N. Korea: China echoes U.S. concerns

China today echoed Washington's concerns about North Korea's nuclear weaponisation programme, even as the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, left Beijing for the United States on a "working visit'', which will climax in a meeting with the American President, George W. Bush, at his ranch in Texas on Friday.

The China-U.S. context of the ongoing international efforts to transform North Korea into a nuclear-weapons-free zone acquired an importance beyond the semantics of this summitry as the Foreign Ministry in Beijing today set out its strategic priorities in relation to Pyongyang. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said in Beijing that the 1994 Agreed Framework between the U.S. and North Korea had so far sustained the Korean peninsula (inclusive of South Korea) as a nuclear-free area. The Agreed Framework, which was not easy to formulate in the first place, had indeed maintained peace and stability in the Korean peninsula. The accord should, therefore, be observed `faithfully' by all the parties concerned, it said.

The latest `problem' between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the U.S. could be properly settled through `dialogue', China emphasised. The reference was to the dispute between Washington and Pyongyang over the latter's `acknowledgment' of a clandestine nuclear-arms programme. China's insistence on the settlement of this dispute through dialogue might seem to indicate a difference with the U.S., which has left North Korea with the Hobson's choice of having to give up any ambitions of becoming a declared nuclear power. By nightfall, the delegations of the two Koreas failed to narrow their differences on North Korea's nuclear profile. As the two sides continued to engage each other in what was described by the South as a tug-of-war over the nuclear issue, their eighth ministerial meeting remained inconclusive. South Korea insisted that Pyongyang agree to uphold the inviolability of the 1994 Agreed Framework and of the other non-proliferation documents that the North had, at various times in the past, pledged to abide by.