Digging into Scoops

Is Xi heading to Pyongyang? Did he lose his cool talking Tokyo with Trump in Beijing?

A pair of intriguing scoops have surfaced in the wake of Trump’s visit to Beijing that merit the attention of anyone trying to follow trends in Northeast Asia.

The first came thanks to TIME magazine’s Charlie Campbell, who, near the bottom of his May 20 story about Vladimir Putin’s post-Trump summit with Xi Jinping, casually informed the reader that “sources” informed him Xi would soon be traveling to North Korea for a summit with Kim Jong Un. Say what? Talk about burying the lede! Here are the relevant bits:

But while Putin is due to depart Beijing early Thursday, it is not the end to Xi’s diplomatic cavalcade, with sources telling TIME that China’s leader will visit North Korea for a state visit perhaps as early as next week. The visit is framed as a response to Japan’s new Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, who has shifted China’s old adversary away from its strict pacifist stance and adopted a more assertive geopolitical posture.

“China and North Korea will coordinate more against the new militarism of Japan,” says one source briefed on the arrangements, asking to remain anonymous since plans had not yet been officially announced.

https://time.com/article/2026/05/20/putin-xi-china-center-stage-diplomacy-analysis/

So far as I know, this was the first report to suggest an imminent visit to Pyongyang by Xi Jinping, who last made the schlep across the border in June 2019—and whose most recent international journey was to South Korea in October last year.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, not to be outdone by TIME, asked officials in Seoul for comment on Charlie’s scoop, and got the following replies:

“We have obtained intelligence indicating that President Xi Jinping will visit North Korea soon,” a high-ranking government official told Yonhap News Agency.

Another government official also said there is a high possibility of Xi visiting North Korea later this month or early next month, noting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Pyongyang last month and the recent trips by Xi’s security guards and ceremonial staff to the North Korean capital.

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20260520013200320

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman neither confirmed nor denied the report when asked at the next day press conference:

AFP: South Korean media outlets have reported citing sources that Chinese leader is likely to visit North Korea. Can the foreign ministry confirm this and provide a comment? (Similar question from Yonhap News Agency)

Guo Jiakun: China and the DPRK are friendly socialist neighbors. The two parties and two countries have a long-term tradition of friendly exchanges, which serves the interests of the two sides as well as peace and stability in the region. For your specific question, I have no information to offer at the moment.

Yonhap News Agency: After the China-U.S. presidential meeting, the White House wrote in its fact sheet that President Trump and President Xi confirmed their shared goal of denuclearizing North Korea. However, nothing related to denuclearization was mentioned in yesterday’s China-Russia presidential meeting. What’s your comment?

Guo Jiakun: China has released the readouts on the China-Russia and China-U.S. presidential meetings. China’s position and policy on the Korean Peninsula issue maintains consistency and continuity. We will play a constructive role in advancing the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue in our own way.

It will be hard to know if Xi is really going to Pyongyang until he gets off the plane to the sight of cheering children on the tarmac of Sunan International Airport. I’ve talked to Charlie Campbell numerous times over the years and know him to be a serious and thoughtful journalist, careful in sourcing, who would not report a trip were imminent unless he had high confidence. Time will tell.

A visit by Xi would explain one little puzzle left over from PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent trip to Pyongyang: a dramatic shift in tone from lowkey initial meeting with his counterpart, DPRK Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, to an enthusiastically reported meeting on day two with Kim Jong Un.

In an earlier Substack video, North Korea watcher extraordinaire Rachel Minyoung Lee and I speculated over that “abrupt turn,” which she had also written about in a piece for 38 North.

Now we can retrospectively posit an explanation—in Wang Yi’s meeting with Chairman Kim, details were ironed out for the visit by Chairman Xi, giving both men something to be happy about.

It’s worth noting that Charlie’s sources offered a curious explanation for the planned focus of a Xi-Kim summit, “coordinating against the new militarism of Japan,” which provides a bridge to the second our our two scoops, this one by the FT’s Man in DC, Demetri Sevastopulo. Demetri’s sources (“seven people familiar with the Trump-Xi meeting”) relayed that Xi lost his cool when talking about Japanese “remilitarisation” under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

Team Trump was apparently got off guard by Xi’s vehemence, which is surprising given that even cursory monitoring of the discourse in Beijing should have alerted them to the likelihood of Xi raising the issue. Anti-Japanese messaging has been in high gear for a solid nine months since the China Victory Day Parade (victory over Japan in 1945) held in Tiananmen Square on September 3^rd last year, and the line hardened considerably in response to PM Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan on November 7, when she said in a Diet debate:

“If battleships are used and a naval blockade involves the use of force, I believe that would, by any measure, constitute a situation that could be deemed a threat to Japan’s survival.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/12/03/japan/explainer/explainer-japan-existential-crisis/

Btw, you can watch/listen to Cambridge don John Nilsson-Wright help me understand this statement and Takaichi in general in an earlier Substack video here:

As the Trump summit was approaching, it seemed fairly obvious that Xi would raise Japan, and my own discussions in Beijing with experts in the days before the visit confirmed that expectation. That said, I confess I am skeptical about the characterization that Demetri’s seven sources provided, designed to make us believe Xi is irrational and emotional on the issue of Takaichi/ Japan (Xi was “vocal and agitated”; it was an “intense diatribe”; a “verbal attack” “most heated” part of the summit). I do not doubt Xi was intense and pointed in his remarks to Trump; I remain a tad skeptical, however, that he was speaking from overheated sentiment, as opposed to coolheaded calculation.

The ongoing tension in Sino-Japanese relations is a significant impediment to regional peace and a potentially destabilizing trend, at a time when the world hardly needs another source of instability. Hopefully the leadership in Tokyo and Beijing can find an off-ramp from the current animosity and start to work more constructively together.

In the meantime, we will have to wait and see if Xi boards a plane for Pyongyang anytime soon, and, if he does, watch carefully and dispassionately to understand the significance of the visit.

After the scoops, the digging. “Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.”