Xi Jinping Goes to Pyongyang—But This Time Kim Holds All the Cards | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China, where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. Xi Jinping has just finished his visit to North Korea and I can finally summarize it for you. It's been seven years since Xi last set foot on North Korean soil. Now the official Chinese Communist Party narrative is, as usual, quite polished. They are touting that this year marks the 65th anniversary of the China-North Korea Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, calling both nations comrades and brothers. But if you ask me, they aren't even cousins. Let's put the most basic fact on the table. The 1961 treaty is the only military alliance treaty China still has in effect. And the second article explicitly states in black and white that it includes an automatic military intervention clause, meaning if one side gets attacked, the other is obligated to send troops. But here is the problem. What has been the historical reality of this supposed blood-forged alliance? You could say the cracks between China and North Korea have never actually healed, and Kim Jong-un has now completed a strategic upgrade. He's moved from being the little brother who relied on Beijing to become a hot commodity that both China and Russia are scrambling to court. North Korea's value to China is extremely clear, yet also extremely limited. Beijing's narrative is to treat North Korea as a geographical buffer zone to block US forces and keep them from pressing directly onto the border of Northeast China. But in reality, this is just an excuse to justify a strategic judgment from back in the day. When the CCP sent troops into North Korea, it was, to a large extent, at Stalin's insistence. So the China-North Korea relationship was never some kind of a brotherly bond. Back then, the CCP was essentially holding its nose and following Stalin's script, getting dragged into this war. The historical records are very clear. Mao Zedong went to the Soviet Union to pay his respects to Stalin, and even then Stalin had brought up the idea of sending troops to North Korea. Mao rejected it at the time, with the excuse that he needed to concentrate China's strength to take down Chiang and annex Taiwan. But, as we all know, Beijing ultimately couldn't stand up to Stalin's pressure and ended up entering the war anyway. The whole idea that China entered the war because it feared a US invasion through North Korea simply doesn't hold up. Furthermore, there is an inherent structural contradiction buried within. Beijing wants a North Korea that is obedient and controllable, not one that is powerful. Pyongyang, on the other hand, wants unconditional support from Beijing, not the kind of protection that comes with strings attached like constant meddling in their nuclear issues. These two demands are fundamentally completely twisted. And this twisted nature didn't just start recently, it's always been this way. In 1956, after Stalin died, Khrushchev pushed for de-Stalinization across the board. The Soviet Union then began criticizing King Yong-sun's cult of personality and his policy failures. What was the political situation in North Korea then? At the time, the pro-CCP faction and the pro-Soviet faction within the Workers' Party joined forces at the August Plenum to challenge King Yong-sun. This was the famous August faction incident in North Korea history. It was the only attempt in North Korean history where foreign major powers actually and substantially intervened in North Korea's internal power struggle. Kim Yong-sun's reaction was extremely intense and lightning fast. He purged all opposition factions, either expelling or executing all the cadres aligned with the Soviet faction and the CCP faction. At the time, both the CCP and the Soviet Communist Party sent a joint delegation to Pyongyang to apply pressure, but it didn't do much. On the surface, King Yong-sun backed down, but afterward, he went right back to purging and executing his pleas. From that moment on, the North Korean regime formed a strategic law that was carved into its DNA. Any intervention by external forces in the internal affairs of the Kim dynasty will be met with deep resentment from the Kim family. And this has nothing to do with ideology. Therefore, there is an iron law within the Kim family, regardless of the name of the friendship or ideology. And regardless of whether you are one of us, I must guard against you. In the words of the Kim family, you must resist threats to survival. Thus, the Korean Workers' Party's wariness of CCP has never been an emotional reaction, but a systemic, genetic, and overall characteristic. By the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea's economic dependence on China soared to over 80% of its total trade. But what did the CCP do? They were actually quite calculating. They turned around and cut off the friendship prize subsidized aid, which made the Kim regime feel particularly uncomfortable. The Kim regime views economic dependence on China as a soft invasion. When Kim Jong-un took power in 2011, he flat out ignored the sensitivity of the CCP power transition period, that time around when Xi Jinping was taking office, and carried out a third nuclear test. He also had his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, who had a relatively mild attitude toward the CCP, executed by artillery fire. Everyone knows this story. This string of