Xi Jinping Arrives in North Korea, With Many Eyes on Trump – The New York Times

“China wants to use the visit to encourage Kim Jong-un to continue to freeze his missile tests,” said Wu Xinbo, director of the American studies program at Fudan University in Shanghai. “We should give him some incentives to stay on the right track.”

The trip is the first by a Chinese leader to North Korea in 14 years. In the past year, Mr. Xi and Mr. Kim have met four times in China. But the 66-year-old Chinese leader, who has shown disdain for Mr. Kim, 35, had been reluctant to go to North Korea until now.

He had been expected to visit sometime this year, but the trip was apparently arranged fairly quickly so the Chinese leader could use it as leverage with Mr. Trump next week.

The timing of the two-day visit skirts the anniversary on Tuesday of the North’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, which started the Korean War. China fought alongside the North against the United States and South Korea during that three-year conflict, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Since then, the two Communist countries have maintained an alliance marked by long periods of tension.

Two years ago, as Mr. Kim fired a series of intercontinental ballistic missiles and China urged caution, the North hurled invective at Beijing, saying its state-run media was making “absurd and reckless remarks” that made the situation worse.

Mr. Xi’s decision to go to Pyongyang did not signal a new warmth, said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea scholar. Rather, Mr. Xi — in a corner over his stalemate in trade talks with the Trump administration — could see the possibility of playing the middle man between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump, he said.