President Xi Jinping followed up his summits with Presidents Putin and Trump with his first foreign trip of the year. The destination – North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a nation of some 26 million normally portrayed in the Western media as a dangerously authoritarian state, an economic basket case, worthy of attention only for its nuclear weapons – may seem a surprise to many.

However, as veteran Korea observer, Keith Bennett and Radhika Desai discuss, neither the destination nor the timing should surprise anyone with a sense of the intertwined histories of the Chinese and Korean revolutions (not to mention the Soviet) and the continuing cooperation between the two countries, founded on socialist solidarity. Nor should it surprise them that, amid the chaos unleashed on the world by a declining West, China and Nort ...