Just days after breaking the ice (without breaking the bank) with U.S. President Donald Trump in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping is turning to more perennial partners.

Xi welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to Beijing on Tuesday for a substantive and far warmer visit. The two leaders attended a photo exhibition on China and Russia’s “everlasting friendship” and released a verbose joint statement in which they pledged to “deepen cooperation” on everything from nuclear energy to the preservation of leopards, pandas, and monkeys. They also name-checked Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, calling it a “clear threat to strategic stability,” and slammed his “irresponsible policy” in allowing the U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty known as New START to expire.

Just days after breaking the ice (without breaking the bank) with U.S. President Donald Trump in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping is turning to more perennial partners.

Xi welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to Beijing on Tuesday for a substantive and far warmer visit. The two leaders attended a photo exhibition on China and Russia’s “everlasting friendship” and released a verbose joint statement in which they pledged to “deepen cooperation” on everything from nuclear energy to the preservation of leopards, pandas, and monkeys. They also name-checked Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, calling it a “clear threat to strategic stability,” and slammed his “irresponsible policy” in allowing the U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty known as New START to expire.

But as comprehensive as that engagement was, it was not altogether unexpected. Xi noted that it was Putin’s 25th official visit to China, underscoring the close partnership the two countries have forged.

However, Xi may be following Putin’s visit with a far rarer and more momentous diplomatic engagement. Multiplereports indicate he could be preparing to visit North Korea in the coming days—possibly as early as next week. China has not officially announced the visit, and the Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

If confirmed, Xi’s visit to North Korea would be only his second as China’s leader and his first in seven years. The two countries have had a close partnership for decades. China accounts for nearly all of North Korea’s trade, and North Korea is the only country in the world with which China has a mutual defense pact.

But North Korea’s increasing closeness to Russia—particularly its military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine—has led to China being somewhat sidelined. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Putin signed a mutual defense pact of their own in 2024.

“There’s an argument that Xi isn’t super excited about this robust, deepening relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang, and with the risk of losing leverage influence on North Korea, that China wants to make sure that it is still relevant,” said Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow and SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“China is also concerned about instability, and if Russian weapons and technology are getting to North Korea—which likes to march to its own drumbeat—that could be destabilizing,” he added. “That’s what China fears more, and so China wants to make sure that North Korea remains part of its orbit.”

China’s effort to shore up that orbit has gathered momentum in the past year, with Xi hosting Kim (alongside Putin) at a military parade in Beijing last September. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also traveled to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang last month, meeting with Kim and stressing the need for the two countries to “strengthen communication and coordination on major international and regional affairs.”

Putin is not Xi’s only recent guest with an interest in North Korean diplomacy. Since coming back to power, Trump has repeatedly hinted he would like to recreate his own landmark 2019 meeting with Kim. The U.S. leader said at several points last year that he would “love to meet” the North Korean leader, and he told reporters last week that he had discussed North Korea with Xi in Beijing (though he declined to reveal details of those discussions).

But North Korea is far more emboldened and assertive than it was during Trump’s first term, when Kim met the U.S. president three times. This confidence is due in part to support from Russia but also to the billions of dollars in cryptocurrency it has seized through cyber-heists that allow it to better weather global sanctions. That is also likely to play into the Pyongyang-Beijing dynamic, said Mira Rapp-Hooper, former senior director for East Asia and Oceania in the Biden administration’s National Security Council.

“North Korea has been in a more confident and less constrained place for the last two years than it has at any time in recent decades,” Rapp-Hooper said. “We’ve seen very little desperation from North Korea in recent years. What I think Pyongyang would be hoping to do would be to re-establish the relationship with China on stronger footing—where North Korea no longer looks like a junior partner or a sheriff’s deputy, but as part of a China-Russia partnership on something closer to equal footing.”

China’s ambitions, on the other hand, are far broader and more global in nature. Xi’s flurry of diplomacy is meant to send a signal about China’s position in the world and its ascendancy in global affairs (he’s even playing hardball with future U.S. military visits to Beijing).

“The main story here is about China asserting its leadership on the world stage, and we need to be careful about focusing it in too narrow a way on each of these interactions,” said Daniel Kritenbrink, who served as a U.S. official and diplomat in Asia through the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations, including at the National Security Council and the State Department.

Kritenbrink, now a partner at The Asia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm in Washington, said that that sentiment was palpable during his visit to Beijing in March and was further strengthened by the Trump and Putin summits happening in quick succession. “Chinese confidence is at an all-time high—confidence that many international trends are breaking China’s way, that China’s time has come and China has to take advantage of that,” he said. “Even though many of these changes are unsettling and tumultuous, I still felt like the message from China’s leadership in public and in private was that China has answers to all of these challenges and China will be central to answering all of these challenges.”

And while a potential Xi visit to Pyongyang would largely be geared towards strengthening the bilateral relationship and managing Russia, it’s also part of a broader continuum of China presenting itself as an indispensable global player.

“Beijing has become the center of gravity for global diplomacy in the first half of 2026,” said Ryan Hass, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “Beijing has presented itself as a predictable actor working to uphold the international order,” he added. “China is leaning into its preferred contrast with the United States to accumulate diplomatic capital on the world stage.”