China's highest-level visit to North Korea in nearly five years is set to get underway Thursday, as Pyongyang seeks to strengthen relations with both Beijing and Moscow amid growing coordination between its neighbors and the United States.
Zhao Leji, China’s third-highest ranked official, will lead a delegation for a “goodwill visit” to the country to kickstart a “friendship year” marking 75 years of diplomatic ties, Beijing announced Tuesday.
The three-day visit, at North Korea’s invitation, shows the “great importance” China attaches to those relations, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said. North Korea’s state media agency KCNA also announced the visit.
It also affords a top Chinese official the opportunity to hear directly from North Korea’s intensely secretive and isolated government while on the ground, analysts say.
Zhao is the highest-ranking Chinese visitor to the country since a state visit from Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2019. Zhao leads China’s rubber-stamp national legislature and is a member of its powerful seven-man Politburo Standing Committee.
The trip comes as both countries are wary of what they see as an increasingly hostile region – in particular growing security coordination between the US and its allies Japan and South Korea, which in turn seek to counter aggression from Beijing and Pyongyang.
The delegation will also arrive amid heightened global concern about North Korea, which has in recent months ramped up its bellicose rhetoric and continued its weapons testing. Pyongyang has also forged closer ties with Moscow, and begun supplying arms used in its war in Ukraine, the US and its allies say.
Those geopolitical fault lines are underscored as the Chinese delegation’s visit coincides with a raft of Asia-focused diplomacy in Washington this week.
US President Joe Biden is hosting a trilateral summit with the Philippines and Japan Thursday, a day after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida where they pledged to advance coordination around countering challenges from China and North Korea.
In an interview with CNN ahead of that meeting, Kishida referred to China and North Korea’s close ties with Russia and urged them to “maintain a free and open international order based on the rule of law.”
