Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, will visit Beijing to attend a massive military parade next week, in a move to reinforce ties with China at a time Mr. Kim is being courted by both the United States and South Korea for dialogue.
Mr. Kim was invited by President Xi Jinping of China to attend the Sept. 3 military parade, which will commemorate the end of the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, their governments said on Thursday. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will also be there, raising the likelihood of Mr. Kim holding summit meetings with both Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin, two of his country’s most important allies.
Beijing said the leaders of some of the largest economies in Asia — like Indonesia and Malaysia — and more than 20 other nations also planned to attend the parade, providing Mr. Kim with his first opportunity to step onto a major multilateral diplomatic arena. The list also includes Myanmar’s junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, as well as President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba.
This will be Mr. Kim’s first trip to Beijing since January 2019. Mr. Kim last met with Mr. Xi when the Chinese leader visited Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in June 2019. Mr. Putin met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang last June, when both leaders restored a Cold War-era alliance treaty of mutual defense and cooperation.
The ties between North Korea and Russia have rapidly deepened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. North Korea has provided Moscow with badly needed weapons and troops. Western officials suspect that North Korea received food, oil, cash and weapons technologies from Moscow in return.
But North Korea still relies on China for almost all of its external trade. Mr. Kim’s trip to Beijing indicates that he wants to strengthen that relationship while expanding ties with Moscow.
Among other things, North Korea hopes that Beijing will resume sending Chinese tourists to North Korea. Tourism is one of the few industries that have not been blacklisted by United Nations sanctions imposed on the country for its nuclear weapons development.
North Korea received a record 300,000 foreign tourists in 2019, most of them from China. But that source of cash dried up with the pandemic. North Korea reopened its borders in 2023, and Russia began sending tourists. But their numbers have only amounted to several hundreds. China has yet to resume tourism with North Korea.
In recent months, Mr. Kim has been wooed by both Seoul and Washington. Just this week at the White House, President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea and President Trump both expressed an interest in meeting with Mr. Kim. Mr. Lee even suggested that Mr. Trump travel to South Korea in October to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and try to meet Mr. Kim around that time. Mr. Trump seemed interested in the idea, according to Mr. Lee’s office.
But there have been no indications that Mr. Kim wants to talk with either man. North Korea has said that while Mr. Kim’s personal relationship with Mr. Trump is “not bad,” it will not re-enter negotiations on easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula as long as Washington wants it to give up its nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kim’s personal diplomacy with Mr. Trump, which South Korea helped mediate, ended up in a huge embarrassment for the North Korean leader, whose state media had raised expectations about the meeting among his people. Their negotiations collapsed in 2019 when they ended their second summit meeting, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, without an agreement on how to roll back the North’s nuclear weapons program and when to ease sanctions.
North Korea has since doubled down on expanding its nuclear arsenal. That and the new alliance with Russia will provide Mr. Kim more bargaining power should he decide to meet with Mr. Trump or Mr. Kim, analysts say.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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