Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to North Korea next week in what will be his first visit to Pyongyang since 2019 — a gap of seven years during which North Korea conducted multiple ICBM tests, made advances in its nuclear warhead miniaturisation programme, and deployed troops to support Russian operations in Ukraine. The BBC separately reported the visit as confirmation of a summit between Xi and Kim Jong Un. The visit follows a period in which North Korea’s relationships with both Russia and China have evolved in ways that challenge the longstanding Western assumption that Beijing exercises meaningful constraint over Pyongyang’s behaviour. No agenda has been officially disclosed, but the timing — with Washington and Seoul watching carefully — is unlikely to be coincidental.
The received wisdom
The conventional reading of a Xi-Kim summit is broadly reassuring: it means Beijing is engaged, lines of communication are open, and China still has leverage that Washington can theoretically use. The Obama administration’s “strategic patience” doctrine rested on this premise. The Biden administration, more explicitly, tried to use great-power competition framing to incentivise Beijing to restrain Pyongyang — the argument being that a nuclear North Korea destabilises a region China also has an interest in stabilising. On this view, Xi’s visit is a net positive. A China that is meeting Kim is a China that is at least present in the conversation, which is preferable to a China that has stepped back entirely.
There is also a school of thought that views the visit primarily through the lens of the Russia-Ukraine war: Beijing is trying to manage the optics of North Korea’s military deployments to Russia, which have been diplomatically embarrassing and have complicated China’s effort to position itself as a neutral peacemaker. A high-profile summit is, on this reading, a reminder that Kim’s primary patron is still Beijing, not Moscow.
A different read
Both readings have some merit, but they share a common flaw: they assume China’s fundamental interest is in a stable, non-nuclear Korean peninsula. Seven years of evidence suggests otherwise.
North Korea’s nuclear programme has advanced substantially on Xi’s watch, through a period of intensive Chinese-Russian-North Korean trilateral deepening. The BBC noted that this will be Xi’s first visit since 2019 — a period during which North Korea tested intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental United States, developed what US intelligence assesses as operational nuclear warheads, and by some accounts supplied over a million artillery shells to Russia. If China’s leverage were being exercised during this period, the results are not visible.
The more useful analytical frame is not leverage but buffer management. China’s core interest on the Korean peninsula is not a denuclearised North Korea; it is the absence of a unified, US-allied Korea on its border. From Beijing’s perspective, a nuclear-armed North Korea that functions as a disruptive and expensive client is preferable to a Korean unification scenario in which American forces would sit on the Yalu River. Henry Kissinger understood this when he described the basic geometry of Chinese strategic interests in Northeast Asia: the Korean buffer has been a constant in Chinese strategic thinking since the Sino-Korean War of 1950, whatever the political system in Pyongyang.
The North Korean troop deployments to Russia complicate this calculus, but perhaps not in the way Western analysts assume. North Korea’s battlefield experience in Ukraine gives Kim’s conventional forces a capability upgrade that makes him marginally less dependent on Chinese patronage — and therefore marginally more independent. Xi’s visit may be partly an effort to re-anchor that relationship, not a display of dominance.
Meanwhile, the US-South Korea-Japan trilateral security arrangement has been deepening. The Biden-era Camp David declaration formalized regular trilateral military exercises; the Trump administration has, despite some initial ambiguity, maintained the security commitments to Seoul and Tokyo. Washington is simultaneously watching North Korea’s weapons pipeline to Russia and watching China’s renewed overtures to Pyongyang. NPR reported that the visit marks the first in seven years, which underscores how unusual — and deliberate — the timing is.
The danger is that Western policymakers will read this visit as evidence that China can be a productive partner in constraining North Korea, and will trade concessions — on Taiwan, on trade, on AI semiconductor controls — for Chinese engagement that delivers nothing verifiable. That trade has been offered before. The denuclearisation it was supposed to produce has not arrived.
What to watch
What, if any, communiqué emerges from the summit: language around “strategic cooperation,” “economic development,” or “security guarantees” will tell you whether Beijing is trying to restrain Pyongyang or ratify its current trajectory.
South Korea and Japan’s response: Seoul has been navigating an increasingly difficult position between Washington’s security umbrella and Beijing’s economic weight. Tokyo’s reaction will be a leading indicator of whether the trilateral security architecture holds.
Whether North Korean troop rotations in Russia continue or pause: a visible drawdown following the summit would suggest Beijing exercised real leverage; continued deployments would confirm the opposite.
US intelligence assessments of DPRK warhead numbers: if estimates tick upward in the next six months, the Xi visit will in retrospect look less like diplomacy and more like a courtesy call to a nuclear power.
— J