The Beijing meeting showed that whatever may come of the upcoming inter-Korean and North Korea-U.S. summits, China will not be a peripheral player. Xi Jinping, fresh out of the National People's Congress with an open-ended mandate as president of the People’s Republic, has flung himself into international diplomacy with gusto.

After news of the Xi-Kim meeting broke, one of the obvious questions was: Why now? (For comparison: Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, also waited six years before leaving North Korea to engage the outside world.) Kim likely just needed time. After eliminating his rivals, consolidating power, and achieving what he likely saw as the completion of a sufficiently credible nuclear deterrent, Kim finally felt ready to go abroad. Recent events also suggest that the Beijing-Pyongyang relationship, which is often strained, is on the mend. North Korea withheld from any ballistic missile provocations during China’s 19th Party Congress. Kim also congratulated Xi both after the Party Congress and the recently concluded National People's Congress. In the past, by contrast, North Korea launched missiles as China held a range of significant international events, embarrassing and annoying Beijing.

But no matter the tensions of the moment, China and North Korea are as close and interdependent as “lips to teeth,” as Mao Zedong put it. Whatever the temporary hiccups in their relationship, China accounts for 90 percent of North Korea's external trade, giving it extraordinary leverage over Pyongyang. The two countries also share a tight historical bond: Chinese soldiers fought, bled, and died on North Korean soil during the Korean War. Their 1961 Treaty of Friendship includes a mutual defense article—one that is thought to only apply now in the case that North Korea is attacked by an aggressor. (China would not back North Korea should it initiate a war.) Finally, for China, North Korea represents a useful buffer, separating it from the nearly 30,000 U.S. troops based on South Korean soil. Kim’s time with Xi underscored the unshakeable bond between Beijing and Pyongyang.

How should Washington interpret the Beijing meeting? For one thing, it should make abundantly clear to the Trump administration that, no matter what, North Korea and China will continue to share long-term strategic objectives. Neither country wants to see the end of the Kim regime, and both Beijing and Pyongyang seek to evict the United States from its alliances in Northeast Asia. It’s also worth remembering that Pyongyang’s interpretation of a “denuclearized Korean Peninsula” is not one where its arsenal has been “completely, verifiably, and irreversibly” dismantled as Washington would like, but one where it gives up its weapons in exchange for the United States withdrawing its nuclear shield from the Peninsula and leaving altogether. This would comport well with Chinese objectives.