TOKYO - Chinese President Xi Jinping recently traveled to North Korea for the first time in seven years and held a summit with leader Kim Jong Un.
The trip should not be seen as an ordinary visit between socialist leaders; rather, it marked a key moment in which North Korea leveraged its honeymoon relationship with Russia to draw China in and expanded its own political and diplomatic room for maneuver.
Pyongyang has fully backed the Russian administration of President Vladimir Putin since immediately after the launch of its invasion of Ukraine, rapidly deepening ties not only militarily but also economically.
For China, however, control over the Korean Peninsula and, by extension, Asia must belong neither to Russia nor to the United States but to itself. Xi has been pushed to value ties with North Korea to the point of choosing the country as his first overseas destination this year.
For North Korea, too, dependence on Russia alone is undesirable: its basic foreign policy is to pursue autonomy and the ideal is to broaden its options through balance-of-power diplomacy among major powers. In that sense, drawing China's interest through closer ties with Russia and realizing Xi's visit amounted to a major political achievement for Kim.
What merits attention is Chinese media coverage. In past China-North Korea summits, reports have said North Korea's "denuclearization" was on the agenda. The Xi administration has steadfastly opposed Pyongyang's nuclear development, but this time denuclearization was not mentioned at all.
Whether the issue was discussed is unknown, but the lack of reference from media reports signals an elevation of North Korea's standing.
With Russia supportive of North Korea's nuclear development and importing large quantities of weapons from the country in violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions, the significance for China of insisting on denuclearization has diminished. This situation, if it continues, could trigger a domino effect that leads North Korea to be recognized as a nuclear weapons state.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made remarks indicating that North Korea is a nuclear power, deviating from Washington's long-held position of not officially recognizing the country as such. North Korea continues to await major U.S. concessions, having halted the test-firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The chances that Pyongyang will respond to conventional denuclearization talks are now close to zero. The country appears to be aiming either for arms-control negotiations premised on its nuclear possession, or for a normalization of relations that shelves denuclearization.
China, for its part, wants to encourage U.S.-North Korea dialogue, remaining in the driver's seat over the situation in the Korean Peninsula while keeping the United States and Russia at bay. The latest China-North Korea summit meeting made it look as though Beijing and Pyongyang are working in tandem to press Washington for concessions.
At the summit the leaders reportedly also discussed increasing exchanges in the military field. Having formed military alliances both with China and Russia, North Korea is no longer in a hurry, as it was in the past, to seek sanctions relief amid a wartime boom.
North Korea has succeeded in raising the bar for negotiations by steadily strengthening its military power while U.S.-North Korea talks remain stalled.
Against that backdrop, Japan's options are limited. Past experiences make clear there are limits to cooperation with the United States and South Korea on the North Korean issue. The Japanese government must act on matters involving Japanese people's lives and human rights, making strategic diplomacy essential.
Atsuhito Isozaki, born in Tokyo in 1975, is a professor at Keio University. He completed his graduate studies at Keio University, served as a senior researcher at the Japanese Embassy in China and visiting scholar at George Washington University in the United States. He specializes in North Korean politics and diplomacy. His books include "Reading North Korea."
