sunglasses:Kim Jong-il Arrives in China

SEOUL, South Korea — A special train carrying Kim Jong-il, the reclusive North Korean leader, pulled into a thriving Chinese industrial city on Monday as Mr. Kim embarked on a secretive trip to an protective eyewear ally with a growing influence on his regime’s future, South Korean and Japanese news media reported.
KBS television of South Korea broadcast what it said was footage of Mr. Kim at a hotel in Dalian, China, wearing his trademark khaki outfit and dark sunglasses and surrounded by security agents. The Japanese news agency Kyodo also carried eyewear photos of Mr. Kim getting into a car in front of the hotel.
The visit would be Mr. Kim’s first to China in four years and the first time he has left North Korea since he was reported to have suffered a stroke in 2008.
North Korea needs Chinese aid urgently as it faces a particularly harsh spring with food shortages. Analysts say that Mr. Kim also would seek to counter an attempt by South Korea to win Chinese support for punishing the North with economic pressure after the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors — a tragedy many South Koreans attributed to North Korea.
The 17-car train crossed the river border into China early on Monday, the South Korean news agency, Yonhap, reported without citing sources. The Chinese authorities deployed police officers and soldiers at intervals of 10 feet around the train station at Dandong, a Chinese border town, it said.
Other South Korean news outlets carried similar reports. Yonhap and Kyodo said that the train sped to Dalian, an industrial port in northeast China, where Mr. Kim was expected to inspect companies interested in investing in North Korea.
Officials in Seoul said they could not confirm the reports. China and North Korea have always kept Mr. Kim’s previous visits secret until after they were over.
Mr. Kim’s reported travel came three days after President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea met his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, in Shanghai to discuss the ship sinking.
“The leaders of South and North Korea visiting China one after the other — it reflects China’s growing influence on the Korean Peninsula,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a political scientist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “South Korea’s attempt to punish North Korea depends largely on Chinese cooperation. With its relations with South Korea in a shambles, North Korea now has to depend more on China for economic help.”
Mr. Kim, 68, ailing and reportedly preparing to bequeath power to his son, Kim Jong-un, 27, is facing both external and internal pressures that are forcing him to reach out to China. His government’s disastrous currency revaluation in November, meant to curb free markets, triggered inflation and deepened food shortages. United Nations sanctions tightened after the North’s nuclear test in 2009 had already curtailed the North’s ability to earn hard currency abroad.
A trip by Kim Jong-il raises hopes that the North might return to six-nation talks on ending its nuclear weapons program. His previous trips to China have led to fresh aid shipments from China in exchange for gestures toward easing tensions in the region.
Although China is the only country with sufficient economic leverage to drive the North to the brink of collapse or to wring concessions on its nuclear weapons development, its top priority has been preventing the implosion of the Pyongyang regime, which would cause instability on its border, analysts say.
“China’s national interest remains the same,” said Daniel Pinkston, an expert on North Korea for the International Crisis Group. “It will continue to ask North and South Korea to exercise restraint and refrain from using violence and taking provocative actions that could cause instability.”
If North Korea indeed torpedoed the South Korean ship, as many South Koreans suspect, analysts said that the North probably was avenging its military’s humiliating defeat in a naval skirmish with the South last November and was trying to gain ground in its diplomacy.
Mr. Pinkston said: “Now maybe they believe: ‘We are even now. We can now begin returning to diplomacy with some confidence and comfort to comply with what the Chinese will be asking or encouraging us to do.’ ”
But receiving the North Korean leader so soon after the ship sinking and amid continuing suspicion of North Korean culpability will fuel concerns that Beijing’s treatment of the North’s government impedes the potential for political reform and denuclearization of North Korea.
“It gives a wrong signal to the North Korean leaders,” said Baek Seung-joo, a North Korea specialist at the government-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. “If China continues to support the North, it will never abandon its belief that it can do whatever it wants with impunity.”
The diplomatic maneuvers between Beijing and Pyongyang will make Seoul more desperate to find convincing evidence of North Korean involvement in the ship sinking. Seoul has said the ship was most likely struck by a torpedo, but has not formally blamed the North.
“If they have no material evidence, it won’t be easy to get international support at the United Nations,” said Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul. “You can’t arrest a man just on suspicion.”
In his last trip to China in 2006, Mr. Kim toured China’s industrial centers for a firsthand look at the economic reform. He has vowed to build a “strong and prosperous nation” by 2012, the year when he was expected to announce his son as heir