Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit North Korea next week, state media said on Friday, his first trip abroad this year after hosting a series of leaders as Beijing asserts itself as a global diplomatic superpower.
State broadcaster CCTV said Xi will visit from June 8 to 9 at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, his first trip to Pyongyang in seven years.
Beijing is a vital source of political and economic support for North Korea, which is one of the most diplomatically isolated countries in the world and under heavy international sanctions.
The upcoming meeting will be Xi’s first official overseas trip this year and comes after he hosted back-to-back summits with US President Donald Trump AND Vladimir Putin of Russia last month.
“China is meeting with leaders from around the world, coordinating positions and playing a mediating role,” Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, told AFP.
“As China’s international standing rises, Beijing is likely to seek to draw Pyongyang more actively into its diplomatic orbit as a partner in advancing a more multilateral order.”
The two leaders will “exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of common interest,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a news conference on Friday.
The visit was “an opportunity to promote the development” of bilateral relations and to “make greater contributions to regional and even world peace,” Mao said.
Pyongyang depends on China for up to 95 percent of its total trade and 85 percent of its exports, according to 2022 statistics from the National Committee on North Korea, a Washington-based think tank.
But North Korea has drawn closer to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with Pyongyang sending thousands of troops and weapons to support the war effort.
In return, analysts say North Korea is receiving financial aid, military technology, food and energy, helping it circumvent sanctions over its banned nuclear programs.
Xi’s choice of Pyongyang for his first overseas trip of 2026 is “a deliberate visual counter to the prevailing reading in Western capitals that Pyongyang had quietly migrated into Moscow’s orbit,” said Seong-Hyon Lee of the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations.
Relationship management
Xi last met with Kim in September, when he invited the North Korean leader and Putin as well guests of honor at a military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over Imperial Japan in World War II.
In 2019, Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan were welcomed to North Korea with pomp and fanfare to celebrate the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship”.
Beijing’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a visit to Pyongyang in April that China and Korea should “increase coordination” on international and regional issues.
China’s interests include monitoring North Korea’s nuclear program, whose progress is “extremely fast”, Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) told AFP.
“This aspect needs to be managed. If North Korea acts in a provocative and belligerent manner, it may cause regional conflict, which may be against China’s interests,” Hong said.
Kim pledged an “exponential” increase in nuclear military capabilities on Wednesday as he visited a new atomic facility, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported.
South Korea’s foreign ministry has said it hopes exchanges between North Korea and China will contribute to peace and stability and that China can play a constructive role.
Pyongyang has repeatedly shunned the South Korean government’s efforts to improve relations, calling Seoul its most “hostile” adversary.
Analysts have seen Xi’s latest diplomatic storm as part of efforts to position China as a viable and strategic alternative to an unpredictable United States.
Traditional US allies, incl Britain’s Keir Starmer AND Emmanuel Macron of Francethey have also come to Beijing.
However, KINU’s Hong judged the chances of Xi helping to broker a meeting between Trump and Kim as “very low”.
