Communist China’s Xi Due Monday at Pyongyang for Summit With Kim Jong-un

Communist China’s president, Xi Jinping, goes to Pyongyang Monday for talks with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un at a time when America’s relations with South Korea are deteriorating. Mr. Xi, fresh off his summit with President Trump in Beijing last month, is sure to focus on China’s role as North Korea’s leading benefactor despite Mr. Kim’s armed support of Russian forces in UkraineMr. Kim’s heightened hostility toward South Korea will inevitably play into the summit, which lasts two days, as Mr. Xi shows China’s value not merely as North Korea’s primary source of oil and food but also as South Korea’s primary benefactor.China’s relations with South Korea have tightened while President Lee Jase-myung has been reluctant to cooperate fully with America, which has 28,500 troops in the South for security against the North.“Clearly the Lee government was going to reorient policy toward China,” said a former American ambassador to South Korea, Philip Goldberg. Mr. Goldberg, who served as ambassador to Seoul between 2022 and 2025, attributed the change in large measure to President Trump’s uncertain policy toward South Korea, from which he threatened to withdraw some of America’s troops while moving tariffs up and down. America’s “traditional relationship based on the alliance seems to be changing,” Mr. Goldberg said at a forum at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington. “It’s a complete redesign of the relationship” with “outstanding ramifications.”Amid America’s shifting, uncertain ties with South Korea, Mr. Xi will build on China’s role as North Korea’s historic ally that rescued the North from defeat in the Korean War. South Korean officials have speculated that Mr. Xi may urge Mr. Kim to receive President Trump for another summit, which Mr. Trump has eagerly sought. While Mr. Xi may touch on the topic of another Trump-Xi summit, he will focus on showing that China, not Russia, is North Korea’s real friend.Mr. Goldberg doubted, however, that Mr. Kim would be inclined to reverse the policy of avoiding ties with South Korea — and then meeting Mr. Trump. The “only conditions,” he said, would be a rupture with Russia as well as “economic hardship” severe enough for the North to look to South Korea and America for aid.“It’s been a challenging year,” another former American ambassador to South Korea, Kathleen Stephens, observed, citing the “abandonment” by Mr.Trump of the Korean-American free trade agreement. Security for South Korea was also uncertain, she said, amid “a questioning of the longstanding relationship” that has forced Americans and South Koreans “to work with a bit of a deficit in trust.””Mr. Xi last visited the North Korean capital in June 2019 after Mr. Trump had seen Mr. Kim at their summit in Singapore in June 2018 and then again in Hanoi in February 2019. Mr. Xi invited Mr. Kim and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin went to Beijing last September for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II — and sat between them to watch the parade.While gearing up for the summit in Pyongyang, the Chinese have been as eager as ever to pounce on signs of discontent. Relatives of those who died in the massacre of hundreds of protesters on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, were barred from visiting the graves of their loved ones on the anniversary for the first time. In Hong Kong, the scene of mass protests against the regime several years ago, police questioned mourners at a memorial vigil.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, not alluding to Mr. Trump’s recent summit with Mr. Xi, memorialized the “Chinese students, workers and other civilians who lost their lives” at Tiananmen.“ No amount of censorship can erase the past,” he said, of “those who sacrificed to uphold their unalienable rights of free expression and peaceful assembly.”

Communist China’s Xi Due Monday at Pyongyang for Summit With Kim Jong-un

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