There was a marked difference in the rhetoric coming out of NKorea before Kim Jong Un disappeared for a month and after. Before, he was rattling sabers and threatening SKorea. There were missile and rocket tests.
Then he disappeared, and all that stopped. Now he’s touring flood zones.
I think something happened there, and I’m not sure what. The official story is Covid 19, and Kim went into seclusion to avoid it. But NKorea is right next to China, and China has a habit of disappearing people for a while. Fan Bingbing was one of the more famous cases. She disappeared, reappeared, and confessed to tax fruad. What happened while she was gone? Hard to say. Was Kim disappeared by Chinese powers? Hard to say.
Well, easy to say, but there’s no evidence one way or the other. He could have just avoided Covid.
But it is quite odd how the rhetoric changed. I wonder what the Chinese calculus on that was: not even about what they did, but how Bejing saw Kim’s words, actions, and interactions with the US and SKorea.
Again, there is no evidence one way or the other. It’s just odd.