Xi's North Korea Visit Signals Beijing's Bid to Contain Emboldened Kim Jong Un

Xi Jinping landed in Pyongyang on a Tuesday in early June, and by the time he left two days later, he had declared a new chapter in China's relationship with North Korea. The official messaging spoke of deepened ties and expanded cooperation, a "new historical starting point" in the words of the Chinese president. But beneath the choreography and the state department language, something more urgent was driving the visit: Beijing needed to understand what its nuclear-armed neighbor was actually planning to do.

Kim Jong Un has become a different kind of problem for China than he was even three years ago. Bob Carlin, who spent more than five decades analyzing North Korea for the U.S. State Department, put it plainly: the Chinese have never had to manage a North Korea with this much confidence in its own power. For decades, Pyongyang had oriented itself toward engagement with Washington—the goal was always normalization, always negotiation. That calculus has inverted. Since 2023, Kim has rewritten North Korea's entire strategic doctrine. The confrontation with the United States is no longer something to avoid; it is the centerpiece of his ambition. He sees himself as a leader in this movement, and he believes a reckoning with America is inevitable.

This creates an acute problem for Xi. If Kim stumbles into a conflict with the U.S., China will be drawn in whether it wants to be or not. Geography and alliance make that unavoidable. So Beijing's task is to stay close enough to Kim to know what he is thinking, to counsel restraint when possible, and to maintain some leverage over decisions that could reshape the entire region. The relationship between Xi and Kim is not warm. There is what Carlin calls a "poisonous stream" running through their personal dynamic, rooted in history—Kim executed his own uncle, Jan Song-thaek, in 2013, a man the Chinese had cultivated as a mentor and ally. Years later, China backed United Nations sanctions against North Korea's nuclear program. But neighbors cannot choose each other. Both sides have accepted that coexistence requires a kind of pragmatic equilibrium, even without trust or affection. They need each other more than they dislike each other.

What should concern observers most, Carlin said, is military cooperation. The real test will come next month, around the 65th anniversary of the existing defense treaty between Beijing and Pyongyang. If China announces sales of military hardware—air defense systems, for instance—or joint naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, those announcements will reveal whether this week's summit actually deepened the relationship or was merely theater. The stakes are not abstract. Kim has recently unveiled a new nuclear production facility and visited uranium enrichment plants. His sister, Kim Yo Jong, declared North Korea's nuclear status irreversible. The arsenal is growing: plutonium production is accelerating, and Kim now possesses enough missiles to deliver nuclear weapons across South Korea and Japan. He feels powerful, and the question that keeps analysts awake is when he will decide to use that power.

Xi's visit also served another purpose: countering Russian influence. Moscow's role in North Korea has grown substantially during the war in Ukraine. In exchange for weapons and thousands of North Korean troops, Russia has provided financial assistance Pyongyang desperately needs. More significantly, Russia has recognized North Korea as a fellow nuclear weapons state—a gesture that has emboldened Kim and given him confidence as he accelerates his weapons program, which analysts assess as far more advanced than Iran's. China does not want Russia and North Korea plotting together in a corner, out of Beijing's sight. Xi needed to plant the flag again, to remind Kim that China is still the primary relationship, still the one that matters most.

Kim's three ambitions are now clear, according to Carlin. He wants to diminish American standing on the world stage. He wants to reunify the Korean Peninsula under his rule. And he wants to be treated as a peer by both China and Russia—to move beyond the status of a minor player that can be managed or contained. The window for American leverage has closed. When Trump and Kim met three times during Trump's first term, there was still theoretical space for negotiation. Since their last meeting in 2019, North Korea has tested more than a dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Kim has made abundantly clear he will not discuss denuclearization. Carlin believes the U.S. lost that opportunity years ago, when talks broke down. There is nothing Washington can offer now that would convince Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear weapons. The question is no longer whether Kim will keep them. The question is what he will do with them, and whether China can maintain enough influence to keep that decision from spiraling into catastrophe.