Trump dinner with Xi follows roasting for Kim Jong-un

Donald Trump was greeted with ‘state visit-plus’ pomp in China last night.

Melania and Donald Trump are hosted by Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan in Beijing’s Forbidden City late yesterday. Picture: Reuters

Donald Trump was greeted with “state visit-plus” pomp in China last night as the world’s biggest economies push to ease strains on trade and thwart the North ­Korean nuclear threat.

The US President and wife ­Melania stepped off the plane in Beijing before an intimate dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan.

But while Mr Trump has been granted the rare honour of a banquet in Beijing’s Forbidden City during the three-day visit, he also faces pressure to confront China on the $US347 billion ($452bn) trade deficit and build an Asian front against Kim Jong-un’s ­nuclear weapons program.

Hours earlier in South Korea, Mr Trump delivered his longest and strongest speech on the North Korean threat, warning its “cruel dictatorship”: “Do not underestimate us, and do not try us.”

Speaking in the National ­Assembly in Seoul, an hour’s drive from the North Korean border, Mr Trump launched a personal ­attack on North Korea’s ­“Supreme Leader”.

He described Kim as a ­“deranged tyrant” presiding over a “military cult” with “a deranged belief in the leader’s destiny to rule as parent-protector over a conquered Korean peninsula and an enslaved Korean people”.

Addressing Kim, he said: “North Korea is not the paradise your grandfather envisioned. It is a hell that no person deserves … Your weapons are not making you safer. They are putting your ­regime in grave danger.

“Despite every crime you have committed against God and man, we will offer a path towards a much better future.”

It would have to begin, though, with the North stopping ballistic missile development and “complete verifiable and total denuclearisation”.

Children greet Mr Trump on his arrival in Beijing yesterday.

The first US leader to speak to the South Korean parliament in 24 years triggered frequent ­applause.

“The longer we wait, the greater the danger grows, and the fewer the options become,” he said.

Mr Trump said the US had ­deployed the “three largest aircraft carriers in the world” — loaded with F35 and F18 jets, and a nuclear submarine — to the region’s ­waters.

He called on China and Russia to join forces to isolate Pyongyang. Mr Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Da Nang, Vietnam, this weekend at the APEC summit.

“To those nations that choose to ignore this threat — or, worse still, to enable it — the weight of this crisis is on your conscience,” he said. “You cannot support, you cannot supply, you cannot accept.

“We will not allow American cities to be threatened with ­destruction. We will not be intimidated. And we will not let the worst atrocities in history be repeated here, on this ground we fought and died to secure.

“The world cannot tolerate the menace of a rogue regime that threatens it with nuclear devastation. America does not seek conflict or confrontation, but we will never run from it.”

Rousing especially strong ­applause, Mr Trump said: “We will not permit America or our allies to be blackmailed or attacked.”

Labelling Kim a “cruel dictator” could be “enough to provoke North Korea because the North Korean system puts the most ­importance on the dignity of its leadership”, said Yang Moo-Jin from Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies.

Mr Trump has brought a business delegation along for the ride, with deals expected to be signed between the countries, though analysts doubt that it will do much to allay US concerns about China’s massive trade surplus.

Mr Trump was reported to be bitterly disappointed a surprise helicopter visit to the demilitarised zone that splits the Korean peninsula was thwarted near landing because of fog. South Korean President Moon Jae-in had flown in before the fog closed in. Mr Trump described the DMZ as “the line that today divides the oppressed and the free”, where “the flourishing ends, and the prison state of North Korea sadly begins”.

As Mr Trump was flying to Beijing, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, People’s Daily, editorialised that “in realising the denuclearisation of the ­Korean peninsula, and protecting peace and stability” there, “China and the US have common interests”.

Additional reporting: Agencies