The Chinese president’s first visit to North Korea in nearly seven years is less a diplomatic courtesy call and more a strategic corrective — Beijing arriving, slightly late, to reclaim a neighbour it allowed to drift.
On the morning of June 8, 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s aircraft touched down in Pyongyang, the flags of both countries lining the route into the capital. It was Xi’s third visit to North Korea in his political career and his first since June 2019 — a gap of nearly seven years that tells its own story about how complicated, and how consequential, the Beijing-Pyongyang relationship has become.
The timing is not incidental. Xi’s arrival in North Korea follows back-to-back summits in Beijing with US President Donald Trump on May 14–15 and Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 20. That sequencing — Washington, then Moscow, now Pyongyang — frames Xi as the indispensable broker in a geopolitical triangle that nobody has fully figured out how to manage. Whether that framing reflects reality is precisely what this visit will test.
Xi Jinping’s North Korea Visit: The Strategic Reset Beijing Needed
The visit has been carefully positioned as a reciprocal call. It reciprocates Kim Jong Un’s September 2025 trip to Beijing, where the North Korean leader attended China’s Victory Day Parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. But reciprocity is the diplomatic veneer. The substance is more urgent.
Ahead of Xi’s visit, North Korea unveiled a new facility for uranium enrichment, with Kim announcing plans to bolster the country’s nuclear forces “at an exponential rate,” signalling Pyongyang’s ambition to cement its status as a nuclear weapons state. One day before Xi landed, North Korean state media reported that Kim had inspected a major munitions company, receiving a briefing on expanded capacity to produce ballistic and cruise missiles. That sequencing — nuclear provocations followed by a state welcome — is a classic Pyongyang negotiating gambit: arrive at the table having just reminded everyone you don’t need to be there.
According to CSIS senior adviser Sydney Seiler, this is Xi’s third visit to North Korea overall — the first came when Xi was vice president in 2008, the most recent before this trip in June 2019. The largely formulaic, symbolism-heavy state media coverage from both Xinhua and KCNA has offered little insight into the substance of talks — which is itself informative. When there is real news to manage, both governments go quiet.
China is North Korea’s top economic lifeline, accounting for the vast majority of the country’s foreign trade, and has long ranked as Pyongyang’s most important diplomatic partner. Yet the past several years have seen that primacy erode at the margins. For North Korea, Xi’s visit marks another chapter in its longstanding balancing act between Russia and China, as it seeks military and economic benefits from both while avoiding excessive reliance on either.
The 1961 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance — China’s only formal military alliance — marks its 65th anniversary this year, renewed in 2021 for another two decades. It is the legal scaffolding on which the entire relationship rests, but scaffolding is not the same as a living architecture.
Why Does Kim Have the Upper Hand Now?
A question the summit forces into sharp relief: who needs whom more?
The conventional wisdom holds that North Korea is the dependent partner — sanctioned, isolated, economically fragile, and sustained almost entirely by Chinese goodwill. That picture hasn’t aged well.
“North Korea has more leverage vis-à-vis China compared to June 2019, when Xi last visited Pyongyang,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, senior fellow at the Stimson Center’s Korea Program, citing deepened military ties with Moscow, advances in its nuclear programme, and an improved economy in recent years. The logic is straightforward: a country with a viable alternative partner — Russia — and a functioning, albeit limited, economic recovery has less reason to accept Beijing’s terms.
What does China want from Xi’s visit to North Korea? Beijing’s immediate objectives are threefold: reassert strategic influence over a neighbour that has been gravitating toward Moscow; position China as the responsible power capable of managing Korean Peninsula tensions; and give Xi a readout opportunity following his Trump summit, where the White House fact sheet pointedly stated that both leaders had confirmed “their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea.” That wording was almost certainly unwelcome in Pyongyang, but Xi will likely frame it to Kim as diplomatically necessary to placate Washington — a piece of private reassurance that Beijing routinely offers when public statements and private commitments diverge.
At a macro level, Xi is likely hoping to demonstrate a dynamic leading role on the international stage — particularly within the China, Russia, Iran, North Korea grouping of revisionist powers — while portraying US global influence as in decline.
The Pyongyang summit, in this reading, is part of a broader performance of multipolarity.
The Trump Variable and the Nuclear Impasse
The most combustible element in the room — though Kim won’t acknowledge it openly — is the possibility of resumed US-North Korea diplomacy.
Some analysts believe Xi may be carrying a message from Donald Trump, who has signalled willingness to resume diplomacy with Kim. North Korea, however, has insisted Washington drop its denuclearisation precondition before any talks begin. South Korea’s minister of unification noted last month that a possible Pyongyang-Washington summit could be on the agenda of this week’s discussions. Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed hope that Xi’s visit would “play a constructive role in addressing issues related to the Korean Peninsula.”
