Chinese envoy in NKorea to push to restart nuke talks; 2 Koreas discuss restarting joint tours

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Chinese envoy in NKorea; 2 Koreas meet at border

SEOUL, South Korea — A senior Chinese envoy was in North Korea on Monday on a mission to persuade the reclusive state to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks, reports said, while officials from the two Koreas met in the North to discuss restarting joint tour programs.

Wang Jiarui, a top Communist Party official, will likely meet Monday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to discuss the stalled six-party nuclear talks, the South Korean cable network YTN reported, without citing its source.

The mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper carried a similar report, saying Wang is expected to deliver a message from President Hu Jintao to Kim. The paper, citing an unidentified senior South Korean official, said the North will likely promise during Wang’s trip to make progress in denuclearization in return for Chinese economic assistance.

In Beijing, officials at the Foreign Ministry declined to comment on Wang’s trip.

The visit from North Korea’s chief ally and benefactor comes amid an international push to get North Korea back to negotiations on dismantling the regime’s nuclear program. U.N. political chief B. Lynn Pascoe also was due in Pyongyang this week.

A South Korean delegation, meanwhile, traveled to a North Korean border town to discuss restarting tours to the North’s famed Diamond Mountain resort and ancient sights in downtown Kaesong. The tours, which offered South Koreans and others a rare chance to visit North Korea, were suspended in 2008 amid inter-Korean tensions.

Reclusive North Korea has been reaching out to the international community recently after months of tensions over its nuclear and missile programs.

Pyongyang on Saturday released an American missionary who had been detained for more than 40 days after deliberately going into North Korea illegally to call attention to rights abuses there.

On Sunday, Wang and North Korean Workers’ Party officials met in Pyongyang to discuss strengthening ties and other “matters of mutual concern,” the official Korean Central News Agency said.

YTN said the trip is Wang’s fifth since 2004, and that he has met with leader Kim on all previous visits. A year ago, Kim assured Wang that North Korea remains “dedicated to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” and wanted to move international talks forward, according to Beijing’s Xinhua News Agency.

North Korea walked away from the disarmament talks last year in anger over international condemnation of a long-range rocket launch. The country later conducted a nuclear test, test-launched a series of ballistic missiles and restarted its plutonium-producing facility, inviting widespread condemnation and tighter U.N. sanctions.

North Korea wants sanctions eased, better relations with the United States and a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War before returning to the talks.

Washington has said Pyongyang must come back to the talks first before any talk about political and economic concessions.

South Korea’s foreign minister said Monday that it’s still unclear whether and when the North would return to the six-party talks, noting that the country has not stopped provocative acts such as firing artillery toward its sea border with South Korea last month.

“I believe there is no fundamental change in North Korea’s policy on the nuclear issue,” Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told a ministry meeting, according to the text of a speech provided by his office.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration would continue to try to get North Korea to return to the table.

“Engagement has brought us a lot in the last year,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.”

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters Friday that he expected China would continue to play a significant role in restarting the on-and-off disarmament negotiations, adding that Washington and Beijing share concerns about the North’s nuclear ambitions.

“And in fact, we see eye to eye with China with respect to our concerns about North Korea,” Crowley said. “I think we have significant unanimity within the six-party process about what North Korea should do.”

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AP researcher Xi Yue in Beijing contributed to this report.