People watch a TV screen showing a file image of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, June 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) 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 state. For instance, the nation has amended its constitution on various occasions, most recently in 2023, to enshrine its possession of these weapons. A day before Xi arrived in Pyongyang, Kim Yo Jong, Kim’s powerful sister, called America’s demands for denuclearization an “anachronistic dream” and said North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was “irreversible.”
As recently as 2023, Beijing and Moscow backed a dual track approach as they sought to get Pyongyang to give up nukes and at the same time build what is called a peace regime — a replacement of the 1953 Korean War armistice with a treaty to formally end that conflict.
Russia, in an apparent bid to win favor with Kim Jong Un, has formally abandoned the goal of North Korea denuclearization. “The technologies used by North Korea are the result of the work of its own scientists,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last July after meeting his North Korean counterpart, Choe Son Hui. “We respect North Korea’s aspirations and understand the reasons why it is pursuing a nuclear development.”
China’s commitment to denuclearization of North Korea has always been suspect, because, among other reasons, China’s continual transfer of nuclear weapons materials, equipment, and technology to the North over the course of decades. Moreover, Beijing has consistently shielded the Pyongyang regime from the international community, particularly during the ill-fated Six Party Talks of the first decade of this century.
The dominant narrative is that Beijing has dropped North Korea’s denuclearization as a goal because it is competing with Moscow for influence in Pyongyang. There has always been an element of rivalry between China and Russia for the affections of the Kim regime, but the point is overdone.
North Korea’s critical dependence on China — before the recent Russian arms deals China accounted for about 95 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade — suggests the Chinese are not that worried about Pyongyang’s move to bulk up their Russian ties.
The Chinese know that they have influence over the North Koreans and can get them to do what they want. As former Russian diplomat Georgy Toloraya put it, Russia is “an ambulance” treating North Korea in emergencies, while China is “the doctor who treats her day by day.”
“North Korea fully depends on China’s economic aid to survive, as is increasingly the case with Russia,” Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank in Prague and a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, told me. “So Beijing has leverage to ensure that any independent Russia-North Korea alliance will not go very far.” In short, Beijing believes that neither Vladimir Putin nor Kim is strong enough to betray China.
China has been supporting the North Korean nuclear program all along because that program gives it leverage over Washington. As Greg Scarlatoiu, president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told me, “For Xi, any thorn in the side of the United States, especially North Korea’s nuclear program, is appealing.”
Beijing and Pyongyang are adept at fooling outsiders. China watcher Bill Triplett once told me that “Pyongyang and Beijing have operated one of the most successful denial and deception operations ever mounted.”
Beijing’s apparent dropping of the denuclearization demand is not a reversal of long-standing policy; it is an affirmation of China’s long-standing support of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.“
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