Xi hails ‘invincible friendship’ with N. Korea
Seoul—China’s President Xi Jinping hailed an “invincible friendship” 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’s chief geopolitical rival, has been North Korea’s main trading partner by far for decades and a key source of diplomatic and economic support for the country hit by multiple international sanctions.
Military officers lined a red carpet as an Air China plane carrying Xi arrived for his first visit since 2019, video from Xinhua showed.
A banner that read “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping” and hailing the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship” hung below Chinese and North Korean flags at the airport.
Xi made the trip after hosting US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin separately in Beijing, and as North Korea’s nuclear talks with Washington remain deadlocked.
The White House said last month that Xi and Trump “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearize North Korea” during their summit in Beijing.
However, leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister said on the eve of Xi’s arrival that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was “the line of no retreat.”
Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that “Beijing probably has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state” but Xi “will probably tell Kim that China wants stability more than anything.”
China has “always prioritized stability and is currently having to manage its relations and differences with the US,” Ku said.
Seong Hyon-lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center, also said Beijing is shifting towards “underwriting regime durability” rather than seeking to coerce North Korea into denuclearization.
“China’s broader regional strategy benefits from a stable, heavily armed, and aligned buffer state that absorbs US and allied military bandwidth,” he told AFP.
