The lavish welcome China's Xi Jinping received on his recent visit to North Korea stylistically underscored a deep and comradely relationship between the two communist regimes. Mr Xi's trip to Pyongyang, his first in seven years to the secluded socialist state, was nonetheless more about reviving and rebalancing ties with the dictator Kim Jong-un than about political substance.
Mr Xi, as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, lavished praise on North Korea, a neighbouring state sharing many of China's cultural traditions. State media reported both are "socialist countries led by communist parties with traditional friendship, rooted in their shared ideals and beliefs as well as their common goals, and backed by a profound historical foundation, a solid political basis, and strong emotional bonds".
During the Korean War, for example, the newly founded People's Republic of China sent hundreds of thousands of "volunteers" to aid North Korea's attack on South Korea. The Chinese communist forces sustained huge losses in helping their North Korean comrades, a memory still part of a near-sacred political mantra of relations between both states. Mao Zedong described the PRC/DPRK relationship as "close as lips and teeth".
