China’s Xi Jinping to make rare trip to North Korea next week

Hong Kong (CNN) — Xi Jinping will travel to North Korea next week for a rare visit just weeks after the Chinese leader hosted US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin for separate, nearly back-to-back visits.

Xi will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a two-day state visit starting from next Monday, state media Xinhua announced on Friday. North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency also confirmed the trip.

The visit will be Xi’s first to North Korea since 2019, and the latest overture from Beijing to warm a historical but often complicated relationship with its neighbor. It will also be Xi’s first overseas trip this year.

Xi’s last trip abroad was last October to South Korea for the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, which included a meeting with Trump.

Since then, leaders of foreign governments have been queuing up to visit Beijing. Xi has hosted 17 world leaders in the capital in 2026, according to a CNN tally, and is set to meet his Laotian counterpart this week.

Xi and Kim last met in September, when the North Korean leader was an honored guest among a host of global leaders at a military parade in Beijing. Putin was also at the parade, with the three autocratic leaders putting on an unprecedented show of unity.

Next week’s trip provides Xi yet another opportunity to present himself as a geopolitical power broker with direct lines to a diverse cast of counterparts.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in May that any exchange between China and North Korea “serves the interests of two sides as well as peace and stability in the region.”

The timing of Xi’s trip has raised speculation about whether the Chinese leader is aiming to act as a mediator between Trump and Kim.

Trump met with the North Korean dictator three times during his first term – part of a fanfare-filled bid to disband North Korea’s nuclear program that ultimately stalled. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in restarting that diplomacy.

The Korean peninsula was among issues discussed between Xi and Trump during the US president’s three-day visit to Beijing in mid-May. A White House readout said the two leaders have a “shared goal to denuclearize North Korea.”

Since the collapse of talks during the first Trump administration, North Korea has pressed on with its nuclear weapons program in defiance of international sanctions.

Only this week, Kim inspected a new plant that makes weapons-grade nuclear material, saying Pyongyang plans to “beef up our state’s nuclear forces at an exponential rate,” according to a report from state-run media.

Kim last fall expressed an openness to sitting down with Trump again – but only if the US abandons denuclearization goals. It is difficult to know whether that would be acceptable to Trump, who launched a war against Iran in part to destroy the country’s nuclear enrichment program.

Any link to US diplomacy notwithstanding, Xi will arrive in Pyongyang with his own agenda for managing one of Beijing’s more complex partnerships.

China is North Korea’s top economic lifeline, accounting for the vast majority of the country’s foreign trade, and has long ranked as Pyongyang’s most important diplomatic partner.

But Beijing is also widely seen as wary of North Korea’s illegal nuclear program and weapons testing, which heighten American focus on the region and risk instability that could impact China, which shares a border with North Korea.

Ties have been noticeably cooler between Beijing and Pyongyang in recent years, including as North Korea closed its border during the Covid-19 pandemic and, later, as it grew closer to Moscow, deploying what are believed to be thousands of soldiers to aid Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The visit is a chance for Xi to push for a rebalancing of these ties and to signal the importance of the relationship to Beijing at a moment of global flux.

The US under Trump’s muscular foreign policy has taken aim at other nations it sees as threatening its security, like Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Beijing, meanwhile, is warily eying Japan’s bolstering of its defense capabilities.

Observers will be watching closely how Xi’s welcome and his meeting with Kim compare with the North Korean leader’s welcome of Putin during a 2024 visit to Pyonyang.

Putin’s visit – his first in nearly a quarter-century – was a pomp-filled affair where he and Kim drove each other around in a Russian-built Aurus limousine and inked a landmark mutual defense pact.

Last month, senior Moscow officials attended the inauguration of a war memorial complex in Pyongyang, where soldiers fighting for Russia were honored and a message from Putin was read aloud.

Xi’s visit coincides with the 65th anniversary of the two countries’ 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, China’s only mutual defense treaty, which was signed less than a decade after Chinese troops fought with North Korea in the Korean war.

CNN’s Shuai Zhang contributed reporting.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.