Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang on Sunday is significant for one reason.
It’s not that they are meeting: The two men met in Beijing just a year ago when China held a massive military parade to mark 80 years since Japan surrendered unconditionally to Allied forces, bringing an end to the second world war.
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What’s surprising is that Xi is travelling at all.
The Chinese leader has not travelled to Pyongyang since 2019, having steadily cut down his travel in recent years, and world leaders like US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin generally come to him these days.
“We need to remember that Xi Jinping has not really travelled abroad that much,” William Yang, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Northeast Asia, told Al Jazeera. “The growing trend is foreign leaders heading to Beijing to meet with him.
“For Xi Jinping to be the one who decides to travel to Pyongyang, it shows the level of significance that China attaches to this trip.”
Xi averaged about 14 trips a year between 2013 and 2019, but dropped to approximately six a year between 2022 and 2025, according to the Asia Society. In 2020, he made just one overseas trip, and in 2021, he made none, as China grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic.
He may be travelling now, though, amid concerns about North Korea’s relationship with Russia, Yang said.
Senior partner no more?
Traditionally, Beijing played the role of senior partner in the China-North Korea relationship, with North Korea heavily dependent on China for as much as 95 percent of its trade, according to one 2022 estimate from the National Committee on North Korea, a US-based nonprofit.
That dynamic has been changing since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however. North Korea has provided Russia with critical weapons, artillery and manpower and is credited by observers with helping to keep Moscow’s war machine going.
South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy, a government-funded research institute, estimates that since 2023, Moscow has paid North Korea as much as $14.4bn for troop deployments and the export of “artillery, shells, and guided and ballistic missiles”.
The report said that North Korea may only have received between $580m and $1.5bn of that in the form of “goods”, which means there is a “significant possibility that the majority of the payment from Moscow was in the form of ‘sensitive military technology or related precision parts and materials that are difficult to observe via satellite’,” according to a translation.
Although China shares a mutual defence treaty with North Korea, it is still wary of North Korea acquiring new military technology, Yang said.
“Beijing has always been very careful about providing military assistance to North Korea because they do not see a militarily stronger North Korea as necessarily in its favour,” he said. “A North Korea that is militarily emboldened through its relationship with Russia could be a potential source of disruption to the balance of power and status quo on the Korean Peninsula.”
North Korea has already carried out eight missile launches since the start of the year, and in May unveiled a new AI-guided tactical cruise missile, according to North Korean media and the US Naval Institute.
Earlier this week, North Korean state media also released photos of Kim touring a new “weapons-grade nuclear materials” factory, which would be used to expand Pyongyang’s nuclear capability at an “exponential rate”.
Fluctuating tensions
North Korea has technically been at war with South Korea since 1950, with the conflict suspended by a 1953 armistice agreement. The two countries are divided by a 250-kilometre-long (155-mile-long) Demilitarized Zone, splitting the Korean Peninsula.
Tensions have fluctuated dramatically over the years, reaching a recent low point in 2024 when Kim abandoned the long-term goal of Korean unification.
He has largely cut off communications ever since, according to observers. On Friday, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it hopes that Xi’s trip will “play a constructive role in addressing issues related to the Korean Peninsula” – suggesting that Seoul may have lobbied the Chinese leader to try to smooth over relations.
South Korean Minister of Unification Chung Dong-young separately told reporters last month that he expects the two leaders to discuss a possible meeting between Kim and Trump later in the year.
Xi may also be alarmed by other security developments in East Asia, including news of a possible military-logistics support pact between South Korea and Japan, which was raised at the Shangri-La Dialogue of regional defence officials in Singapore last weekend.
While China and South Korea’s relationship fluctuates, its ties with Japan are acrimonious due to longstanding grievances dating back to Imperial Japan’s occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s. Beijing has also objected to recent moves by Tokyo to expand its de facto military.
