Kim Jong Un’s Treatment of Wang Huning Feeds Doubts About Xi Jinping’s Grip, Analysts Say

Wang Huning, who sits on the Chinese Communist Party’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee and chairs its top advisory body, visited North Korea from July 15 to 17 at the head of what Beijing pointedly described as a “party and government delegation.” Footage of his meeting with Kim Jong Un, released by North Korean state media, spread rapidly online. It shows Kim seated by himself at the center of one side of a long oval table, facing Wang and more than ten Chinese officials arrayed along the other side. The vast tabletop holds almost nothing beyond teacups and small notebooks spread open in front of the visitors. As Kim speaks, the Chinese officials, Wang included, bend deferentially over their notebooks.

Cai Shenkun, a U.S.-based independent Chinese commentator who uses the name “David Tsai” on X, shared a still image from the meeting on July 17 with a sharply critical caption. He wrote that the “Kim Sun,” a mocking reference to North Korea’s personality cult around Kim Jong Un, had humiliated Wang Huning, often nicknamed the “state tutor of three reigns” for his role in shaping the political doctrines of three successive Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Cai questioned why Wang, a state-level leader ranked fourth in the CCP hierarchy, had been seated so far from Kim. He asked whether the arrangement reflected normal diplomatic protocol, deliberate stage design, or an effort to elevate Kim’s image—and sarcastically wondered whether the two sides had agreed that a future “Xi Sun” would receive the same treatment.

Chinese netizens mocked the delegation’s deference to a small, poor neighbor

The online reaction was dominated by ridicule. Commenters contrasted the Chinese delegation’s deferential note-taking before Kim with the assertiveness CCP officials often display toward Western counterparts, mocking the sight of senior Chinese officials appearing submissive before the leader of a small, impoverished state. One recalled that when Chinese Premier Li Qiang visited Pyongyang the previous year, Kim reportedly spoke to him with one hand in his pocket. Another quipped that Mao Zedong had once been the “teacher” of Kim’s grandfather, but that the third-generation Kim had now become the teacher of the CCP’s third generation of “red” elites.

One commenter offered a harsher interpretation of the staging. Wang, the commenter suggested, brought a large entourage because he feared that a more private meeting would be exploited for North Korean propaganda. Kim, meanwhile, had wanted Xi Jinping to arrive in person with financial support but received a party theoretician instead, and responded by publicly humiliating him. Once China stops paying, the commenter wrote, the grandson becomes the master overnight.

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Others dismissed the visit as a self-inflicted embarrassment. The mockery points to a broader shift: the optics of China–North Korea diplomacy are increasingly becoming a liability for Beijing, at least among its domestic and overseas critics.

A year of warming visits conceals mutual calculation

Beijing said little about the trip’s substance, calling it only an “official friendly visit” with no published agenda, while stressing the “party and government” character of the delegation. It caps nearly a year of intensifying exchanges. Kim traveled to Beijing in September 2025 for the military parade marking 80 years since the end of World War II, the morning Xi was caught on a hot microphone discussing living to 150 with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Li Qiang led a delegation to Pyongyang in October 2025. Foreign minister Wang Yi visited in April 2026, and Xi and his wife made a state visit to Pyongyang in June, where North Korean media released images of the couple watching a performance in matching glasses. From July 10 to 12, North Korea’s prime minister Pak Thae Song visited Beijing for the 65th anniversary of the 1961 China-North Korea friendship treaty, which remains in force and contains a mutual military assistance clause. Xi told Pak the two countries should strengthen strategic coordination in a turbulent world; Pak relayed Kim’s wish to build “the most powerful strategic relationship.” Wang Huning’s trip followed within days.

Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, told NTD that the apparent warmth between Beijing and Pyongyang masks a three-way struggle involving China, North Korea and Russia. China has sustained North Korea for decades, he said, but the Kim dynasty has long resisted Beijing’s control, purged pro-China officials and looked to Moscow as an alternative patron.

With Russia now under growing strain, Feng said, Pyongyang has adopted a balancing strategy: turning to Moscow for military and defense cooperation while continuing to rely on Beijing for food and financial support.

China accepts this arrangement, he argued, because it does not want Russia to gain greater influence in Eurasia. At the same time, Beijing remains wary of giving North Korea advanced defense technology, fearing that a better-armed Pyongyang would become even less responsive to Chinese pressure.

An analyst counts three anomalies in state media’s account of the meeting

In a July 19 commentary for the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times, Zhou Xiaohui highlighted three unusual features in Beijing’s official account of Wang Huning’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.

First, the titles. When Wang conveyed Xi’s greetings, state media had him use “General Secretary and State Chairman,” while Kim’s reciprocal greeting to Xi used “General Secretary” alone, the same single title Li Qiang’s readout used last year. Zhou asked whether Wang misunderstood protocol or whether someone inside the Party is using titles to chip at Xi’s standing.

Second, the verbs. Wang pledged that China would “resolutely implement the important consensus of the two parties’ and countries’ top leaders” and “give full play to the strategic leading role of exchanges between the top leaders.” When Li Qiang met Kim last year, the formula was different: the Xi-Kim meetings had “pointed the direction” for relations, and China would “follow the common guidance of the two top leaders.” The shift from Xi pointing the direction to leaders jointly implementing a consensus, Zhou argued, reads as a deliberate demotion of Xi from his singular status.

Third, Kim’s own phrasing moved from a wish to “maintain close” high-level exchanges last year to “strengthening” them now, alongside deepening exchanges of “party-building” experience, leaving open whether the high level in question means Xi or the CCP leadership as a whole.

One sentence about ‘party-building’ may reveal the trip’s purpose, Zhou argues

The official report on Wang’s separate meeting with Jo Yong Won, the North Korean Politburo Standing Committee member who runs the ruling party’s powerful Organization and Guidance Department, contained the line Zhou considers decisive: Wang “introduced the essential meaning of Xi Jinping’s party-building thought.”

The content of that doctrine changed one month earlier. At a national party-building work conference on June 15, the framework known as Xi’s party-building thought expanded from “thirteen upholds” to fourteen, dropping some planks and adding a new one: “uphold the centralized, unified leadership of the Party Center.”

Zhou’s reading is that after months of internal struggle, the Party’s top ranks reached consensus on the collective “Party Center” leadership formula adopted at last October’s plenum, and Xi, unable to climb back to the summit of his former power, could only accept it. Dispatching Wang to walk Kim through the revised doctrine, Zhou argued, amounted to formally notifying Pyongyang that the China-North Korea relationship is no longer directed by Xi alone. That, he suggested, is why Kim offered none of the flattery about Xi’s “wise leadership” that he produced for Li Qiang a year ago.