actions sent one clear message to the CCP. The Kim regime does not accept being managed by you, Xi Jinping. It certainly won't accept the CCP using its nuclear issues to strike a deal with the Americans. This is their fundamental attitude. If Kim Jong-un's past actions were just him struggling in the cracks, then the Russia-Ukraine war gave him a historical, massive opportunity to complete a systemic leap. The scale of this has far exceeded what outsiders initially estimated. Look at the data. According to Polish think tank PRSM, from August 2023 to June 2026, Kim Jong-un gave Putin about 33,000 containers of military supplies, estimated to be roughly 50 million artillery shells, and he also sent over 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers as cannon fodder, on and off. In exchange, Russia is providing satellite launch technology, air defense systems, and even potential technology transfers for nuclear submarines. Politically, Russia has even more openly abandoned its stance on sanctions against North Korea at the United Nations, which is effectively a substantive recognition of North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. Xi Jinping's attitude is also very characteristic of his behavior. He is sitting on the fence, trying to play both sides. What was Kim Jong-un's situation before 2022? His economic dependence on the CCP was over 80%, and his military technology was limited by the CCP's chokehold. On the status of nuclear weapons, both China and Russia were supporting sanctions against North Korea at the time. So, North Korea was almost entirely hanging from the single tree of the CCP. But, after the Russia-Ukraine war, North Korea could get grain, technology, and energy from Russia, and its status as a nuclear-armed state was even recognized by Russia. So, North Korea's reliance on major powers shifted from relying only on China to a dual-track approach with China and Russia. To put it bluntly, Kim Jong-un successfully upgraded himself from a strategic dependent of the CCP into a strategic asset that both China and Russia want to fight for. Under these circumstances, the leverage the CCP held over Pyongyang has been systematically gutted by more than half. Now with China's domestic economy in a total mess and facing internal and external troubles, this is the reason why Xi Jinping had to personally make a trip to Pyongyang. Objectively speaking, Kim Jong-un's Russian dividend also has a ceiling. He can't just keep eating off of it forever. Still looking at the PRSM analysis, it reveals a particularly critical asymmetry. The weapons North Korea provided to Russia are valued as high as five and a half to ten billion dollars, while the grain, energy, and armament Russia gave to North Korea amount to at most 1.2 billion dollars, an eight-fold difference. What does this mean? It means North Korea is actually trading high-value assets for technology. This deal can work while the war is still going on. But once the Russia-Ukraine war ends, regardless of whether Russia wins or loses, this strategic demand will drop off a cliff and the ceiling for the Russian-North Korea economy will be reached. I believe Putin also has plans to use North Korea to bind the CCP so he won't be tied to Kim Jong-un indefinitely either. After covering the overall background, let's turn the lens to Xi Jinping. Just how passive is the Xi situation this time as he sets off? That strongman posture of his is purely an act. It's fair to say Xi is currently being squeezed from both inside and out. First, let's talk about the external situation. In East Asia after the 2023 Camp David summit, the trilateral security cooperation between the US, Japan, and South Korea entered a formalized stage. Who deserves the most credit for that? It's the CCP foreign ministry's wolf warrior PR, which has never once ceased. And the fact that the CCP hasn't calmed down in the South China Sea either. Then the US-Japan-South Korea defense coordination was upgraded directly. You could say it escalated all the way from intelligence sharing. Japan has even historically, for the first time, allowed the export of lethal weapons to 17 allied nations. Even after the Li Jiaming regime, which wanted to hedge both ways, took power in South Korea, then the momentum didn't slow down. This means the old tricks of the CCP aren't working anymore. How did the CCP do it in the past? It was an operational maneuver to use China-South Korea economic ties to softly check that triangle alliance. Now this space has been rapidly compressed because everyone is running for the exit, and the CCP doesn't have any tools left in its diplomatic countermeasure toolbox. There is another detail that really explains the situation. After the Trump-Xi meeting in May 2026, both the US and China issued meeting summaries, and the result was that each side just said what they wanted. The White House version clearly wrote about the shared goal of achieving the denuclearization of the peninsula, while the CCP version didn't mention it at all. It didn't even mention denuclearization. When you compare these two versions, the CCP's intention to use North Korea issue as leverage against the United States is completely exposed. So if Xi wants to use North Korea as leverage against the United States but no longer fully controls that leverage, what can he do? Isn't that precisely why he had to travel to Pyongyang to create the appearance that Beijing still holds significant influence