[view] on the Second Trump-kim Summit: China Hopes for Solid Progress

How time flies. And how different a year can be.

This time last year the world was still very much unsure what would unfold amid Kim Jong-un's Olympic charm offensive after the "fire and fury" of 2017. But now we are on the cusp of witnessing a second summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump.

A year ago, Chinese officials, still trying to charm and being charmed by Trump, did not see the trade war coming; and now they are working hard to see the end of it. Apropos Korean affairs in particular, several broad observations jump out.

First, a great deal of what was said or implied by Beijing about its relations with North Korea seems to have lost its relevance. After years of characterizing Sino-DPRK relations as "normal state-to-state" relations, since 2018 Beijing has dropped the "normal" reference, as Kim's denuclearization pledge removed the biggest obstacle between them. In their meetings, whereas Kim Jong-un appeared to dutifully ingratiate himself with his host, Xi Jinping went to great lengths to emphasize the enduring Chinese devotion to the North Korean party, people and state.

Second, for all the suggestions that North Korea was a sovereign nation making its own decisions, especially when Pyongyang defied its wishes, Beijing can no longer convincingly claim that it has no influence on Pyongyang's behaviour. Such sentiment cannot be made more emphatically than by Robert Kelly, an American scholar based in South Korea, who, in the wake of news breaking on Kim's first visit to Beijing in late March, argued that "Next time, the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs says the real issue is between the U.S. and North Korea, and that China is just a mediator or just wants stability, we will know they are lying." In fact, in the past couple of years, Chinese influence was placed on full display ? positive in the form, for example, of the Air China plane that flew Kim to his history-making rendezvous with Trump, and negative in the sense that its cooperation was indispensable in Trump's maximum-pressure campaign against North Korea.

Third, the intertwining of China's relations with North Korea and the United States is now a matter of indisputable fact. In a dramatic yet also perfectly understandable way, the Xi-Kim meetings have been serving as a good indicator ? or even predictor, as in the case of their January 2019 meeting ? of the Kim-Trump summits. The same days (in January 2019) when Kim paid his fourth visit to China in 10...