On Saturday Kim Jong Un boarded his train, rode it north to the frontier and simply carried on into China. Officials in Seoul who track inter-Korean affairs said the North Korean leader reached Dandong, in Liaoning province, by rolling over the Yalu from the border town of Sinuiju. The journey had not been announced in advance, and by evening neither Pyongyang nor Beijing had said a word about it publicly.
The route itself carries a message. He crossed on the new road bridge over the Yalu, roughly three kilometres long with four lanes, that China finished in 2014. It then sat idle for twelve years because roads, customs posts and other facilities on the North Korean bank were never completed. The crossing only opened on 15 October, and Seoul has called it the first concrete result of the summit held in June, when Xi Jinping visited Pyongyang for the first time in seven years.
The calendar points the same way. On Sunday China marks 76 years since its troops entered the Korean War to fight alongside the North. Japan’s Kyodo agency reported closed roads and blocked hotel bookings in Dandong, including around a museum devoted to that campaign, and South Korea’s Yonhap said Premier Li Qiang had also come to the city. Whether Kim travels on to meet Xi remained unclear. On each of his five earlier trips to China, the two men did meet.
No foreign trip by Kim had been known for more than a year; his last one took him to Beijing in autumn 2025 to watch troops march past alongside Xi and Vladimir Putin. Recent days had also brought gossip on social media claiming he was dead, and Seoul’s spy agency dismissed it as baseless in a briefing for parliament. Some observers are already looking ahead to the Asia-Pacific summit China hosts in Shenzhen in mid-November, though diplomats in Washington and Seoul are said to rate the odds of Kim sitting down with Donald Trump before the year ends as low.
