Xi Jinping is feted in Pyongyang as Kim Jong-un swivels to Moscow

Beijing: On a dais in Pyongyang’s public square beneath giant posters of their airbrushed faces, Xi Jinping was feted with a colourful spectacle of Soviet-era agitprop as he met with Kim Jong-un to reaffirm their countries’ deep ties, “forged in blood” during the Korean War.

The two-day summit is the Chinese leader’s first visit to North Korea in seven years, during which time Kim has powered ahead with his nuclear weapons program and grown emboldened by shifting his country’s centre of gravity toward Moscow.

Xi’s visit has drawn the attention of analysts because it is his first overseas trip this year and comes as he reduces his travel and increasingly delegates international summits to lower-level officials.

His decision to make the journey east – officially to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the China-North Korea mutual defence treaty – is being widely interpreted as Beijing’s bid to remind its neighbour and the world that it remains Pyongyang’s biggest economic lifeline and hedge against US influence in East Asia.

Kim, meanwhile, will be looking for Beijing’s assurance that it has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state, and will not seek denuclearisation goals in talks with other foreign powers.

“Ideally, it will obtain China’s tacit recognition of its nuclear status, which the Russians appear to have given behind closed doors,” says Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior fellow with the Stimson Centre’s Korea Program, a US think tank.

“China’s stance on denuclearisation remains much more dubious, and the North Koreans seem set on clarifying that during Xi’s visit.”

Ahead of Xi’s arrival, North Korean media published a statement from Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, vowing the country would never relinquish its nuclear weapons, saying in a statement that its “status as a nuclear weapons state is the line of no retreat”.

Officially, Beijing remains committed to a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula – a goal the Trump administration claimed the US president discussed with Xi when they met in Beijing last month. The Chinese side has never confirmed this and has dropped all references to denuclearisation from its official messaging since 2024, including in a defence white paper issued last year, breaking with past practice.

To welcome Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan on Monday, Kim put on a pomp-filled show – broadcast through the sanitised lens of the world’s two most controlled media apparatuses.

Thousands of cheering masses packed into Kim Il-sung Square (named after Kim’s grandfather, the country’s founding dictator), waving flowers and balloons against t