" BEIJING — Propaganda departments in China and North Korea were in full swing on Wednesday as Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, concluded a two-day tour of China that painted the once-reclusive autocrat as a forward-looking leader.

After meeting with President Xi Jinping and briefing him on the summit meeting with President Trump in Singapore last week, the North Korean leader was portrayed in the Chinese state media as eager to learn how to turn a developing nation into a global superpower.

In North Korea, a propaganda machine that for decades turned out anti-American slogans and that denigrated South Koreans struck a new conciliatory tone, publishing posters this week that heralded unity on the Korean Peninsula.

A focus on development :

Before his plane took off in the late afternoon, Mr. Kim made “on the spot” inspections of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and a subsidiary of the Beijing Infrastructure Investment Company on his second day in the capital.

Both organizations are part of China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” initiative, created to spread the country’s global influence by lending other countries money for big infrastructure projects built by Chinese companies.

The agriculture academy specializes in machinery, animal disease prevention and seed production for hybrid rice and corn, according to its website. These are all things that North Korea badly needs.

The infrastructure company, a state-owned enterprise specializing in tunnel construction and real estate development, recently won a contract under the Belt and Road initiative to build railroad tracks in China’s far western region of Xinjiang, its website says.

North Korea experts in China have predicted that Beijing will try to extend the initiative to North Korea. The main question, they say, is whether that can happen while sanctions are still in place.

The visits, which followed ones last month by a team of North Korean provincial governors, dovetailed with Mr. Kim’s new emphasis on building the North Korean economy, a move that China supports wholeheartedly. Mr. Trump has said that China and South Korea should be mainly responsible for helping North Korea in this regard.

Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, also visited the agricultural research institution while he ruled North Korea, in 2006, one of more than two dozen factories and plants he inspected during seven trips to China. Over many decades, it was at the forefront of introducing technology and management techniques that transformed China’s agricultural sector.

It seems the elder Mr. Kim never put what he learned there into practice, as North Korea still struggles to feed its own people.

“There’s great potential for China-North Korea cooperation regarding agricultural technologies,” said Li Zonglin, director of the College of Economics and Management at Yanbian University.

North Korea’s change in tone :

New propaganda posters shared on Twitter this week focused on the summit meeting in April between Mr. Kim and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in. They appeared to be designed to whip up domestic support and expectations for Mr. Kim’s continued diplomatic outreach toward South Korea.

One poster showed Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon holding up the agreement from their meeting, with a slogan that read, “The whole Korean nation should firmly consolidate under the flag of national independence and build a strong, prosperous, unified nation!”

Another poster turned part of the summit agreement into a slogan: “Let’s exert joint efforts to alleviate the acute military tension and eliminate the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula!”

It showed two bulldozers demolishing the heavily armed inter-Korean border and removing a missile bearing the words “joint military drills for invading the North.” In their place, the bulldozers carried banners that read “independent reunification” and “coprosperity.”

The posters’ emphasis on peace and reconciliation, like Mr. Kim’s shift to diplomacy, are a drastic departure from last year, when North Korea helped drive the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war by conducting a series of nuclear and missile tests and exchanging threats of nuclear annihilation with the Trump administration.

While exhortations for reunification and inter-Korean cooperation have been standard fare in North Korean propaganda, the new posters were also conspicuously lacking in anti-American messages. But it remains to be seen whether, after the Trump-Kim talks in Singapore, North Korea will take down its widespread anti-American propaganda and replace it with a softer message toward the United States.

Deepening ties :

The Chinese state media celebrated Mr. Kim’s surprise visit to Beijing — his third since March — saying that China and North Korea had now repaired their fractured relationship for the good of the world.  "

By
Daniel Henninger





“ In a press conference after his summit with Kim Jong Un, President Trump said: “Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

Can Donald Trump break every rule in the book and still win?
With the North Korean nuclear threat, we are about to find out.

Mr. Trump successfully broke the rules of presidential campaigning. His defeat of Hillary Clinton was “unthinkable.” He has turned virtually the entire Washington press corps into a determined opposition and routinely calls on his own attorney general to resign.

No U.S. president has ever done these things. What has this approach produced?

Politically, it has provided his supporters the constant reassurance that he will fight for them in the most public way with anyone.

Mr. Trump’s most substantive legislative achievement is the 2017 tax cut. If he announced his retirement next week, history would record that his presidency gave the nation one of the most beneficial economies on record. In the U.S. today, there is work for virtually everyone.

The tax cut, however, was negotiated with Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady, who should not be mistaken for Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.

This week in Singapore, President Trump greeted Mr. Kim in front of American and North Korean flags arrayed as equals, extended his hand in friendship four times before their private conversation, and when the summit was over said, “I do trust him.”

There are at least three arguments for Mr. Trump’s convivial approach to Kim Jong Un.

One is that his predecessors’ old-school diplomatic strategies toward North Korea manifestly failed. A second is that unlike Ronald Reagan’s nuclear negotiating partners in the Soviet Union, which was malign but rational, Kim Jong Un’s rule is solitary and whimsically homicidal. In early 2017, Mr. Kim executed five senior North Korean officials with an antiaircraft gun. There is arguably no alternative to Mr. Trump’s fake flattery of a nut case who possesses up to 60 nuclear bombs.

A last argument for Mr. Trump’s break-all-the-rules approach is that the clock is ticking. Mike Pompeo said in early 2017, when he was CIA director, that Mr. Kim’s scientists were probably within “a handful of months” of being able to produce a nuclear-armed ballistic missile that could survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The best guess previously was that North Korea was years from this capability.

There is indeed a case for disruption and breaking the rules of international engagement. But to put it bluntly: When do we start winning?

Motion isn’t winning. It’s just motion. Mr. Trump’s unconstrained self-confidence is something to behold, such as his tweeting Wednesday, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” But self-belief cannot make the decades-old complexities of a North Korea simply go away.

After the summit, Mr. Trump made a major announcement about pulling back the U.S. troop presence in South Korea. Was there any planning behind that surprise?

It would be nice to believe that Secretary of State Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton have been working the back channels and that significant breakthroughs will emerge now. There is no evidence of that. Mr. Pompeo on Wednesday described a time-frame for disarmament of 21/2 years. It sounds as if we are back in the familiar foothills of the North Korean nuclear mountain.

In 2017, after Mr. Kim exploded the largest of his nuclear bombs so far, the Trump administration obtained U.N. sanctions that were squeezing North Korea. I think one of the main reasons Mr. Kim agreed to the summit was to get relief from those sanctions. Within hours of the summit, a statement by China made it clear the sanctions regime is going to erode during negotiations. Restoring that leverage will be impossible. It is a big loss.

The Iran nuclear-deal withdrawal was a good step, but what has become of it? State Department officials are attempting to gain Europe’s support for this decision at the same time that Mr. Trump is fighting the G-7 over trade.

Mr. Trump’s public trade battle with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Europeans is entertaining, and this week’s news that the U.S. is about to impose tariffs of tens of billions of dollars on China is provocative. But when should we expect a recognizable economic benefit for the U.S. to appear?

In dealing with foreign powers—North Korea, Iran, China, Europe, Mexico, Canada, Russia—we have been watching the attention-getting half of Mr. Trump’s improvisational negotiating model. Where’s the rest of it? When do we get the payoff for all this activity?

It isn’t just our show, either. America’s traditional Asian allies in Japan, India, Taiwan and elsewhere are calculating, with every U.S. statement or presidential tweet, whether to lean toward the U.S., China or even Russia.

Feeling good again about America matters. But in an unsentimental world, that isn’t the same as winning.  “