China announced on Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will attend a military parade in Beijing on September 3 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Beijing’s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hong Lei, announced Kim’s attendance at a press conference on Thursday morning.
The North Korean leader last visited China in January 2019 for talks with President Xi Jinping.
Some 26 leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, will also attend the parade, which will showcase China’s latest equipment and feature Xi inspecting troops in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Millions of Chinese people were killed during a prolonged war with imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s, which became part of a global conflict following Tokyo’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Earlier, US President Donald Trump expressed interest in meeting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un again, potentially before the year ends, during a White House visit by South Korea’s new progressive president, Lee Jae Myung.
Hours before President Lee Jae Myung arrived for his long-planned first visit to the White House, Trump took to social media to denounce what he said was a “Purge or Revolution” in South Korea, apparently over raids that involved churches.
Forty minutes into an Oval Office meeting in which Lee profusely praised Trump, the US leader dismissed his own sharply worded rebuke, saying, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding” as “there is a rumor going around.”
Trump said he believed he was on the same page on North Korea as Lee, a progressive who supports diplomacy over confrontation.
Trump, who met Kim Jong Un three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the young totalitarian and said he knew him “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister.”
“Someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump told reporters, saying he hoped the talks would take place this year.
Trump once said that he and Kim “fell in love” during their meetings, which helped reduce tensions but ultimately failed to produce a lasting agreement.
But Kim has since been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Russia after sending thousands of North Korean troops to fight.
North Korea has dug in and refused any talk of ending its nuclear weapons program.
Lee, a former labor rights lawyer who has criticized the US military in the past, immediately flattered his host and said Trump has made the United States “not a keeper of peace, but a maker of peace.”
“I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un and construction of Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf” there, Lee told him.
He even cited propaganda from North Korea that denounced South Korea by noting that Pyongyang said the relationship with Trump was better.
Kim “will be waiting for you,” Lee told him.
In a speech after his meeting, Lee warned that North Korea could soon produce 10 to 20 nuclear weapons per year as well as a missile that can hit the United States — despite pressure and sanctions.
“The hard fact is that the number of nuclear weapons that North Korea possesses has increased over the past three to four years,” Lee said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He highlighted his overtures to the North, such as stopping the blaring of anti-Kim messages over loudspeakers on the military frontier.
Lee was elected in June after the impeachment of the more hawkish Yoon Suk Yeol, who was removed from office after briefly imposing martial law.
The raids denounced by Trump likely referred in part to investigations surrounding Yoon’s conservative allies.
Military Bases For USA
Korean Air announced after the talks that it would buy more than 100 aircraft from US manufacturer Boeing, as Trump presses allies hard for business.
Trump, who frequently accuses European allies of freeloading off the United States, made clear he would seek greater compensation from South Korea over the 28,500 US troops in the country.
He suggested the United States could seek to take over base land, an idea likely to enrage Lee’s brethren on the South Korean left.
“We spent a lot of money building a fort, and there was a contribution made by South Korea, but I would like to see if we could get rid of the lease and get ownership of the land where we have a massive military base,” Trump said.
He also spoke bluntly about one of South Korea’s most delicate issues: the so-called “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery during Japan’s 1910-1945 rule.
The South Korean left has historically been outspoken about Japan’s legacy, although Lee visited Tokyo on his way to Washington, a highly symbolic stop praised by Trump.
Japan had agreed to compensate comfort women, but the deal was criticized by survivors who questioned Tokyo’s sincerity.
Via Agence France-Presse
