" 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.
On Wednesday, North Korean state media said Kim and Xi reached an understanding on denuclearization and other issues following the Singapore summit. The report by the Korean Central News Agency did not give details on the views shared by the two leaders. But, in the past, North Korea defined denuclearization as including an end to the U.S.-South Korean military alliance and a shift in U.S. defense policies to end nuclear protection for South Korea and Japan.
lthough 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.
[Trump threatens tariffs on nearly all of China’s products shipped to the U.S.]
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. "
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