Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader, surfaced on June 5, 2026 after ten unexplained days out of public view, triggering a wave of speculation about his health and political survival. Within hours of his reappearance, state media announced a state visit to North Korea for June 8 and 9. Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based Chinese political commentator, argues that Xi went to Pyongyang because the Party’s internal pressure left him no choice.
Xi’s ten-day disappearance triggered coup rumors inside China
Xi’s absence ran from May 26 to June 4, 2026, a stretch of ten consecutive days during which no official state media coverage placed him at any public event. The period coincided with a conspicuous gap in Party reporting: state media, which reliably announces the monthly Politburo meeting held at month’s end, published no such report for May, adding to the speculation that something had gone wrong at the top.
Rumors spread quickly. Hu Liren, a Shanghai-born entrepreneur now living in the United States who runs his own media commentary channel, reported that a longtime contact in Beijing, someone he described as occupying a sensitive position, told him that a “coup-like event” had taken place in Beijing on May 26. The contact said it was unclear whether Xi had been injured. Hu acknowledged that the claim could not be independently verified.
On June 5, state media broke the silence. The official Xinhua news agency reported that Xi had met with Thongloun Sisoulith, the general secretary of Laos’s ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Footage broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV showed Xi with noticeably grayer hair but no obvious signs of physical impairment. On the same day, state media announced the North Korea trip. Tang read the decision to publish both items simultaneously, rather than separately as protocol would normally dictate, as a deliberate damage-control maneuver designed to dispel all speculation in a single news cycle.
Beijing spent months preparing the Pyongyang visit as North Korea drifted toward Moscow
The June 8–9 visit to North Korea was Xi’s first foreign trip of 2026, and preparations had been underway for months. State visits of this caliber typically require three to six months of logistical groundwork. Tang Jingyuan believes the process began in September 2025, when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traveled to Beijing to attend a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of China’s victory in World War II. Kim likely extended a reciprocal invitation to Xi at that time.
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In March 2026, China and North Korea restored cross-border rail passenger services that had been suspended for six years. That same month, direct commercial flights between Beijing and Pyongyang resumed. On April 9, 2026, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi traveled to Pyongyang, his first visit in seven years. South Korean news agency Yonhap reported on May 21, citing a senior government official, that intelligence pointed to an imminent Xi visit, and that Chinese security and ceremonial advance teams had already been observed in Pyongyang following Wang’s April trip.
Beijing lost control of Pyongyang to Moscow, and Xi is scrambling to recover it
For decades, Beijing treated Pyongyang as a client state, managing it with a mixture of economic dependence and political condescension. The relationship soured badly after Kim Jong Un took power. Kim repeatedly conducted nuclear tests close to the Chinese border, openly antagonizing Beijing, and Party-controlled state media at one point published a commentary calling him a “troublemaker.” Relations froze and remained frozen. When COVID-19 broke out in January 2020, Kim severed cross-border rail links between Beijing and Pyongyang entirely, a gesture that made the estrangement official.
Russia stepped into the gap. After the war in Ukraine stalled into a grinding stalemate, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Pyongyang on June 18–19, 2024. Kim sent North Korean troops to fight on the front lines in Ukraine and supplied Russia with ammunition and weapons; in exchange, he received oil and other assistance. The partnership between Kim and Putin deepened rapidly, and Beijing watched its longstanding dominance over the Korean Peninsula erode in real time.
Tang Jingyuan argues that allowing an armed, nuclear-capable neighbor to realign openly with a rival power constitutes a geopolitical failure of the first order, one that generated serious pressure on Xi from within the Party leadership. The invitation extended to Kim for the September 2025 Beijing parade, and the stepped-up Chinese aid to North Korea that followed, were Xi’s attempt to begin reversing the damage. The Pyongyang trip is the next move in that attempt.
Beijing’s strategic imperative, as Tang frames it, is plain: China cannot tolerate a nuclear-armed neighbor on its border that is pulling away from Beijing’s orbit and deepening ties with Moscow. Beyond that, with Japan-China relations deteriorating, Xi sees North Korea’s missile capability as a potential pressure point that could be applied to Tokyo.
Xi pledged denuclearization to Trump, then flew to Pyongyang without raising it
The North Korea visit exposed a contradiction at the center of Xi’s foreign policy. After the Trump-Xi summit in May 2026, the White House published a fact sheet stating that both leaders reaffirmed a shared commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Beijing’s official readout of the same summit contained no mention of denuclearization at all.
Tang Jingyuan sees little realistic prospect that Xi can or will push Kim toward giving up his nuclear arsenal. The nuclear program is Kim’s ultimate insurance policy, and no amount of Chinese pressure has moved him in forty years of attempting it. What Xi can do is demonstrate to Kim that Beijing is a more valuable partner than Moscow, and secure enough influence over Pyongyang to prevent North Korea from becoming fully absorbed into Russia’s orbit.
The last Party chief who flew to Pyongyang was stripped of power on his return
Zhao Ziyang, the CCP general secretary who traveled to North Korea from April 23 to 30, 1989, never recovered his position after returning.
Zhao left for Pyongyang at the height of the student protest movement that would culminate in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Before departing, he instructed demonstrators to return to class and called for the dispute to be resolved through dialogue. During his absence, hardliners within the Party leadership moved decisively. On April 26, People’s Daily, the Party’s flagship newspaper, published what became known as the “April 26 Editorial,” labeling the student and citizen protests a form of “turmoil,” a characterization designed to justify a crackdown. Zhao returned to Beijing to find the political ground had shifted irrevocably beneath him. He opposed the military crackdown that followed, was stripped of power, and spent the remaining sixteen years of his life under house arrest. His decision to complete the Pyongyang trip rather than cut it short left him out of the country at the moment the political battle was decided, and his opponents locked in a position he could not reverse.
The Party is, by Tang’s account, in a state of acute internal conflict, with two rival power centers engaged in open struggle. Personnel changes have been occurring at an unusual frequency. Xi has been conspicuously reluctant to leave Beijing for most of 2026; his domestic travel in the first half of the year dropped sharply compared to prior years, when he regularly toured provinces and inspection sites. Tang reads this reluctance as a sign that Xi fears what might happen the moment he steps out of the capital.
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