over Kim Jong-un? And that's only the external challenge. The domestic situation may be even more serious. Just how severe are China's internal problems under Xi? The picture became much clearer after the latest military purge. At this point, much of the senior leadership of the Central Military Commission has either been removed or replaced. Over the past three years, more than 24 generals and lieutenant generals have reportedly been dismissed or investigated, including Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia and Joint Staff Chief Liu Zhenli. At the 4th plenum in October 2025, 63% of the generals who held Central Committee member status were absent. Then in 2026, when the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection held its meeting, 45% of the generals who held CCDI status were absent. Within this, there is a paradox of power logic. Xi Jinping wants to use these purges to establish absolute authority. But the purging itself has created a huge vacuum in combat readiness. In other words, while his control over the military may have been strengthened in form, it has been weakened in actual combat capability. Economically, whether it is the ongoing deflationary pressure or the government debt burden, none of these problems have been effectively resolved. At the same time, Xi still intends to extend his political tenure, which leaves him with very limited sources of external support. North Korea is one of the few remaining options. This raises a natural question. Xi has visited North Korea before, so why does he appear far more passive this time? That is a fair point. If we compare it with his 2019 visit, the shift over the past seven years becomes immediately clear. After Xi's June 2019 trip to Pyongyang, there were plenty of symbolic statements. But the substantive economic commitments widely expected at the time, such as agricultural assistance and new development cooperation agreements, ultimately produced little tangible outcome. In hindsight, the CCP's policy toward North Korea at that stage can be summed up quite simply, rhetorical support without meaningful delivery. The relationship was marked by repeated verbal affirmations of support for Kim Jong-un, but a consistent failure to follow through with concrete commitments. So at that time, the pattern was that both sides got what they needed, but China was clearly in a more active structural position. At the very least, it still had the ability to use denuclearization issue as narrative leverage over Kim Jong-un. By 2026, however, the situation has completely reversed. The CCP's influence and the policy tools toward North Korea have been systematically weakened, and it no longer holds the key leverage over Kim Jong-un. Instead, it is now Beijing whose demands have become more urgent. What concerns Beijing most in this shift is the risk that Kim Jong-un and Putin become increasingly closely aligned, eventually creating a long-term strategic drift in which North Korea effectively decouples from China altogether. At the same time, Kim Jong-un now has more bargaining power because he has alternatives. The logic is straightforward. If the CCP does not provide what he wants, he can turn to Russia instead. On the nuclear issue as well, he no longer needs to make any meaningful concessions. There is another detail worth noting. Just a few days before the announcement of Xi Jinping's visit to North On May 26, North Korea suddenly launched several short-range ballistic missiles. The timing is highly unlikely to be coincidental. It can be read as Kim Jong-un sending a signal to Xi Jinping. His internal timetable is not constrained by external actors, including a visiting Chinese leader. This pattern of missile launches ahead of high-level meetings fits a familiar style of Kim family signaling, essentially communicating that whether you come or not, we proceed on our own terms. In this sense, the visit itself becomes a kind of high-cost engagement for Xi. The likely agenda is not expansionary diplomacy but material commitments, increased oil supplies, expanded food assistance, renewed investment pledges, and possibly infrastructure-related projects. The early resumption of the China-North Korea railway service in March 2026 can be seen as only a preliminary step. Put bluntly, Xi Jinping is expected to incur real costs in this engagement. Why is Kim Jong-un willing to cooperate with this so-called restoration show? It is not because his attitude toward the CCP has softened. At its core, this is purely transactional. First, the biggest advantage is that he can effectively cash in on Xi Jinping's anxiety. The more urgent Beijing becomes about stabilizing the relationship, the higher the price Kim Jong-un can demand. Simply accepting Xi's visit at this moment, adding a few friendly lines in a joint statement, and attaching some routine diplomatic language is already enough to extract concessions in the form of oil, food, and development projects. So why wouldn't he take that deal? There is almost no reason not to. And compared to China, Russia would have to make similar concessions anyway, so the bargaining position is even stronger. Second, this is about maintaining a carefully balanced China-Russia dynamic, which is the most advantageous position for Kim Jong-un. It means not fully aligning with either side. While ensuring that both Xi and Putin feel they cannot afford to lose him, in this sense, even the appearance of repairing ties with