That’s cautious diplomatic language for: please don’t make things worse.
Kim has been cautious in his diplomacy since he failed in 2019 to gain forward momentum in locking in his nuclear status with the United States. He refused to engage Trump for the remainder of the first Trump administration, ignored the Biden administration for four full years, and has been nonresponsive to US overtures in the second Trump administration. Kim is signalling that he needs stronger assurance that any meeting with Washington would not simply reopen the stalled denuclearisation file.
The structural obstacle is severe. Trump launched military action against Iran’s nuclear programme earlier in his second term, partly to destroy its enrichment capability. Kim has watched that closely. The notion that Pyongyang would move toward denuclearisation talks — even notional ones — in that environment strains credibility. Still, there may be a way for Trump to frame engagement that appeals to Kim, avoids the thorny denuclearisation question in the near term, and claims forward momentum that predecessors failed to achieve.
The Russia Factor: Competition or Complementarity?
The picture grows more complicated when Moscow is introduced.
North Korea has deepened military cooperation with Russia since 2023, including deploying troops to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. That deployment — unprecedented in modern North Korean foreign policy — has given Pyongyang military experience, hard currency, and a second great-power patron. It has also given Beijing reason for concern. A North Korea that is primarily Moscow’s strategic partner is a very different geopolitical liability than one that defers to Beijing.
Yet the evidence suggests Kim is managing both relationships deliberately rather than choosing between them. The meeting demonstrates that North Korea and China can improve relations in spite of Kim’s growing closeness to Russia — it is not a zero-sum choice for Kim.
On the economics, Beijing’s leverage is still real. Two-way trade between China and North Korea in 2025 rose 25% from a year earlier to $2.73 billion, according to data from China’s General Administration of Customs — close to the $2.79 billion recorded in 2019, before pandemic-related border restrictions caused a two-year slump. China remains Pyongyang’s dominant supplier of food, fuel, and industrial inputs. Russia provides weapons contracts and battlefield deployment; China provides the economic oxygen that keeps the state functional. Kim’s strategy appears to be: take both.
The Counterargument: Beijing’s Leverage Is Overstated
Not everyone reads this visit as a Chinese strength play.
There is a credible case that Xi is arriving in Pyongyang with less leverage than the optics suggest. The 2019 visit produced no meaningful shift in North Korean behaviour on the nuclear question. UN sanctions — which China nominally supports — have been progressively hollowed out by Beijing’s own trade normalisation. Though observers hope that Xi might increase pressure on North Korean denuclearisation or even draw a red line seeking to discourage Kim from moving even closer to Russia, these outcomes are unlikely.
The harder realist reading is this: China has consistently prioritised Korean Peninsula stability — meaning no collapse of the Kim regime — over denuclearisation. That preference has never changed. It simply gets re-packaged every few years with a new state visit and a fresh communiqué about “bilateral friendship.”
There is also the domestic politics of the visit to consider. Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s sister and the regime’s most hawkish visible voice, issued a commentary the day before Xi’s arrival that pointedly emphasised North Korea’s sovereign independence. North Korean defectors note that Pyongyang is frequently irritated by what it considers Beijing’s high-handedness — and that irritation has not disappeared simply because the two sides have resumed high-level contact.
Beijing’s influence in Pyongyang is real, but it’s neither unconditional nor unlimited.
What Follows from Here
When Xi departs Pyongyang on June 9, the communiqué will be warm. Both sides will affirm their unbreakable socialist friendship, their mutual commitment to Korean Peninsula stability, and their shared vision of a multipolar world. The state photographers will capture handshakes.
What it won’t resolve: North Korea’s nuclear status, the pace of its missile development, the depth of its Russian military partnership, or the prospects for any serious US-North Korea engagement. Those are structural problems that a two-day state visit cannot move, regardless of how significant the optics are.
The sustainability of improved North Korea-Russia and increasing North Korea-China relations may influence just how long Kim can continue to ignore Washington and Seoul. For now, though, Kim appears confident that he can maintain his balancing act — drawing economic sustenance from China, military partnership from Russia, and nuclear legitimacy from sheer persistence.
“The fact that Xi has decided to make his first overseas trip of 2026 to North Korea reflects the level of significance that Beijing attaches to the attempt to shore up ties,” said William Yang, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Northeast Asia.
Whether that significance translates into actual leverage is the question Beijing has been unable to answer for thirty years. Xi’s jet touched down in Pyongyang this morning. The answer hasn’t changed.
