Xi Jinping’s arrival in Pyongyang on June 8, his first in nearly seven years, is precisely that kind of visit. It is the visit of a patron who suspects, with some justification, that his most loyal vassal is finding new masters. And the anxiety behind it tells us more about the shifting architecture of Asian power than any joint communiqué ever will.

The last time Xi set foot in Pyongyang was in June 2019, when the geopolitical landscape looked considerably different. Back then, Kim Jong Un was emerging from a brief, spectacular flirtation with Donald Trump — the Singapore handshakes, the DMZ photo-ops — that ultimately produced nothing. China was comfortable. It remained indispensable. It held the economic levers. North Korea had nowhere else to go.

That comfortable arrangement no longer quite exists. North Korea has been deepening its military and economic collaboration with Russia at a pace that would make any traditional patron a little uneasy. For Beijing, which has long viewed itself as Pyongyang’s primary diplomatic and economic lifeline, the Russia-DPRK relationship represents a quiet but real challenge to its influence. This is the inconvenient truth that Xi’s delegation carries into Kim’s reception halls: not just goodwill and solidarity rhetoric, but something closer to strategic unease dressed in diplomatic costume.

History offers instructive parallels. When the Soviet Union began courting Egypt in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nasser leveraged superpower competition masterfully, playing Moscow against Washington with the practised ease of a bazaar merchant. Kim Jong Un, a man whose strategic instincts are routinely underestimated by Western analysts, appears to have absorbed that lesson thoroughly. He now sits between Beijing and Moscow with growing confidence, collecting dividends from........

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