Xi flies to Pyongyang as Kim outplays China
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- Xi Jinping made his first foreign trip of 2026 to Pyongyang — not Moscow or Washington — despite already hosting roughly a dozen world leaders in Beijing this year including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and on the eve of his visit China resumed direct passenger train services and Air China flights to the North Korean capital for the first time in six years.
- Kim Jong Un systematically cut Beijing's monopoly leverage by extracting $7.7–$14.4 billion from Russia for troops and ammunition in Ukraine — more than triple North Korea's $3.2 billion total foreign trade for 2025, with 11,000 North Korean soldiers deployed alongside Russian forces by late 2024.
- Vladimir Putin made a two-day visit to Pyongyang in June 2024 — his first since July 2000 — and Russia has since supplied North Korea with drone technology, air defense systems, anti-aircraft missiles, electronic warfare equipment, space assistance and what sources speculate is a nuclear submarine reactor.
- At Beijing's September 3, 2025 Victory Day parade, Kim stood on the rostrum alongside Xi and Putin — the first public appearance of the three together since Mao, Kim Il-sung and Khrushchev in 1959 — and was one of only two foreign leaders (with Putin) subsequently invited to Xi's private tea and banquet at the Great Hall of the People.
- The 2024 Russia–North Korea Comprehensive Strategic Partnership gives Kim a second mutual-defense guarantor alongside the 1961 China treaty Beijing renewed in 2021, a structural shift confirmed by the conspicuous absence of "denuclearization" from the September 2025 Xi–Kim summit readout for the first time in their six meetings.
- North Korea's nuclear arsenal is estimated at roughly 150 warheads and projected to exceed 400 by 2040, while the Lazarus Group's crypto thefts since 2017 have topped $6 billion — a sanctions-proof, borderless revenue stream funding Kim's missile program.
Why it matters: For decades Beijing treated North Korea as a vassal kept on a leash via near-total economic dependence. Kim has now given himself a second patron in Moscow, a nuclear arsenal projected to grow from ~150 to 400+ warheads by 2040, and $6B in sanctions-proof crypto revenue. Xi traveling to Pyongyang in 2026 is the diplomatic equivalent of admitting the leash is gone — a hermit kingdom now sets terms with great powers.
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