China’s No 4 official Wang Huning to head to North Korea as visits multiply

China’s fourth-ranked official, Wang Huning, will head to North Korea this week, the latest in a flurry of high-level exchanges between Beijing and Pyongyang. Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday that Wang would lead a Communist Party and government delegation on an “official goodwill visit” to the country from Wednesday to Friday. Wang is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s leading decision-making body. He is also chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the top political advisory body. The trip comes days after North Korean Premier Pak Thae-song’s three-day visit to Beijing to mark the 65th anniversary of a friendship treaty between the two neighbours, a trip that included a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the meeting, Xi called on Beijing and Pyongyang to expand cooperation, maintain “firm strategic resolve” and “resolutely defend our respective sovereignty, security and development interests”, according to a Chinese statement. It followed the Chinese leader’s trip to Pyongyang last month, his first visit to North Korea since 2019 and his first trip abroad this year. Before that trip, Xi wrote in an article published by the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea that “China is willing to work with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to take the bilateral relationship to a strategic height and promote its greater development in keeping with the times”. Wang will be the third senior Chinese official to visit Pyongyang in three months, after Xi in June and Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, in April. Zhan Debin, director of the Centre for Korean Peninsula Studies at the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, said Wang’s visit this week showed that the momentum of high-level exchanges would be sustained and “signalled to the outside world that the warming of China-North Korea relations is not a one-off diplomatic event but has entered a phase of continuous, institutionalised advancement”. “President Xi’s visit [in June] primarily embodied top-level strategic guidance while Wang Huning leading a Chinese party and government delegation to North Korea shows that both sides are translating the leaders’ consensus into concrete arrangements for party-to-party exchanges, political communication and cooperation across various fields,” he said. According to Zhan, the back-to-back visits by top Chinese officials to Pyongyang in recent months reflects a noticeably warming relationship between the two neighbours and bolsters strategic communication. “Both China and North Korea hope to reaffirm the strategic value of their relationship against a backdrop of a complex security situation in Northeast Asia, strengthened US-Japan-South Korea cooperation and the revival of Japanese militarism,” he said. “China-North Korea relations are moving from a new historical starting point towards interaction that is of a higher level, more stable and more institutionalised.” Ryu Yong-wook, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said Wang’s trip showed that Beijing and Pyongyang wanted to develop their bilateral relationship rapidly after having reassessed each other’s strategic importance. For North Korea, the economic and strategic utility of a close military relationship with Russia appeared to have faded, pushing Pyongyang to return to its “more powerful patron”, he said. Moscow has turned to Pyongyang as a source of military supplies and personnel amid its war with Ukraine. China’s continued strategic rivalry with the United States and increasing pressure from the West meant that it could not afford to lose partners, especially those that could be militarily useful, such as North Korea, Ryu said. And with US President Donald Trump appearing to show interest in improving ties with North Korea, the recent exchanges between China and North Korea could also be a “harbinger for US-North Korea negotiations as Pyongyang needs to work out with Beijing its position of compromise and negotiation vis-a-vis Washington”, Ryu said.

China’s No 4 official Wang Huning to head to North Korea as visits multiply

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The move shows that the nations are rapidly deepening ties after reassessing each other’s strategic value, analysts said

The move shows that the nations are rapidly deepening ties after reassessing each other’s strategic value, analysts said