North Korea signals push for closer ties with China with Kim's congratulatory message to Xi

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has marked the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with a congratulatory message to Chinese President Xi Jinping, again pledging to deepen ties between the two countries.

The message, carried by state media Wednesday, is the latest sign that Kim is leaning harder into China after Xi's state visit to Pyongyang last month. During that trip — Xi's first visit to North Korea in nearly seven years — the two states declared an upgrade in relations and played up their shared socialism and traditional alliance.

In the message, Kim praised the CCP's leadership.

"There is no new China without the Communist Party," Kim said, according to the state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). "This is the truth the Chinese people have realized while advancing under its guidance for many years."

"It is the steadfast stand of our Party and government to steadily develop the DPRK-China friendly relations with long and historical roots and with socialism as their core," Kim said, referring to North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Kim added that he was ready to work with Xi to "add shine to socialism, the common cause of the two parties."

Kim also looked back on the June 8-9 summit and called it a "historic occasion of deepening the comradely friendship and trust between [the two parties]." 

The summit reconfirmed "the unshakable will to more dynamically promote socialist construction in the two countries and their traditional friendly relations," according to KCNA.

Observers read the message as an effort to cement North Korea's place within the socialist camp and to position itself as a counterweight to South Korea, the United States and Japan as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing deepens. At the same time, Kim is working to secure broad economic cooperation from China, which his country needs.

"North Korea is making the most of a strategic environment shaped in its favor," said Jeong Yu-seok, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification. "Cooperation with China, with which it shares a border of some 1,400 kilometers [870 miles], is bound up with sourcing the raw and intermediate materials it needs to meet its economic targets, so the two will stay close for now."

The message was Kim's first marking the CCP's founding anniversary since the party's centenary in 2021, a gap of five years.

State media also gave prominent play to a banquet the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang held the day before to mark the anniversary, which the Rodong Sinmun — the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) — ran on page 2.

China's ambassador to North Korea, Wang Yajun, told guests that Beijing wants to deepen "strategic communication" and exchanges with Pyongyang, casting the two as bound by a shared destiny across generations of mutual support.

Kim Song-nam, the WPK's secretary for international affairs, replied that at last month's summit, the two leaders had affirmed a commitment to build the traditional relationship into "a model relationship between the most powerful and strategic socialist states."

Also on hand, adding weight to the event, was Jo Yong-won, a secretary of the WPK Central Committee and one of Kim Jong-un's closest aides. Jo recently returned as the party's organization secretary after serving as chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly.

BY CHUNG YEONG-GYO [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]