Chinese Premier Li Qiang will visit North Korea for celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of its ruling Workers' Party of Korea later this week, Beijing and Pyongyang announced Tuesday.

Li will head a Chinese delegation of party and government officials for an "official friendly visit" from Thursday through Saturday, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said, following an invitation by Pyongyang.

A delegation of Russia's United Russia Party, led by former President Dmitry Medvedev, is also scheduled to attend the celebrations, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported earlier.

Meanwhile, China and South Korea's top diplomats held phone talks Tuesday, with Seoul expressing hope that Beijing's ties with Pyongyang "develop in a way that contributes to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," the South Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Friday's festivities in Pyongyang are expected to include a large-scale nighttime military parade, South Korean authorities have said. Such parades have typically been chances for the nuclear-armed North to showcase its array of powerful weapons systems, including long-range missiles capable of striking the United States.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said late last month that his country had acquired new "secret weapons." That same month, Kim oversaw an engine combustion test for a next-generation Hwasong-20 intercontinental ballistic missile, and observers have said that ICBM could be rolled out for the parade.

The attendance by senior officials from Pyongyang's two top patrons will come just over a month after Kim joined Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing for another military parade, as the three sought to showcase a willingness to more openly redefine the postwar U.S.-led global order.

Following that parade, Kim and Xi held their first in-person talks in six years, with the two agreeing to support one another “no matter how the international situation may change.”

North Korea has ramped up its diplomatic outreach in recent months, sending a top official to speak before the United Nations General Assembly last month for the first time since 2018, while inviting the Vietnamese and Laotian leaders to join this week's festivities.

Kim has also signaled a willingness to reengage with the U.S. under President Donald Trump, albeit with a caveat. The North Korean leader has demanded that Washington first drop its long-standing demand that Pyongyang relinquish its nuclear weapons.