North Korea leader visits China again
BEIJING — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday amid an escalating trade conflict between China and the United States, one that gives him an opening to play the powers against each other as Washington presses him to dismantle his nuclear arsenal.
“This could be regarded as an intuitive response to Trump’s escalation of the trade war,” Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said of China’s invitation to Kim.
The surprise trip, just a week after his landmark summit meeting in Singapore with President Trump, is the North Korean leader’s third visit to China since March. His two-day trip was announced by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, as Kim was arriving Tuesday morning; his previous stops in China were not made public until after they were over.
For his first one, in March — which was also his first trip abroad and his first meeting with a head of state since becoming the North’s leader — Kim arrived in Beijing aboard an armored train and he spent two days in the capital for talks with President Xi Jinping. In May, Kim visited the port city of Dalian, also spending time with Xi.
This time, Kim arrived much as any other foreign leader might, landing at Beijing’s international airport and taking a stretch limousine to the city center.
Xinhua’s report gave no details of the agenda for Kim’s visit. But he was likely to deliver a personal briefing about what happened behind closed doors during three hours of talks with Trump last week, the first meeting ever between leaders of the United States and North Korea.
Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea who has lived in the North and still has ties there, said Kim would be seeking to take advantage of the trade conflict between the United States and China, deepening their rivalry to ensure they do not join forces against him, as they did last year on the U.N. sanctions over his weapons program.
“He wants to further disrupt the united ChinaU.S. front, which somewhat surprisingly emerged last year, but now is in critical condition due to the trade war,” Lankov said.
For its part, China would like Kim to pull back a bit on the bonhomie he showed Trump in Singapore, analysts in Asia said.
China, they said, sees the trade dispute with Washington as a more serious threat than Kim’s nuclear arsenal.