Sino-NK

PRC Ambassador to the DPRK Wang Yajun (main second left), Minister Feng Chuntai (main left), and Defence Attaché Major General Wang Yisheng (main right), offer condolences before the bier of Kim Yong-nam alongside DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Pak Myong-ho (main second right), 4 November. | Image: Rodong sinmun, reprinted by the Embassy of the PRC in the DPRK.

The death of Kim Yong-nam, the 97-year-old former chairman of the Presidium of the DPRK on 3 November, led to a flurry of diplomatic exchange with China last month, continuing a recent high-level of political interaction between the two countries.

Following his death, Kim’s body lay in state on 4 November at the Sojang Funeral Hall in Pyongyang. North Korean President of State Affairs Kim Jong-un led remembrance activities in Pyongyang alongside “officials of the Party, power, and armed forces organs, ministries and national agencies”, according to the DPRK’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Among the foreign dignitaries who paid their respects to the bier of Kim Yong-nam on 4 November were PRC Ambassador to the DPRK Wang Yajun, Minister Feng Chuntai, and Defence Attaché Major General Wang Yisheng.

In the spirit of warming Sino-North Korean ties, the embassy communiqué detailing their visit emphasised China’s willingness “to work with North Korea to carry forward the legacy of the older generations of leaders (such as Kim), implement the important consensus reached by the top leaders of the two parties and countries (in September), and jointly promote the continuous development of China-North Korea relations for the benefit of the people of both countries”.

In Beijing, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed its condolences through spokesperson Mao Ning, who reaffirmed Kim as an “old friend of the Chinese people” (中国人民的老朋友) – a moniker given to foreigners deemed favourable by the Party – who had “led delegations to China more than once and made important contributions to the cooperative ties between the two countries”.

In reporting the official state funeral held on 5 November, KCNA detailed how Pyongyang’s citizenry lined the roads to “bid farewell to the late Kim Yong-nam, who devoted his whole life to the Party, country and people and the victorious advance of Juche revolution and strove to carry out the honourable mission of demonstrating the dignity and might of our socialist state”.

The subsequent ceremony, held at the Patriotic Martyrs Cemetery in Shinmi-ri, was attended by Kim Jong-un and roughly 100 of the DPRK’s leading officials.

Since assuming the post of SPA chairman in 1998, Kim served as the DPRK’s ceremonial head of state and functional second-in-command until his retirement in 2019. His career in North Korean politics was a remarkably lengthy one, remaining unscathed in a political arena fraught with periodic purges.

Born in 1928, information concerning the early years of Kim’s life – as with all biographies blurred by hagiographers in Pyongyang – is marked by uncertainty. Official DPRK accounts state Kim was born in Pyongyang, though as noted by the Seoul-based academic Fyodor Tertitskiy, some sources argue he was born in the late 1920s in what is now Dandong, in China’s Liaoning Province, before crossing the Yalu with the Chinese People’s Volunteers during the Korean War in 1950.

While almost all PRC media outlets avoided mention of Kim’s delicate potential origins in China in reporting his death, state-owned Shenzhen Radio and Television’s Direct News was more willing, alongside unofficial Chinese bloggers, to acknowledge his contested biography. The former news media outlet, known as Zhitong Xinwen, referenced the possibility Kim had been born in Fengtian, the former name of Shenyang, rather than Pyongyang, his stated birthplace according to official North Korean accounts.

After studying in Moscow, Kim became a section chief in the Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee Foreign Department in 1956, and was appointed vice foreign minister in 1962, before becoming an alternate and then full member of the Politburo in February 1974 and August 1978 respectively. In 1983, he was promoted to vice premier of the Administration Council and minister of foreign affairs, and made PA chairman in 1985.

Kim was thus a permanent fixture in DPRK diplomatic engagement for over half a century. His first mention in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily (人民日报), came in December 1961, when the then 33-year-old Kim served as the North Korean delegate to the Soviet-backed World Peace Council conference in Stockholm.

Kim Yong-nam and PRC Diplomacy

Kim Yong-nam (left) meets with Deng Xiaoping (right) while leading a WPK delegation to the PRC, November 1981. | Image: People’s Daily.

Kim’s permanence in the DPRK’s diplomacy efforts over decades made him a key actor in Sino-North Korean exchange. An online People’s Daily archive references Kim in 747 articles published between 1961 and 2012. The first of these related to PRC-DPRK diplomatic engagement, published on 24 April 1962, saw Kim mentioned as being present among North Korean officials welcoming a delegation of the Chinese National People’s Congress, led by Peng Zhen, to Pyongyang.

Kim’s last known visit to China occurred in August of 2013, when he stopped in Beijing en route to Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s then new President Hassan Rouhani. A mysterious article from the People’s Daily, which quoted the Beijing-controlled Ta Kung Pao in Hong Kong, failed to mention who Kim met with in he Chinese capital amid unconfirmed speculation of talks with then new President Xi Jinping who had been anointed six months earlier. At the time, Xi remained in a silent standoff with the young North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and the pair would not meet until nearly five years later.

