Top Chinese official meets North Korea's heir apparent

Oct 11, 2010, 7:34 GMT

Beijing - One of China's top officials has met Kim Jong Un, the son and heir apparent of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, Chinese state media said on Monday.

Zhou Yongkang met both Kims and other North Korean leaders on Sunday in Pyongyang, where he was a guest of honour at a huge military parade to mark the 65th anniversary of the founding of Korean Workers' Party, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Zhou's meeting is believed to be the first publicly reported event involving Kim Jong Un and a foreign leader since Kim was appointed to the central committee of the North Korean Workers Party last month, a move that signalled the likelihood of him succeeding his father.

The agency gave no details of the meeting.

Photographs of the military parade showed Zhou, who is on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, standing next to Kim Jong Il on the North Korean leaders' podium.

The agency said Chinese president and Communist Party leader Hu Jintao sent a congratulatory message to Kim Jong Il for Sunday's anniversary.

The Chinese party 'cherishes the traditional friendship' with its North Korean counterpart and 'makes it an unswerving policy to continuously strengthen and develop bilateral friendly and cooperative ties,' Hu was quoted as saying.

The appearance of Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be about 27 years old, at the parade was the first opportunity for North Koreans to catch a glimpse of him in the open.

China has been a key ally of North Korea, with which it shares a 1,400-kilometre land border, since the Communist Party sent troops to help fend off South Korean and US-led Allied forces in the 1950-53 Korean War.

Some analysts have detected a cooling in its relationship with North Korea, especially since Pyongyang tested nuclear weapons.

But China remains North Korea's biggest trading partner and still provides an undeclared quantity of food and energy aid to its famine-hit neighbour.

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