By M A Hossain
Xi Jinping’s arrival in Pyongyang on June 8, his first in nearly seven years, is precisely that kind of visit. It is the visit of a patron who suspects, with some justification, that his most loyal vassal is finding new masters. And the anxiety behind it tells us more about the shifting architecture of Asian power than any joint communiqué ever will.
The Prodigal Patron Returns
Xi’s previous visit to Pyongyang was in June 2019 when the geopolitical situations was very different. At the time, Kim Jong Un was just emerging from a brief, dazzling dalliance with Donald Trump ( the Singapore handshakes; the DMZ photo-ops) one that had added up to very little. China was comfortable. It remained indispensable. It held the economic levers. Where else was North Korea to go?
That comfortable arrangement no longer quite exists. North Korea has been deepening its military and economic collaboration with Russia at a pace that would make any traditional patron a little uneasy. For Beijing, which has long viewed itself as Pyongyang’s primary diplomatic and economic lifeline, the Russia-DPRK relationship represents a quiet but real challenge to its influence. This is the inconvenient truth that Xi’s delegation carries into Kim’s reception halls — not just goodwill and solidarity rhetoric, but something closer to strategic unease dressed in diplomatic costume.
History offers instructive parallels. When the Soviet Union began courting Egypt in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nasser leveraged superpower competition masterfully — playing Moscow against Washington with the practiced ease of a bazaar merchant. Kim Jong Un, a man whose strategic instincts are routinely underestimated by Western analysts, appears to have absorbed that lesson thoroughly. He now sits between Beijing and Moscow with growing confidence, collecting dividends from both.
Kim’s New Leverage
North Korea has more leverage vis-à-vis China compared to June 2019, when Xi last visited Pyongyang. That leverage has a very specific source: the Ukraine war and what it has done for Pyongyang’s strategic value to Moscow. Kim dispatched troops and ammunition to support Russia’s war effort, and Russia, grateful and flush with wartime necessity, returned the favor in ways that matter enormously to a sanctions-squeezed regime. A South Korean security assessment suggests Russia has transferred the equivalent of roughly $14.4 billion in assistance to North Korea since 2023, a significant portion likely including advanced military technology.
Xi wants to counterbalance all of the Russian influence over North Korea as a result of their military cooperation in the war in Europe. China does not like anyone else having more influence on Pyongyang than they do. That is, stripped of all diplomatic circumlocution, the real story. This is not a celebration of brotherhood. It is a power recalibration — Beijing reminding Pyongyang that Russia can offer military technology, but only China can offer something irreplaceable: a shared border, sustained economic sustenance, and the UN Security Council veto that has shielded North Korea from international accountability for decades.
North Korea has carried out several missile tests in 2026, including an intercontinental ballistic missile test in April that confirmed capability to reach the US mainland. Kim unveiled a new nuclear fuel production facility in a show of defiance, days before Xi’s visit was announced. That could not have been coincidental. it could be a signal to Beijing that Pyongyang would not be managed or an opening bid in upcoming negotiations. This maneuver emphasized a fundamental reality: Kim is no longer the supplicant figure of previous years. Now he bargains. He maintains a posture. He makes customers come to him.
A Triangle With Sharp Edges
At a macro level, Xi is likely hoping to demonstrate a dynamic leading role on the international stage — particularly within the China, Russia, Iran, North Korea grouping of revisionist autocracies — while portraying U.S. influence as diminishing. The optics are deliberate and layered. In May 2026, Xi held summits with both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now he arrives in Pyongyang, completing a triangular diplomatic circuit that signals Beijing’s ambition to be the indispensable node in every consequential relationship — the pivot around which both accommodation and resistance to American power revolves.
But triangles, as geometers and geopoliticians alike know, are stable only until the internal forces shift. The Russia-North Korea axis has introduced precisely that kind of destabilizing tension. Moscow is no longer content to play a secondary role in Pyongyang’s patronage network. And Kim, emboldened, is not inclined to return to a purely subordinate relationship with Beijing simply because Xi arrives bearing state banquets and ideological affirmations.
Some analysts also suggest Xi might be carrying messages from Donald Trump, indicating a willingness by the U.S. president to try diplomacy with Kim again. But North Korea has remained firm in demanding that Washington removes its precondition for denuclearization to be discussed before talks can take place. If accurate, this opens up a whole new angle entirely — Xi visiting as an intermediary, which would greatly increase Chinese relevance on the peninsula and also serve to remind Kim that what Beijing has to offer extends well beyond trade routes and energy subsidies.
The Stakes Beyond the Peninsula
Step back from the immediate theater of this summit, and the broader contours of a restructuring world come into focus. The Korean Peninsula has always been — a terrain where great powers project ambitions, fight proxy contests, and conduct the choreography of dominance. That dynamic has not changed. What has changed is the number of whales and the ferocity of their competition.
North Korean international sanctions remain in place, but enforcement is lax as divisions at the UN Security Council have eroded unity over time. The very multilateral arrangement intended to limit Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions is breaking apart — and China, Russia, and North Korea all see the play. In this sense Xi’s visit is an acknowledgment that the post-Cold War rules-based order that once sought to contain rogue actors has decayed to the extent it can no longer do so and a replacement arrangement is not just possible but inevitable.
For Washington and its allies in Seoul and Tokyo, it is time to be decisive not to get agitated. The most counterproductive response to Xi’s trip to Pyongyang would be to treat it as the cementing of a permanent alliance. Alliances based on mutual opportunism, not shared values or genuine strategic alignment, have their own paradoxes. The Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang axis is not a one-dimensional construct. It is a mutual alignment not of permanent relationships but of shared inconveniences bound by a common animus towards American might.
History suggests such arrangements are brittle. The Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, born from precisely this kind of ideological proximity masking deep strategic competition, remains one of the most consequential ruptures of the 20th century. Xi knows it. And somewhere in the Kumsusan halls of Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un — a student of survival above all else — knows it too.
The patron has come calling. Whether the client is still listening is the real question of this summit.
M A Hossain is a senior journalist and international affairs analyst, based in Bangladesh.