Kim and Xi had held a series of prior meetings, a further factor adding to rumours of a secret meeting in Beijing in 2013. In June 2008, Kim met Xi in Pyongyang, then vice president of the PRC, during the latter’s first official overseas trip after having assumed his new position. The pair would cross paths again later that year, this time in Beijing, when Kim led the North Korean delegation to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics, during which he also met with then CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao.

Kim would ultimately step down two months before Xi’s first visit to Pyongyang in the capacity of general secretary of the CCP in June 2019, though not before playing a role, at the age of 90, in laying the foundations for the 2018 inter-Korean summit, and the Kim-Trump summit of 2019.

Prior to Xi, Kim had met with a succession of Chinese leaders during his long diplomatic career. Following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Kim was part of a DPRK government contingent that accompanied Kim Il-sung in offering condolences at the PRC embassy in Pyongyang. Eight years later, in 1984, he led a North Korean delegation to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ), noting the economic transformation reshaping post-Mao China under the stewardship of Deng Xiaoping.

Kim’s extraordinary longevity in an unstable political milieu was the consequence of much noted loyalty to the Kimist regime – captured by international media in his reverence for Kim Yo-jong, sister of Kim Jong-un, during the pair’s visit to South Korea for the opening ceremony of the February 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

Sino-North Korean educational exchange

PRC Ambassador to the DPRK Wang Yajun tours Kim Il-sung University, 19 November. | Image: Embassy of the PRC in the DPRK.

Following frequent high-level contact between China and North Korea in recent months, November saw education become a key focal point of PRC Embassy activity in the DPRK.

On 19 November, Ambassador Wang Yajun visited Kim Il-Sung University where he met with University Vice President Pak Hak-chol, visited Chinese students, and gave a speech to a class of North Korean students in the department of Chinese literature.

In his address, Wang noted that Defence Attaché Major General Wang Yisheng, and Councillor for Economic and Commercial Affairs Wang Congrong, both rank among alumni of Kim Il-sung University. He added: “They have not only become the backbone of China’s diplomatic undertakings, but have also made active contributions to the development of Sino-North Korean relations.”

Wang spoke of the fruitful results yielded by autumn’s increase in diplomatic activity, before remarking “the new era of Sino-North Korean relations brings more opportunities to the youth of both countries, as well as greater responsibilities”, which he suggested the students were primed to shoulder on the basis of their “concentrated appearance and fluent Chinese”.

Two days prior to Wang’s visit, the Chinese Embassy published the seventh issue of its “Korea Through the Lens of a Chinese Diplomat” photo series, designed to “open a window for understanding North Korea and build a bridge of friendship between the two countries”.  The issue, the first part of a mini-series, carried a photo of North Korean students studying at the People’s Grand Study House in Pyongyang, where they similarly honed their Chinese language skills.

Trending towards normalcy?

Before North Korea’s COVID-induced shutdown, an average of 60 government-sponsored and 70 self-funded Chinese students studied in the country annually, with approximately 400 North Korean students making the journey to PRC institutions on government scholarships.

Following the pandemic’s outbreak, Chinese students were absent from the DPRK until last year, when a more muted cohort of 41 government-sponsored and 45 self-funded students arrived in Pyongyang.

A May 2025 embassy communiqué stated that the number of government-funded Chinese students in the DPRK had returned to pre-pandemic levels, however, with 62 having arrived in the North Korean capital. Their return followed the reopening of the DPRK’s only HSK Chinese language test centre at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, opened in 2019 but closed shortly thereafter. It remains unclear whether the number of self-funded students has likewise recovered given the inconsistency in data published by the Chinese Embassy.

Educational programmes have long represented a key element of cultural exchange between the two states, as well as a significant form of Chinese aid to North Korea, as noted by academic James Reilly in his paper on China’s aid to the DPRK in 2014.

Dandong-Sinuiju postal route: Running smoothly

A letter received by the PRC Embassy in the DPRK, and published to the Embassy’s website on 24 November. | Image: Embassy of the PRC in the DPRK.

In an update to the announcement made in October by the PRC’s State Post Bureau on the resumption of the land postal route connecting Dandong and Sinuiju in late September, the PRC Embassy in Pyongyang issued a communiqué noting that one enthusiastic Chinese citizen had sent a letter to test the efficacy of the service.

Sent from Shanghai on 2 November, the letter transited through Beijing and Shenyang, before arriving in Dandong on 9 November, and then crossing the border the same day.

Its author, a purported “ordinary citizen who follows China-North Korea relations”, expressed their excitement surrounding the restoration of the postal route, and through their letter hoped to “personally verify the smooth operation of this historic channel”.

The letter’s publicization on the Embassy website appeared to be an attempt to reassure the sender, and observers more broadly, that all is indeed running smoothly on the China-DPRK postal front.

The revived land-postal route represents one facet of increased activity along the Sino-North Korean border: As reported by Sino-NK, the PRC border province of Liaoning is on track to register a record year of trade activity with its reclusive neighbour.

Though not marked by the unusually high-level diplomatic exchanges of October and September, November’s activity suggests a continuation toward improving bilateral relations amid Pyongyang’s rapid recent realignment with Moscow.

That China is re-engaging with the DPRK will no doubt serve as comfort to the enthusiastic Chinese letter sender in Shanghai, who remarked on a personal wish that “the friendship between China and North Korea remains strong and lasting, and cooperation between the two countries again yields major achievements”.