BEIJING—China’s sending its foreign minister to North Korea as Beijing seeks to avoid being sidelined by its
neighbor’s top-level negotiations with Seoul and Washington.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is scheduled to visit North Korea on Wednesday and Thursday at the invitation of his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong Ho, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
Though no agenda was released, Mr. Wang’s visit comes on the heels of
Friday’s summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, where the two sides agreed to seek a peace treaty to end the Korean War. On Sunday, the South Korean presidential office said the North’s Kim Jong Un had
committed to closing its nuclear test site in May.
With planning under way for a summit between Mr. Kim and President Donald Trump in coming weeks, analysts said Beijing is anxious to gain insight into those negotiations and secure a Chinese role in any multilateral talks that might follow.
“One very important thing for China is to know what happens, as it happens, before it happens.
China needs to feel it knows what is going on,” said James Reilly, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Sydney. He pointed to China’s and North Korea’s strained relations of recent years, saying “trust has been damaged and this is the process of rebuilding it and opening communication.”
China is North Korea’s only ally and biggest trade partner. Relations soured over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and more recently over Beijing’s tighter enforcement of trade sanctions.
Mr. Kim made a fence-mending trip to Beijing in late March—his first ever meeting with President Xi Jinping —to secure China’s backing ahead of its recent diplomatic efforts, analysts said, and to pave the way for loosening United Nations sanctions that have squeezed the North Korean economy. Foreign Minister Wang may discuss plans for a follow-up visit by Mr. Xi to Pyongyang, analysts said.
Chinese officials have long urged Pyongyang and Washington to hold direct talks.
Amid the recent weeks of fast-moving diplomacy, however, China has grown concerned that it is being marginalized in negotiations over the Korean Peninsula and that a potential agreement between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington might not reflect Chinese interests, diplomats and analysts said.
Hosting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang and briefing him on Mr. Kim’s meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in is a way “to show North Korea really respects China and wants to keep close coordination with China going forward,” said Zhao Tong, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
Mr. Zhao said China likely will want to secure a role in the dismantling of North Korea’s test site. South Korea’s presidential office said on Sunday that Mr. Kim committed to close the site by May and to discuss inviting U.S. and South Korean experts and journalists to verify the closure.
Also likely on Mr. Wang’s agenda is securing China’s involvement in negotiations with the U.S. and North and South Korea on turning the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War into a peace treaty, Mr. Zhao said.
In a joint declaration issued at Friday’s inter-Korean summit, North and South Korea agreed to “actively pursue” either three-way talks involving the U.S., or four-way ones also involving China, on establishing a permanent peace regime.
