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A train believed to be carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has left the Chinese city of Dalian and is reportedly bound for Beijing. Neither North Korea or China has confirmed Kim’s presence in the country, but media reports suggest he will meet top Chinese leaders. He arrived in China on Monday, traveling on his special train. Mary Kay Magistad reports.

• BBC coverage
• North Korea: secretive state

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is on a rare visit to China.  Despite tight security, South Korean journalists managed to get a few pictures of him yesterday in the northern city of Dalian.  Still, Chinese state run media are ignoring the visit and Chinese officials aren’t saying much either.  The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.

MARY KAY MAGISTAD:  It’s become something of a tradition in China that when Kim Jong Il comes to town, the Chinese government says nothing about it until his armored train is on its way back to Pyongyang.  And so it was again today at the regularly scheduled Foreign Ministry briefing.  Spokeswoman Jiang Yu kept saying in response to repeated questions about Kim’s trip, I don’t have any information on that.  A BBC correspondent pointed out that there’s photographic evidence that Kim is in China.

MALE VOICE 1:  We’re now in a farcical situation where everybody has seen the photographs, we know he’s here, but you’re saying nothing about it.  Why is that?  Surely that makes the Chinese government look a little bit ridiculous.

MAGISTAD: That sounds like an opinion rather than a question.  Kim Jong Il is visiting China at a time of tense relations with South Korea, just weeks after a South Korean warship was blown up by what the South Korean military believes was a torpedo.  They’re investigating to see whether it was North Korea’s.  Meanwhile, North Korea’s already fragile economy has taken a hit from the government’s capricious revaluation of its currency earlier this year.  And energy supplies are woefully short, says German aid worker Karin Janz, a long time resident of Pyongyang.

KARIN JANZ:  I think the energy is a very, very big problem and last winter, including me, I was living in a cold apartment, in a cold office.  We didn’t have any heating and this is in Pyongyang.  The cities, they don’t have electricity for weeks in winter.

MAGISTAD: But worse than that, she says, North Korea’s model of agriculture depends heavily on equipment.  And since fuel is in short supply, the harvest may be too this year.  That’s usually when North Korea goes looking for international aid.  And North Korean expert Andrei Lankov thinks it plays the game very well.

ANDREI LANKOV:  I believe that North Korean government are the best Machiavellians still in business.  They are smart.  They are rational and they know what they want.

MAGISTAD: He says the North Koreans are great at using perceptions of them as erratic and dangerous to create a crisis, extract aid, and keep going until the next time.  China has talked of trying to get the six party talks going again this summer; talks aimed at getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and other incentives.  Some Chinese and South Korean analysts say it could well be that Kim on this trip gets aid in exchange for a promise to come back to the negotiating table.  But Andrei Lankov doubts North Korea’s leadership is every going to give up its nukes because it’s all that keeps the money rolling in.

LANKOV:  They understand that the world will pay enough, without asking too many questions about how the aid is used.  And of course, a large part of aid goes to the politically valuable parts of population to ensure domestic stability.

MAGISTAD: But with an ailing leader and a failing economy, it’s unclear just how much domestic stability there is in North Korea these days.  Aid worker Karin Janz says the obvious question North Koreans ask when Kim Jong Il visits China is why he doesn’t take a page from China’s highly successful playbook.

JANZ:  All the Koreans have hope that oh please, now he goes to China again and let him learn something from the Chinese example we could apply this in our country.

MAGISTAD: Andrei Lankov believes the reason North Korea doesn’t give up on isolating its population and controlling the economy is because that would require opening up and that would let North Koreans see how far ahead of them South Koreans are, causing the regime to lose all credibility and collapse.

LANKOV:  Such experiment is likely to bring not Chinese style economic boom, but German style collapse followed by unification.

MAGISTAD: And China’s leaders don’t want that, because it would put a U.S. backed Korea smack on their border.  So, North Korea’s economy hobbles on, with China as its main benefactor, and Kim Jong Il has once again come to call for a trip of unknown length, and unknown purpose, except the ever-present purpose of doing what it takes to stay in power.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

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