the CCP helps avoid giving Russia the impression that North Korea has fully shifted into its orbit. At its core, this is a strategy of leverage management. Finally, this is also about Kim Jong-un keeping an exit option open for himself. One of North Korea's core strategic objectives is to secure de facto recognition as a nuclear-armed state. Trump, for his part, has his own ambition. He has long expressed interest in direct engagement with Kim Jong-un, which is an avenue Kim has deliberately kept open as a long-term option. From Beijing's perspective, one aim is to signal to the United States, look, we still have influence over Kim Jong-un. But at the same time, Kim Jong-un also has a practical use for the CCP. He benefits from using China as an external communication channel, effectively turning Beijing into an intermediary or messenger. In the end, Kim Jong-un's willingness to participate in this repair of relations is not driven by dependence on China. It is because, at this moment, China needs him more than he needs China. That imbalance in perception itself becomes his strongest bargaining tool for driving down the price. Let's take this analysis one level higher and look at what this visit to North Korea actually signifies. In my view, it is a key snapshot of a broader shift in the CCP's overall strategic posture. Does anyone still remember the line Xi Jinping repeated most often in 2021 and 2022? The East is rising, the West is declining. At that time, the CCP leadership genuinely believed this framing. They saw the US withdrawal from Afghanistan as a humiliation and the COVID-19 pandemic as exposing systemic weakness in Western governance. In their assessment, the historical tide had clearly turned, giving China a window of opportunity for relatively smooth and sustained expansion. But viewed from 2026, that assessment has proven wrong in almost every respect. Externally, the result was not the weakening of US-led alignment, but the opposite. The US-Japan-South Korea trilateral framework has become increasingly consolidated. Across the EU, the United States, and Australia, derisking from China has become a shared policy direction. And a broader multi-layered balancing structure against the CCP has now largely taken shape. Once this framework solidified, China found itself under sustained strategic pressure. In this context, North Korea has re-emerged as a highly unstable but unavoidable strategic card. At the same time, driven further by the Russia-Ukraine war, North Korea itself has effectively upgraded into a more autonomous regional actor. The result is paradoxical. Instead of China leveraging North Korea against the United States, Beijing now has to expand resources simply to keep North Korea from drifting away and becoming fully absorbed into competing power structures. Internally, successive rounds of military purges have already made the underlying issue clear. The crisis has reached the core of the system. At the same time, the economy is under persistent deflationary pressure and structural strain. Taken together, Xi Jinping's current strategic behavior becomes fairly transparent. The focus is no longer expansion, but the maintenance of external stability in order to buy time and space for internal adjustment. In essence, this is a defensive posture rather than an expansionist one. So the situation is fairly clear. Xi Jinping has shifted from the more outward-looking, expansion-oriented posture of 2019 to a position that is increasingly defensive and driven by strategic anxiety. Once a leadership enters this kind of defensive phase, it tends to follow two parallel tracks. Externally, the posture becomes one of contraction. Even relationships like North Korea now require active management and appeasement rather than being used as leverage. On the Taiwan Strait issue, the approach relies more on maintaining a prolonged gray zone dynamic, carefully managing escalation in order to stretch stability through key political cycles such as party congress timelines. At the same time, Beijing still has to calibrate the intensity of its competition with the United States, avoiding either escalation or disengagement. Internally, the pattern tends to move in a more coercive direction. Pressure increases, control mechanisms tighten, and economic and social constraints become more pronounced. From this perspective, it is often ordinary people who feel the sharpest impact. Recent policies have increasingly centered on restricting capital flows, tightening expression, limiting mobility such as passports, and expanding forms of administrative and legal constraints over personal movement and activity. Even earlier governance policies during the COVID-19 period, which relied heavily on strict control mechanisms, have in many ways evolved rather than disappeared. Based on all of this, what is the CCP likely to do next? Or, more precisely, what does Xi Jinping actually want to secure from this visit? Going a step further, the real question is what level of proof he needs in order to project a political signal to the United States that North Korea is still within China's sphere of influence. In practical terms, one of the most visible indicators would be the frequency of North Korea's ballistic missile tests. This is the easiest signal for external observers to track. If, after Xi's visit, the situation escalates and Kim Jong-un continues launching missiles at a high frequency or even intensifies activity immediately