China's Xi to Meet With Kim Jong Un in North Korea Ahead of G-20

(Bloomberg) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to North Korea on Thursday for talks with Kim Jong Un, state media in Beijing and Pyongyang reported.

The state visit will take place on June 20-21, China’s official Xinhua News Agency and the Korean Central News Agency reported Monday. The visit on the 70th anniversary of the establishment of relations between the two states “is of great significance for efforts to build on past successes,” said Song Tao, head of the international department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, according to Xinhua.

This will be Xi’s first visit as Chinese leader to North Korea and the first by China’s top official in about 14 years to the impoverished state that depends on Beijing for economic support. It comes ahead of next week’s Group of 20 summit in Japan that’s expected to be attended by Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump as well as Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

“This trip to North Korea is part of China’s strengthening of neighboring diplomacy against the backdrop of a China-U.S. trade war,” said Wang Sheng, professor of international politics at Jilin University. “The move is also intended to make it clear to the United States that China’s role cannot be overlooked, whether it is in Northeast Asia or a multinational occasion such as the G-20.”

The visit comes after a Feb. 28 meeting between Kim and Trump collapsed in Hanoi, in a fight over the U.S.-backed sanctions that are pressuring North Korea’s economy. Beijing is North Korea’s biggest backer, and Xi’s visit continues a pattern of close coordination between the neighbors during negotiations with the U.S. over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

‘Applying Pressure’

“The timing makes it even more tense, especially applying pressure toward South Korea and the U.S.,” said Kim Dong-yub, a professor specializing in North Korea at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in South Korea. “It seems to me that North Korea is choosing to walk a new path of its own, just as it had warned before.”

Kim last month oversaw a live-fire military exercise that potentially included North Korea’s first ballistic missile launch since 2017, while stopping just short of challenging Trump’s bottom line by continuing a moratorium on intercontinental ballistic missile firings and underground nuclear tests.

Even so, despite Trump’s frequent praise of Kim -- declaring last week that the dictator had sent him a “beautiful letter” -- there’s no evidence a year after their first meeting that North Korea has made a strategic decision to give up its nuclear weapons program, according to people familiar with the talks.

Xi’s visit may contribute to the early reopening of denuclearization talks, South Korea’s presidential spokeswoman Ko Min-jung said Monday.

Nuclear Talks

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, who’s visiting Russia, discussed Trump’s planned June trip to South Korea in a phone call Sunday with U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, according to the ministry in Seoul. She and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks in Moscow on Monday on ways to cooperate in securing the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to the South Korean government.

South Korea’s nuclear envoy Lee Do-hoon will also meet U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun in Washington this week to discuss ways of resuming denuclearization talks, the foreign ministry in Seoul said in a statement Monday.

Trump and his aides contend that sanctions continue to bite, even if enforcement may have loosened, particularly along the border with China. And the president believes that as long as North Korea isn’t testing long-range, nuclear-capable missiles, the threat is vastly reduced.

Kim visited China three times in 2018, including in June, a week after his first summit with Trump. In January this year, just a month before his second summit with Trump, Kim and his wife Ri Sol Ju went to Beijing. That trip laid the ground for his subsequent meeting with the U.S. president.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Dandan Li in Beijing at dli395@bloomberg.net;Jihye Lee in Seoul at jlee2352@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, Philip Glamann

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

With assistance from Bloomberg