Kim Jong-un arrives in Beijing for China's military parade alongside Putin and Xi

Kim Jong-un's armored train pulled into Beijing on Tuesday, carrying the North Korean leader across nearly a full day of track to attend China's military parade. The event, scheduled for Wednesday morning at Tiananmen Square, marks eighty years since Japan's formal surrender in 1945—a date freighted with meaning for Beijing, which counts more than thirty-five million Chinese casualties from the Japanese invasion across the 1930s and 1940s. For Kim, the journey represents only his second trip abroad in six years, and his first appearance at a multilateral gathering of world leaders. He arrived with a delegation that included his foreign minister, Choe Son-hui, and other senior officials from North Korea's ruling Workers' Party.

The symbolism of the moment is difficult to overstate. A Kremlin adviser recently confirmed that Kim and Vladimir Putin will stand directly beside Xi Jinping during the parade—a visual statement of alignment between three nations that have grown increasingly skeptical of the West. The timing is no accident. Donald Trump's return to the U.S. presidency has unsettled the region, and China is working to position itself as a more trustworthy partner to Southeast Asian nations than Washington. The parade itself will feature forty-five military formations, an aerial flyover, and last roughly seventy minutes. Xi is expected to address the crowd from Tiananmen, review troops, and detail the modernization of the People's Liberation Army—an institution that has weathered recent corruption scandals and the purge of two defense ministers.

Kim's diplomatic reemergence is striking given his long withdrawal from the world stage. Between 2018 and 2019, he engaged in high-level talks with Trump and South Korea's then-president Moon Jae-in, but those efforts collapsed after a failed summit in Hanoi. He then retreated almost entirely, remaining in North Korea throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. His only significant foreign engagement in recent years came in 2023, when he met Putin in Russia's far east. This Beijing visit signals a shift—a return to active diplomacy, albeit one oriented firmly toward Moscow and Beijing rather than Washington.

Beijing has transformed itself into a fortress for the occasion. Security measures have intensified across the capital for weeks: airport-style scanners at government buildings, round-the-clock guards on elevated roadways, kilometers of metal barriers lining avenues. Artistic installations have sprouted throughout the city—flowers, doves, and emblems depicting the Great Wall with the inscription "1945-2025." Military analysts have already spotted new weapons systems being prepared for display, including what may be an enormous laser weapon, though officials have released no formal inventory.

The parade concludes an intense diplomatic week for Xi. He spent the previous days in the port city of Tianjin hosting leaders from across Eurasia at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, where the focus was promoting an alternative model of global governance. The convergence of these events—the multilateral summit, the military parade, the presence of Putin and Kim—amounts to a coordinated message: that Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang are moving together, and that the post-Cold War order centered on American leadership is giving way to something else. Other attendees include Cuba's Miguel Díaz-Canel, Iran's Masud Pezeshkian, Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif, and leaders from across Southeast Asia—a guest list that itself reflects Beijing's effort to build coalitions beyond the traditional Western sphere. What unfolds on Wednesday morning will be watched closely for what it reveals about the architecture of power taking shape in the Indo-Pacific.