Xi Visits North Korea to Counter Russia's Influence
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- Xi Jinping completed a two-day visit to North Korea ending Tuesday, his first to the country since 2019, greeted by Kim Jong Un with fanfare; readouts so far have consisted only of boilerplate announcements about cooperation.
- The visit's main priority, per Deng Yuwen's earlier Foreign Policy analysis, is keeping North Korea from drifting into Russia's orbit, especially after Pyongyang signed a mutual defense pact with Moscow in 2024 and sent thousands of troops to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
- China and North Korea have been formal treaty allies since 1961 under a mutual defense pact, but relations were strained for decades by China's reform era, its 1992 diplomatic recognition of South Korea, and what Pyongyang saw as inadequate Chinese aid during the 1990s famine.
- Structural frictions remain stubborn: Chinese officials find working with North Koreans "irritating"; the Chinese public's views of North Korea are "overwhelmingly negative" (with "West Korea" used as a pejorative for China itself); and Chinese trade with North Korea totaled just $2.2 billion in 2024 versus $328 billion with South Korea.
- Kim Jong Un ordered the execution of his uncle Jang Song Thaek in 2013 partly because of Jang's close ties to China, and the subsequent purging of China-friendly officials alienated Chinese diplomats who had cultivated personal relationships in Pyongyang.
- China has downplayed explicit references to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and expanded trade and economic ties with North Korea since 2018, and genuinely wants the country to open its economy to stabilize the regime and revitalize China's struggling northeastern provinces.
- The last North Korean pop-culture hit in China was the 1972 film The Flower Girl, while South Korean entertainment has become a model for China's own industry, illustrating the cultural asymmetry behind the formal alliance.
Why it matters: With North Korea's 2024 mutual defense pact with Russia and North Korean troops now fighting in Ukraine, Xi's visit signals Beijing's concern about losing Pyongyang to Moscow. The stakes are concrete: China-North Korea trade totaled just $2.2 billion in 2024, a fraction of the $328 billion Beijing does with Seoul, and Beijing wants a stable, economically open North Korea to help revitalize its own struggling northeastern provinces.
