BEIJING (AP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping offered encouragement for North Korea's focus on economic development in a speech in Pyongyang, turning to a topic Beijing has long pressed with its Communist neighbor amid wider concerns over the North's nuclear weapons program.

In an address at a banquet Thursday night, Xi noted that the nation under leader Kim Jong Un had "initiated a new strategic line of economic development and improving people's livelihoods, raising socialist construction in the country to a new high tide," according to China's official Xinhua News Agency.

Xi left North Korea...