Xi meets Kim: China reaffirms support for North Korea’s nukes   

China, in a major reversal of policy, has apparently dropped its demand that North Korea “denuclearize” and surrender its most destructive weapons. The reversal was evident in what was not included in the Chinese statement after this month’s summit between Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. 

China’s statement omitted any mention of denuclearization. When the pair last met in the North Korean capital, in 2019, the Chinese leader had publicly talked about playing “a positive and constructive role in achieving the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and long-term stability in the region.”

Not everyone believes Beijing has decided to accept the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a nuclear weapons state. A Chinese expert on China-North Korea relations told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that claims that China had abandoned denuclearization were “mere media hype.”

In any event, Beijing did not push the denuclearization issue during the two-day event. And as Tong Zhao of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told NPR, Beijing has adopted “a very significant policy change to tacitly accept the reality of a nuclear North Korea.”

North Korea joined the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in December 1985. In return for promising not to develop nukes, the regime received nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Pyongyang, however, secretly developed these weapons and announced its withdrawal from the agreement in January 2003.

North Korea is thought to have detonated its first nuclear device in October 2006.  

Since then, Kim has sought global recognition as a nuclear weapons........

© The Hill