Kim Jong Un visits China. Since he met Trump, such trips mostly led to no talks.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un crossed a new bridge into China on 24 October. China hosts a summit of Pacific leaders on 18 and 19 November.
What happened
Kim Jong Un crossed the New Yalu River Bridge into the Chinese city of Dandong, weeks before China hosts a summit of Pacific leaders in Shenzhen.
Kim Jong Un crossed the New Yalu River Bridge into the Chinese city of Dandong on . It was the North Korean leader’s sixth visit to China and his first since . He went home the same day.
Chinese President Xi Jinping did not meet him. Wang Huning, the fourth most senior official in China’s Communist Party, received Kim and passed on greetings from Xi. Kim said North Korea “stands ready to work with China“ and to expand practical cooperation. His sister Kim Yo Jong and foreign minister Choe Son Hui travelled with him.
Xi hosts the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC) in Shenzhen on 18 and . The summit has fuelled talk of a meeting between Kim and US President Donald Trump. On Reuters reported that US and South Korean officials see little chance of such a meeting this year.
Trump had earlier said he planned to hold in-person talks with Kim before the end of the year.
Al Jazeera,
On Trump called Kim “a friend of mine“. He and Kim held summits in 2018 and 2019, and talks broke down over US demands that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. North Korea has not formally agreed to a new meeting.
Sources: theguardian.com
The Pattern
We looked for cases where the leader of a country with no diplomatic ties to the US visited its main backer, after already meeting the US president in person. We found four such visits from 2018 to 2025: three trips by Kim Jong Un to Beijing and one by Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa to Turkey. Each time the US president was Donald Trump.
Show the other 2 cases
The Read
Three of the four visits were followed by no meeting within eight weeks. The one meeting, in Hanoi in , came 51 days after Kim’s trip to Beijing and took place in Vietnam, a third country. This year the APEC summit falls 26 days after the visit, and it is in China, the backer’s own country.
Kim made three of the four trips, all to China, and the US president was always Donald Trump. In all four, the Chinese or Turkish leader received the guest in person, while this time Xi Jinping did not. Twice, in 2018 and 2025, a leader met Trump about five weeks after a trip to his backer, but those two had never met Trump before.
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