Kim Pays a Second Surprise Visit to China, Heightening Diplomatic Drama

DALIAN, China — The leaders of China and North Korea met for the second time in two months Tuesday, staying overnight in this Chinese port city as China worked to regain control in the fast-moving diplomacy over the North’s nuclear program.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un flew to Dalian on Monday, where he held long rounds of discussions with Chinese officials, attended a formal banquet and took a stroll on a beachfront sidewalk with China’s president, Xi Jinping. The pageantry was shown at length on China’s state-run evening television news, with the two men looking like friends, if rather stiff ones.

The Chinese leader appeared intent on showing that the frayed relationship with North Korea was now repaired and that China was as important to resolving the problems of North Korea’s nuclear weapons as the United States.

President Donald Trump has said he will meet with Kim in the coming weeks and tweeted hours after the meeting in Dalian that he expected to talk shortly on the phone with Xi about North Korea, as well as trade.

A Chinese statement, which was issued on behalf of both leaders after Kim left, showed the differences between the Trump administration on the one hand, and China and North Korea on the other, over the question of how to rid the North of its nuclear weapons.

It envisioned a far more drawn-out process for the denuclearization of North Korea than the demands of the Trump administration, which has talked about dismantling the North’s arsenal in six months to a year.

Kim wanted “phased and synchronous measures in a responsible manner” and hoped to “eventually achieve denuclearization and lasting peace on the peninsula,” the Chinese statement said.

The statement said Kim expressed his “gratitude to China for its long-standing and significant contribution in realizing denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula,” phrasing that seemed to extol China’s role in hosting talks among six countries on North Korea’s nuclear weapons in the mid-2000s. Those talks fell apart and the Trump administration has been scathing about them.

North Korea’s bare-bones economy — which has been long kept afloat by China, but is now being pummeled by United Nations sanctions — featured in the Dalian talks, the statement said. Kim told the Chinese that he wanted to develop his economy, a move that China said it supported.

Chinese analysts speculated that Kim asked Xi for relief from the rounds of tough sanctions for which China grudgingly voted last year, at the urging of the United States. Those sanctions have drained the North’s foreign-exchange reserves.

Kim recently met South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is eager to help the North with economic aid, although within the bounds of the U.N. sanctions. That meeting gave the North Korean leader new leverage with Xi.

In essence, Kim can say that if China does not help ease the North’s economic pain, South Korea will.

Xi was joined in the talks by Wang Huning, one of his close aides, as well as others from the Communist Party hierarchy, and Kim brought a large retinue of officials, including his foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho.

Chinese television footage showed the two delegations seated at a long table during formal discussions, with Xi doing most of the talking. The flight from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, to Dalian is under one hour. Even so, the surprise arrival of Kim was a departure from protocol, which the Chinese usually take pride in following to the letter, said a Chinese analyst, Cheng Xiaohe.

After Kim’s visit to Beijing at the end of March — his first foreign visit after being in power since 2011 — it was Xi’s turn to travel to Pyongyang.

Xi was expected to wait to go to the North Korean capital until after Trump’s summit with Kim. But under that schedule, Xi would have not seen Kim again until the end of June or July.

It is without modern precedent for a leader to come to China on back-to-back visits as Kim has done, Cheng said.

“This second meeting demonstrated that North Korea wanted China to play a larger role in the denuclearization process,” said Cheng, a professor at Renmin University. “When Kim enters the meeting with Trump, he will feel more confident, simply his positions on a variety of issues were consulted and sanctioned by the Chinese leader.”

But some Chinese analysts said the warmth between the two leaders on display in Dalian — they sat for a while in wicker arm chairs on a bucolic outdoor terrace — should not be overstated. Kim retains a streak of independence, they said.

“North Korea was never a vassal state,” said Shi Yinhong, also a professor at Renmin University. It is even less of one now that the United States has agreed to deal with Kim, he said.

Like Kim’s visit to Beijing in March, his visit to Dalian was kept under wraps. But early Tuesday afternoon, the Japanese news service Kyodo reported that a plane from the North Korean carrier Air Koryo was at Dalian’s airport. Security at the airport was tight Tuesday afternoon, with flights canceled between 1:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Chinese officials will be heading to Tokyo for meetings Wednesday with South Korean and Japanese counterparts as part of the recent burst of diplomacy over North Korea. Japan, the host of the talks, has been pushing the United States to continue a tough line against Pyongyang.

North Korean state news media on Tuesday criticized Japan for continuing to support tough sanctions against the North, with Rodong Sinmun, the country’s official newspaper, calling it “tantamount to throwing cold water over easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula.”

But Moon, who as South Korea’s leader has pushed for engagement with Pyongyang, urged Japan to consider normalizing ties with North Korea.

“I think dialogue between Japan and North Korea should be resumed,” Moon said in an interview Tuesday with the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.

“If Japan-North Korea relations are normalized, that would greatly contribute to peace and security in Northeast Asia beyond the Korean Peninsula,” he said in written answers to questions submitted by the newspaper. Dalian was also the site of a 2010 meeting between Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, and Li Keqiang, China’s premier.

Kim, apparently not as fearful of flying as his father, traveled by plane this time. On his visit to Beijing, he came to China by a slow-moving train, as his father had done.