Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, in what analysts describe as an effort to revitalise the relationship between Beijing and a neighbour that has grown increasingly autonomous in its foreign and military policy. The BBC frames the visit as a question of “friendship or leverage” — asking whether Xi is visiting as an equal partner or as a senior patron seeking to reassert influence. The trip comes against a backdrop of Kim Jong-un inspecting munitions at a weapons factory, signalling that Pyongyang’s military self-reliance posture is very much on display even as Beijing’s leader arrives.
The received wisdom
The mainstream liberal analysis of this meeting runs roughly as follows: Xi is making a strategic error by propping up a rogue nuclear state, and the international community should press Beijing to use its leverage over Pyongyang to denuclearise. On this view, China holds the key to North Korean behaviour — it provides the majority of North Korea’s energy and food, and Pyongyang cannot survive without Chinese patronage. If only Xi would apply genuine pressure, Kim could be brought to the table. The visit, in this framing, is a missed opportunity: instead of demanding concessions on the weapons programme, Xi is offering Kim the prestige of a high-profile diplomatic visit while getting nothing substantive in return.
This analysis has a certain logic and has driven American diplomatic strategy toward China on the North Korea file for three decades. The premise that Chinese leverage is the master key to denuclearisation has animated countless Washington negotiations, from the Six-Party Talks of the 2000s to more recent bilateral engagements.
A different read
The problem is that this analysis has been tested — extensively and repeatedly — and has consistently failed to predict or produce outcomes. China has never been willing to apply the kind of pressure on North Korea that would genuinely threaten regime stability in Pyongyang, because the costs of a collapsing North Korean state fall almost entirely on China: refugee flows, potential Korean reunification under a US-allied Seoul government, and chaos on its northeastern border. Beijing has always preferred a stable, nuclear-armed Kim to the alternative.
What the received wisdom misses is that the relationship between Beijing and Pyongyang has been evolving away from straightforward Chinese dominance for over a decade. Kim has systematically reduced North Korean dependence on China in key sectors, developed an indigenous weapons capacity that gives him genuine strategic independence, and — as the munitions factory inspection suggests — positioned North Korea as an arms exporter with its own customers, including, if numerous reports are accurate, Russia. That last relationship is the crucial variable: North Korean weapons flowing to the Russian front in Ukraine have given Pyongyang hard currency and a new patron, reducing its dependence on Beijing and giving Kim room to be far less solicitous of Chinese preferences.
This is the context in which Xi’s visit makes sense as a defensive move rather than a confident assertion of leadership. Beijing is worried that its leverage over Pyongyang is actually declining. Kim has options now — Russian arms deals, Chinese trade, whatever indirect economic channels exist — that he did not have a decade ago. Xi going to Pyongyang is partly an effort to remind Kim of the relationship’s importance before North Korea’s growing autonomy becomes irreversible.
There is a useful parallel here with China’s approach to other difficult periphery relationships. With Myanmar, with Cambodia, with the various parties in the South China Sea — Beijing has consistently preferred patron-client arrangements that provide the appearance of Chinese influence while accepting significant limits on actual leverage. The pattern suggests that Beijing is more comfortable with dependent neighbours than with independent ones, even when those dependent neighbours cause embarrassment, as North Korea’s weapons programme reliably does in international forums.
The right-of-centre geopolitical take here is unfashionably simple: North Korea has nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un has no intention of giving them up, and Xi Jinping cannot make him. What would actually constrain North Korean behaviour is a credible US military deterrent and a diplomatic framework that accepts Pyongyang’s nuclear status as a permanent fact while managing its proliferation risks — an uncomfortable conclusion that no American administration has been willing to embrace publicly, because acknowledging failure is politically costly. The summit, whatever it produces, will not change that underlying reality.
What to watch
- Whether any joint statement from the Xi-Kim summit addresses North Korean weapons exports, particularly to Russia, which is the most consequential current proliferation concern
- How Seoul responds: South Korean governments have historically been caught between Washington’s pressure to confront Pyongyang and Seoul’s own interest in managing a neighbour it cannot ignore
- Whether Kim uses the visit to extract economic concessions from China — energy guarantees, development assistance — that might modestly reduce his incentive to seek revenue from arms exports
- Any signals from the meeting about North Korean attitudes toward the wider US-China rivalry, which is increasingly the frame within which Pyongyang calculates its interests
— J