North Korea’s Kim makes another trip to China. That complicates things for Trump.
This
image taken from China's CCTV on June 19, 2018, shows Chinese President
Xi Jinping with his wife Peng Liyuan at right and North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un with his wife Ri Sol-Ju at left during a welcome ceremony at
the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (CCTV via AP Video)
(Anonymous/AP)
BEIJING — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is in China. Again.
Kim arrived Tuesday for his third visit to China in the span of three
months, meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the
People in the heart of Beijing.
The visit comes a week after President Trump met with Kim in Singapore and a day after the United States confirmed that it will cancel what Trump called “war games” with South Korea scheduled for August. News of Kim’s trip came just hours after Trump threatened China with tariffs on $200 billion in goods.
On
Tuesday evening, Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, were welcomed by Xi and
his wife, Peng Liyuan. Photos from the event show Kim and Xi shaking
hands in front of a row of Chinese and North Korean flags — a visual echo of Kim and Trump’s much-photographed handshake in Singapore.
Xi
reportedly praised the outcome of the Singapore summit, calling it an
“important step toward the political solution of the Korean Peninsula
nuclear issue,” according to the party-
controlled press.
controlled press.
Although
details are scarce, the timing and staging of Kim’s trip sends a clear
message about Beijing’s place at the center of East Asian diplomacy —
and its power over Pyongyang.
With U.S.-China trade ties on the
rocks, Kim is well-positioned to play both powers, talking sweet to
Trump while pursuing a closer relationship with Xi.
“Although
it seems there is a booming romance between Kim Jong Un and Trump, Kim
understands the hierarchy. He knows that Xi is the Asian Godfather,”
said Yanmei Xie, a China policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an
economic research firm in Beijing. “He is making a pragmatic calculation
that China can provide economic assistance to integrate North Korea
diplomatically and economically into Northeast Asia.”
Kim’s
visit to China this week will renew questions about what happens
post-Singapore. Although Trump has taken great pains to cast last week’s
summit as an unqualified success, the next steps are not clear.
With
North Korea’s nuclear testing halted, for now, and August’s war games
off, China may be willing to cut North Korea some slack.
In Beijing, Kim is likely to ask Xi to ease up on economic sanctions — something the United States strongly opposes.
Last
week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a news conference in
Beijing with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that China “acknowledged that the
sanctions regime that is in place today will remain in place until such
time as that denuclearization is in fact complete.”
But the problem is that there is no consensus on what “denuclearization” means.
The
United States wants North Korea to abandon the nuclear weapons program
that it took years to build — an outcome experts see as extremely
unlikely.
“There is a regional effort, a sort
of Northeast Asia coalition of make-believe, to maintain the fiction
that the North Korea will de-nuke as long as Americans keep talking to
it,” Xie said.
China
is less focused on getting Kim to give away his weapons than on getting
him to fall into line. It may eventually use trade and investment to
keep him onside, experts said.
With North Korea
still struggling under U.N. sanctions, “China’s political and economic
support is still highly important,” said Zhao Tong, a North Korea expert
at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
Zhao said the question now is: “How can China help North Korea develop its economy?”
China
can also help Kim normalize North Korea’s diplomatic status. That
starts with treating him less like a rogue dictator and more like a
visiting statesman.
On Kim’s first visit as
leader, in March, he arrived unannounced aboard an armored train.
Beijing did not disclose his presence, or publish photos, until he left.
Kim met Xi a second time
in May in the Chinese city of Dalian. Photographs of the two leaders
strolling and chatting by the seaside were not released until Kim was on
his way home.
On Tuesday evening, Chinese
news media released photographs of Kim meeting Xi at the Great Hall of
the People, where he often greets visiting dignitaries and heads of
state — the first time photos of Kim in China have been released while a
visit was in progress.
Brian Murphy in Seoul and Shirley Zhao and Yang Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
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