President Xi’s Tryst With Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang Is a Bigger Deal for China Than Beijing Summits With Trump and Putin

Communist China’s state press machine is smothering President Xi Jinping’s two-day visit to North Korea in the florid language of an event deemed as the greatest, most significant summit of them all.From the headlines declaring that “wide-ranging cooperation” is boosting the friendship between China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to “urgent” dispatches on whatever Mr. Xi wants people to believe, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, is firing off a number of “news” stories far outpacing its coverage of last month’s visits to Beijing by President Trump and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.“Urgent” is the breathless label attached to one dispatch reporting that Mr. Xi assured that the “government’s firm commitment to China-DPRK traditional friendship will not change.” Mr. Xi imparted the message during talks with Mr. Kim, the news agency reported using the North Korean dictator’s formal title of “general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”Mr. Xi’s initial sit-down with Mr. Kim followed as elaborate a welcome as North Korea has ever been accorded a visiting head of state. From the moment that Mr. Kim and his wife, Ri Sol-ju, greeted Mr. Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at the airport, it was evident that China and North Korea both wanted it known that they are on the best of terms. At Kim Il-sung Square, named for Mr. Kim’s grandfather, strutting soldiers paraded while shrieking school children waved furiously in a show that mirrored the greeting accorded Russia’s President Putin two years ago.Left out of the torrent of words and images conveyed by China’s state press are mentions of China’s giant rivals, Russia and America, or the regional powers that matter most, Japan and South Korea. It literally goes without saying that Mr. Xi is out to prove that China, not Russia, is North Korea’s big brother, and Mr. Kim had better not forget it. The leading newspaper of China’s often contentious great power rival to the south of the Himalayan frontier, the Times of India, offered its analysis of what’s at stake beneath the pageantry and verbiage.“The Chinese president is personally courting Kim Jong-un,” reads the article titled, “Why China is Worried about Kim Jong Un and Russia.” “There is a deeply strategic reason: Beijing is growing increasingly uncomfortable with Pyongyang’s warming ties with Moscow.” Mr. Xi’s visit, the Times contends, “is driven by China’s desire to weaken the deepening Russia-North Korea alliance while protecting Beijing’s own strategic interests in northeast Asia.”Without a glance at the missile technology, food, and natural gas that Russia is delivering to North Korea in return for the troops and ammunition Pyongyang is sending to Russia’s warfront with Ukraine, Xinhua left no doubt that China wishes to bestow a cornucopia of riches on the North.China “stands ready to work with the DPRK to strengthen the alignment of development strategies and expand practical cooperation in such areas as economy and trade, agriculture, construction, science and technology, as well as health care,” reads the dispatch quoting Mr. Xi.Another lengthy Xinhua dispatch carried by the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, summarized the blessings China wishes to shower on North Korea 65 years after the two signed a “treaty of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance.” The exchanges, ranging from economic, cultural, and educational agreements, are “injecting new vitality into the traditional friendship,” the newspaper gushed.Implicit in the superlatives is the sense that China believes its relations with North Korea may have been undermined by Mr. Kim’s turn toward Mr. Putin’s needs in the war in Ukraine. Also omitted in China’s coverage is that Mr. Xi has not visited North Korea since 2019. He did welcome Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin to a “victory parade” at Beijing last September to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, but the neighbors did not get into substantive discussions about a relationship that has often been prickly.North Korea, counting on China for most of its oil and as much as half its food, has long resented its dependence on China, which rescued the North from defeat by American and South Korean forces in the Korean War. Mr. Kim may have tired of appearing overly grateful to Mr. Xi for his largesse.With Pyongyang’s housing, private auto, cellular, and even, electricity markets all in expansion mode — so much so that the once-dark country is now visible at night by satellite — a senior analyst at International Crisis Group, William Yang, notes that Mr. Kim is flexing as he hosts Mr. Xi, who desires to reassert China’s influence to “prevent Pyongyang from drifting away from its orbit.” “For Kim, while he didn’t secure Xi’s tacit acknowledgement of North Korea’s status as a nuclear state, the visit allowed him to showcase North Korea’s diplomatic prowess and elevate Pyongyang’s global standing through the image of him hosting Xi, the leader of the second largest economy in the world,” Mr. Yang posted. Mr. Kim’s party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, carried a routine dispatch of the visit, devoid of the fervor emoted by the Chinese press. “The Korean people ardently welcome Comrade Xi Jinping visiting the DPRK again with the feelings of warm friendship of the fraternal Chinese people.”Without hinting at China’s economic aid, the article noted that “Korean revolutionaries,” led by Kim Il-sung, “helped the Chinese revolution with blood in the arduous anti-Japanese struggle.” The Chinese “rendered material and moral assistance to the Korean people in their struggle,” it reads, ignoring the aid that Mr. Xi is promising in his current visit.

President Xi’s Tryst With Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang Is a Bigger Deal for China Than Beijing Summits With Trump and Putin

President Xi’s Tryst With Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang Is a Bigger Deal for China Than Beijing Summits With Trump and Putin

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