Chinese President to visit North Korea next week
From Max Lee
The Daily Mail’s
Special Correspondent in Beijing

BEIJING—Chinese President Hu Jintao will visit North Korea next week for meetings with reclusive leader Kim Jong-Il, just weeks before the scheduled resumption of six-party nuclear talks, state media said.
Hu will be in Pyongyang between October 28 and 30 before heading to fellow communist ally Vietnam on what the Xinhua news agency on Friday termed “good-will visits”. The trip takes place ahead of US President George W. Bush’s arrival in Beijing on November 19, with North Korea expected to be high on the agenda.
It will be Hu’s first visit to the Stalinist state since he took power in 2002, and the first by the head of China’s Communist Party since September 2001, when Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin went to the North Korean capital.
Kim, who always travels by train instead of by air, made a secretive trip to China in April 2004 and the invitation to Hu has been on the table since then.
He also came in January 2001, when he toured Shanghai’s stock exchange as his government announced its readiness to adopt Chinese-style economic reforms. China, which maintains cozy ties with North Korea, is seem as an example that a socialist regime can undergo economic reforms without losing its grip on power.
Earlier this month, Hu said he wanted to take cooperation with Pyongyang to “a new high” in a congratulatory message to Kim on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party of Korea. He said the relationship served the fundamental interests of both sides and was “conducive to maintaining peace and stability in the region”.
Despite being North Korea’s closest ally and intent on keeping the six-party talks afloat, analysts said Hu was unlikely just yet to dangle too many incentives in front of Kim to scrap his nuclear weapons programs.
“Hu wants to do all he can to keep North Korea at the negotiating table but China are not at the point yet to offer the North too many goodies,” said Peter Beck, director of the Northeast Asia Project at the International Crisis Group in Seoul. “That might come later, when a deal is done.
“The trip is more for coordination, to boost strategic ties and make sure the North doesn’t walk away from the talks. And certainly, with Bush coming, it shows China is playing a critical role in moving the talks forward”.
China, which already supplies fuel and food to impoverished North Korea, has been the key player in the six-party process that aims to persuade Pyongyang to dismantle its atomic weapons programs.
It has so far hosted four rounds of the negotiations that also include the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia, with a fifth round expected in the first half of next month.
The last session ended in Beijing in September when the North agreed to a statement of principles under which it will give up its nuclear weapons in return for energy and security guarantees.
But the regime backtracked, warning later that it would not dismantle its arsenal until the United States supplied a light-water reactor to allow it to generate power, leaving the prospect of prolonged multilateral wrangling.
Earlier Friday, US politician Bill Richardson said in Tokyo that North Korea was ready to accept a visit at an “appropriate” time by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
North Korea suspended its membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993 and placed limitations on IAEA inspections. It withdrew from the treaty altogether in December 2002 and kicked out inspectors.
Richardson, governor of the US state of New Mexico, has just returned from a four-day tour of North Korea, where he met with top government officials.