asia, told Al Jazeera. “The growing trend is foreign leaders heading to Beijing to meet with him. “For Xi Jinping to be the one who decides to travel to Pyongyang, it shows the level of significance that China attaches to this trip.” Xi averaged about 14 trips a year between 2013 and 2019, but dropped to approximately six a year between 2022 and 2025, according to the Asia Society.
In 2020, he made just one overseas trip, and in 2021, he made none, as China grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic. He may be travelling now, though, amid concerns about North Korea’s relationship with Russia, Yang said. Senior partner no more? Traditionally, Beijing played the role of senior partner in the China-North Korea relationship, with North Korea heavily dependent on China for as much as 95 percent of its trade, according to one 2022 estimate from the Committee on North Korea, a US-based nonprofit. That dynamic has been changing since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however. North Korea has provided Russia with critical weapons, artillery and manpower and is credited by observers with helping to keep Moscow’s war machine going. South Korea’s Institute for Security Strategy, a government-funded research institute, estimates that since 2023, Moscow has paid North Korea as much as $14.4bn for troop deployments and the export of “artillery, shells, and guided and ballistic missiles”. The report said that North Korea may only have received between $580m and $1.5bn of that in the form of “goods”, which means there is a “significant possibility that the majority of the payment from Moscow was in the form of ‘sensitive military technology or related precision parts and materials that are difficult to observe via satellite’,” according to a translation.
The BriefWire