Xi Reaffirms China as North Korea's 'Foremost Priority'
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- Xi Jinping made his first visit to North Korea in seven years on June 8-9, receiving a 21-gun salute, military honours, and a friendship parade, with North Korea's KCNA declaring it a "new era in bilateral relations."
- Kim Jong Un told Xi that strengthening ties with China was his country's "foremost strategic priority" and that Pyongyang would "do its utmost" to make the relationship "a model for state-to-state relations."
- China accounts for more than 90% of North Korea's foreign trade, and the visit coincided with the 65th anniversary of the China-North Korea Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance — Beijing's only formal military alliance with any country.
- Beijing omitted "denuclearisation" from its readout of the May Trump-Xi meeting and removed the phrase from its 2025 defence White Paper for the first time in nearly two decades, with Carnegie analyst Zhao Tong saying Beijing now views substantive denuclearisation progress as "an unrealistic goal."
- Kim Yo Jong declared North Korea's nuclear status "an absolutely irreversible red line and an undeniable reality" a day before Xi's arrival, a move analyst Lee Seong-hyon called a "structural boundary-setting exercise" to remove denuclearisation from the summit agenda before talks began.
- Xi called for closer exchanges in "foreign affairs, law enforcement and the military," seeking to embed China in North Korea's security apparatus in what Lee described as a "hard-power exchange of geopolitical footholds."
Why it matters: Xi's visit locks in Beijing's primacy over Pyongyang at a moment of maximum Chinese leverage: China controls over 90% of North Korea's trade, holds its only formal military alliance, and has dropped denuclearisation language from both its 2025 defence White Paper and its readout of the Trump-Xi meeting. With a Carnegie analyst now calling substantive denuclearisation "an unrealistic goal," the post-Cold War diplomatic framework governing the peninsula is being quietly retired by its most important outside power.
