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US President Donald Trump meets with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the White House on Oct. 20 (UPI/Yonhap News)

As he prepares for his trip to South Korea, China and Japan in early November, US President Donald Trump hinted that he will pressure China to further increase the intensity of sanctions against North Korea after the conclusion of China’s 19th Communist Party Congress, which began on Oct. 18.

“President Xi is right now going through his Congress,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News that was conducted on Oct. 20 and aired on Oct. 22. “I believe he’s [consolidated] the power to do something very significant with respect to North Korea. We’ll see what happens.”

“Now with that being said, we’re prepared for anything. You would be shocked to see how totally prepared we are if we need to be,” Trump said in the interview.

“[The Party Congress] gives him something [consolidated power] that few leaders of China have ever had,” Trump went on to say. And to be honest with…you on this, I want to keep things very, very low key until such time as he gets that. I want him to get that.”

Trump’s remarks appear to mean that he has refrained from leaning on Xi out of respect for the internal political situation of China’s Communist Party Congress and that he wants China to squeeze the North even tighter after the Congress, when Xi will be powerful enough to placate internal opposition. And as the phrase “prepared for anything” hints, Trump was also threatening to undermine China’s security environment if it refuses American demands.

“The president’s view is you [China] have even less of an excuse now” to avoid putting pressure on North Korea,” Reuters quoted a US government official as saying on Oct. 21.

But the US has “failed to see the limits of Chinese influence in the North,” James Person, director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy at the Wilson Center, was quoted as saying by the AP. Person explained that “asking China to solve the North Korean problem remains Washington’s default policy for dealing with Pyongyang,” which he described as “a recipe for continued failure.”

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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