A surprise visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s top aides to South Korea has shown that the North’s “diplomatic offensive” appears to have reached its climax, but it will be difficult to break its diplomatic isolation unless Pyongyang changes its course on its nuclear weapons program, a Chinese expert said Monday.
A trio of high-ranking North Korean officials, led by Hwang Pyong-so, vice chairman of the North’s omnipotent National Defense Commission who is widely seen as the No. 2 man behind Kim, visited South Korea on Saturday.
The sudden visit, officially aimed at attending the closing ceremony of the Incheon Asian Games, came as a big surprise because it followed months of military tensions and vicious verbal attacks by the North against South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
For Wang Junsheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, however, the Saturday visit was “no accident,” given the North’s proactive diplomacy with the outside world in recent weeks.
Last month, Kang Sok-ju, a secretary in charge of foreign relations for the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), made a five-nation trip to Europe and Mongolia. North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Su-yong is on a visit to Russia after making a rare attendance to the U.N. General Assembly.
“The spectacular visit (to South Korea) caused a lot of speculation, but the sudden visit is no accident. It fundamentally reflects North Korea’s external adjustment,” Wang said in his article published by the Beijing News, a daily newspaper run by the Beijing city government.
The Saturday visit “can be described as North Korea’s recent ‘diplomatic offensive’ reaching its climax,” Wang said.
Accompanying Hwang was Choe Ryong-hae, another key confidant of the North Korean leader, and Kim Yang-gon, a WPK secretary in charge of relations with South Korea.
They held talks with South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won, Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae and National Security Adviser Kim Kwan-jin, marking the highest-level discussion between the two Koreas in recent years.
Both sides agreed to resume a high-level, inter-Korean dialogue that has been stalled for seven months, but Wang warned against being overly optimistic about inter-Korean relations without a major breakthrough on the nuclear issue.
“If North Korea does not show sincerity on the nuclear issue, the intense diplomatic activity would be difficult to achieve its desire to break international isolation,” Wang said.
North Korea has shown no signs of abandoning its nuclear weapons program. The six-party talks, which bring together the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the U.S., have been deadlocked since late 2008.
North Korea wants an unconditional resumption of negotiations, but South Korea and the U.S. demand that Pyongyang first take concrete steps toward its denuclearization commitment.
While the six-nation negotiations were idled, the North conducted two nuclear tests and a series of long-range rocket launches, fueling concern the regime is closer to developing nuclear missiles.
Another Chinese expert, Xu Lifan, an editor at the Huaxia Times newspaper, also gave guarded optimism on Saturday’s visit, saying North Korea should take a flexible approach that could pave the way for any resumption of the six-party talks.
“In order to improve the situation on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea should take a more flexible attitude on its nuclear issue,” Xu said.
The two Koreas are technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Inter-Korean relations have been nearly frozen since 2010, when North Korea sank a South Korean warship and bombed the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong. (Yonhap)