after the visit, then the intended political narrative would be seriously undermined, both domestically and internationally. From this perspective, the purpose of Xi Jinping's trip is not only diplomatic engagement, but also narrative construction, to demonstrate influence over North Korea as a form of leverage in both internal party politics and external signaling to the United States. If missile activity were to decrease meaningfully after the visit, Beijing would be able to present it as evidence of influence, an argument along the line of, we still have leverage over Pyongyang, we can still shape Kim Jong-un's behavior. This is an indicator worth watching, but it should not be treated as the core reason Xi Jinping traveled to Pyongyang. More fundamentally, it highlights a structural limitation in the political tools currently available to him, while simultaneously creating more room for Kim Jong-un to play China and Russia against each other. In this context, it is unrealistic to expect this visit to pull North Korea back into China's orbit. The strategic environment has already been reshaped. The United States, Japan, and South Korea will continue their containment framework as before. Japan in particular has already adjusted its security posture to the extent that constitutional reinterpretation has become part of its broader strategic evolution. So the real question is what this visit actually changes. The answer is, very little in concrete terms. Its main significance is temporal rather than substantive. It marks a point in the timeline. From a longer historical view, it may be remembered less for its immediate outcomes and more as a signal of transition, a moment reflecting the CCP's shift from outward expansion toward increasing internal consolidation and constraint. This is a highly symbolic posture of political contraction. However, the more important point is not Xi Jinping himself nor the apparent discomfort of the CCP in this moment, but the structural condition of a system whose capacity for external projection is weakening. Power that can no longer be effectively projected outward does not simply vanish, it has to be redirected somewhere. When external channels are constrained, pressure tends to turn inward. In that situation, the burden is often shifted back onto domestic society. So the real issue is not whether this kind of internal tightening will happen, but how it manifests. Once external tools are limited, greater reliance on internal extraction and control becomes far more likely. The AP report quoted Kim Jong-un as saying, our two parties are rebuilding a strategic relationship. In other words, the old comrade plus brother framing has long been turned over. The two sides were once marked by mutual suspicion. Even though relations have now been restored to a degree, there is no return to the previous model, which is why the relationship is being redefined as a strategic partnership. By using this term, Kim Jong-un is deliberately reframing the relationship. Under the comrade plus brother narrative, there was always an implicit hierarchy who is the elder brother and who is the junior one. That hierarchy is no longer central. Instead, the relationship is being presented as one between strategic actors, not family members. In other words, it is shifting from a quasi-familial bond to something closer to a neighborly arrangement, where both sides operate independently and largely mind their own interests. From the perspective of relationship positioning, this represents a clear downgrade. But the formal abandonment of a consistent stance on peninsular denuclearization is more than a simple relational adjustment. It can be read as a unilateral concession by the CCP, effectively a retreat under pressure from Kim Jong-un. Put differently, it is as if Kim Jong-un draws the boundaries of the interaction and Xi Jinping is required to step inside them. That image alone has been enough to trigger strong reactions in international commentary. Once again, Kim Jong-un comes out ahead. And one pattern is difficult to ignore. In his dealings with Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un has not suffered a visible loss. Even in his interactions with Putin, he behaves less like a junior partner and more like a highly transactional power maximizer. It is hard to explain where this confidence originates. But his negotiating posture toward the CCP often resembles that of a party that believes it is a structurally old something. At times, he is willing to apply pressure directly, even abruptly, without much concern for diplomatic decorum. Xi Jinping, by contrast, is typically projected as confident in almost every other major bilateral setting. Whether facing Trump or Putin, he maintains a controlled and composed posture. Yet, in this particular triangular dynamic involving Kim Jong-un, that composure appears noticeably less stable. And that contrast is what stands out most. Because it is not just a question of diplomacy or leverage, it is a rare case where the usual hierarchy seems blurred, where signals do not flow in expected direction, and where the performance of confidence stops matching the underlying balance of power. Strange, isn't it? Thank you so much for watching. If you find this video helpful, please like it, drop a comment below, and hit the subscribe button right here. It really helps YouTube suggest my video to others. I'll be back with more content soon. Until then, be well.