China's Xi wants to be seen as the “Worlds” peacemaker leader.....he's positioned himself such that FatBoy is nothing more than a nuisance in his way now, though China still wants NKorea itself as a buffer zone.
Now Xi, with his authority unquestioned, his foreign policy team in place, and a DPRK-Republic of Korea (ROK) summit imminent, has seized the moment to reassert China’s pivotal role in managing inter-Korean tensions. Souring relations and a brewing trade war with the U.S. probably also shaped his calculus. North Korea is far from being China’s puppet, but it is an important card Beijing has to play in its intensifying strategic competition with Washington.
In an unusually detailed report, China’s state news agency Xinhua said the meeting was “unofficial” and a “strategic choice”, and that Kim came to Beijing out of “moral responsibility” – signalling that relations are frosty but fixable. According to that report, Xi also told Kim what he now must do if he wants China’s help: meet regularly at the level of decision-makers, communicate early and often, prioritise economic development, promote people-to-people exchanges, and agree to denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula as a long-term goal. One Chinese proposal not in Xinhua’s report may have been to host some forthcoming meetings. Symbolically and practically, that would cement the Middle Kingdom’s position.
If Xi gets his way, by year’s end Korean peninsula talks could be back in a dialogue framework shaped by China. North Korea would become a problem to be managed but not an imminent threat, denuclearisation again would be a distant political goal, and sanctions would evolve into an adjustable valve to manage pressure on Pyongyang. Order under heaven, from China’s perspective. But while that may be Beijing’s preferred route, the journey ahead is far less certain than that travelled by the train that brought the DPRK’s ruler to his first summit, and many factors could knock diplomacy off the rails, not least Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump themselves.