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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s weekend visit to China over the newly completed New Yalu River Bridge was largely symbolic, and acknowledged a history that Pyongyang has downplayed for three generations, experts told Radio Free Asia.
During Saturday’s unprecedented one-day car trip to Dandong, China, across the border from North Korea’s northwestern city of Sinuiju, Kim inspected a bus factory, met with high-ranking Chinese officials, and visited a monument that commemorated China’s entry into the Korean War.
The timing was significant. The visit was on the eve of the 76th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s Oct. 25, 1950 first combat against South Korean and U.N. forces in the war, which would rage on for another three years as the Chinese-backed North and U.S. and U.N. backed South fought to what is largely considered to be a stalemate.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency noted that after Kim and the North Korean delegation toured the Memorial Hall of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and paid their respects, he told the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Huning – the fourth highest ranked official in the Chinese Communist Party – that it was North Korea’s duty to remember the sacrifice of the Chinese army.
“It was a moment to recollect the preciousness of the DPRK-China friendship forged at the cost of blood,” the report attributed him as saying. “We will always remember the history when the excellent sons and daughters of the Chinese people helped our revolution at the cost of their blood and steadily and firmly carry forward the history of the DPRK-China friendship,” Kim said, in the report.
Though international media outlets characterized Kim’s day trip to be an effort to expand trade ties between Pyongyang and Beijing, the visit to the memorial hall was the most important part of the itinerary, Ri Jong Ho, who was once a high-ranking North Korean official but escaped to the South and currently lives in the U.S., told RFA.
“A bridge that stayed closed for twelve years opened only days before Kim crossed it, and on the same day the supreme leader stood before a history his regime has avoided for more than seventy years,” said Ri, questioning whether that was a coincidence or pressure from Beijing, which financed the majority of the new bridge, which lay in a state of near-completion since 2014 before finally opening for trade traffic on Oct. 15.
There is a consensus among historians that North Korea’s survival in the Korean War was due to Beijing deploying troops to aid Pyongyang, but the story is different inside North Korea.
According to that version of history, the North Korean military under the tactical genius of Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung – with only minimal support from China – was able to stave off defeat against an overwhelming force led by the U.S.
This narrative was important from Pyongyang to maintain because it aligns with the country’s founding Juche ideology of self-reliance.
“Pyongyang will present the photographs as proof of an unbreakable friendship. But those inside the Kim system will see something else: the third Kim leader, bowing in public before a history his grandfather and father suppressed,” said Ri.
“Like-minded totalitarians”
Kim’s visit to Dandong is significant because of the timing, but it is more about managing China’s concerns that North Korea is getting too close to Russia, Sydney Seiler, a senior advisor for the Korea Chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies, told RFA.
“Kim is acting with limited confidence, embracing like-minded totalitarian, autocratic … partners such as Russia and China while ignoring the United States, at least for now,” said Seiler. “Kim is working in a ‘safe zone’ between Moscow and Beijing, ensuring that neither side is overly concerned with Pyongyang’s relations with the other, yet still watching to see if and when national interests are threatened.”
He said that at the moment, it is not likely that any moves by Kim and Chinese President Xi Jinping to strengthen their relationship would concern Putin.
“But the opposite is not necessarily true. If Russia’s support to the DPRK enables, empowers, emboldens, and eventually encourages Kim to consider scenarios of even limited use of force toward the ROK, then the PRC will be concerned,” he said, using abbreviations for the official names of South Korea and China. “Kim getting close to the Chinese may be designed to mitigate such concerns.”
But the trip could also be the result of pressure on Kim to finally open the New Yalu River Bridge – and his country, Ri said.
“I believe Chinese leaders, resentful of the neglected bridge, kept pressing him to open it, and a severe economic crisis left North Korea little choice but to unlock the gate,” he said. “The bridge is open, but I suspect Kim’s fear of opening up, and of the outside information that comes with it, remains deep.”
Ri noted that the bridge had been the vision of Jang Song Thaek, the uncle of Kim Jong Un who supported North Korean economic development through close cooperation with China. Jang in 2009 negotiated to get Beijing to finance the bridge while serving in the regime of Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il. Jang’s pro-China views caused him to fall out of favor with the younger Kim and he was executed by firing squad in the early years of his rule following his father’s death.
Message to Washington?
The fact that Kim was able to get into a car and drive to China is intended to point out the lack of effectiveness of sanctions, Hong Min, a senior research fellow at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification, told RFA.
“The trip implies that ‘one-day shuttle diplomacy’ is possible,” said Hong. “North Korea and China intend to continue close strategic communication regardless of sanctions, and it is a signal that sanctions can effectively be rendered meaningless.”
Because Kim’s visit involved many important officials on both sides, commentators in Seoul and Korea observers raised the possibility that the purpose was for the two countries to coordinate before U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Shenzhen, China for the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, and the potential for a summit with Kim while he is in the region.
Ri noted that this was not confirmed and said this kind of meeting would shatter North Korea’s established internal narratives.
“For decades, Pyongyang has preached self-reliance, or juche, and insisted that it bows to no foreign power,” he said. “If its leader must first seek Beijing’s permission before sitting down with an American president, that principle would be hollowed out.”
Ri noted that Kim met with Xi Jinping himself prior to his first summit with Trump in 2018. This time he met only with “China’s No. 4.”
Such a posture would resemble a provincial lord seeking an emperor’s approval,” he said. “An ideology that taught North Koreans for three generations to despise sadae, deference to the powerful, would stand exposed as a slogan.”
Edited by Eugene Whong.
