By JANE PERLEZ and BREE FENG
Published: April 19, 2013
BEIJING — China’s special envoy on North Korea, Wu Dawei, will visit Washington early next week to conduct talks with American officials, the Foreign Ministry said Friday.
The visit was announced after Secretary of State John Kerry said in Beijing last week that China had a vital role to play in helping rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons.
The trip is part of a flurry of diplomacy centered on North Korea as Washington and South Korea focus increasingly on trying to set up talks with the North to cool down fevered tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula. That new focus began to emerge over the past several days, and it coincides with a noticeable drop in pointed threats from North Korea, raising tentative hopes for a way out of one of the worst crises over North Korea in years.
Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, reported Friday that the South’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, would meet with the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, in Beijing next week to discuss North Korea.
Security meetings are also planned. In Washington, military officers said Friday that Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had added a stop in South Korea to an official travel itinerary that includes talks in China with his military counterparts. A range of regional security issues are on the agenda in both countries and are expected to include North Korea.
The visit to Washington by Mr. Wu, one of China’s senior diplomats, will be his first to the United States since 2010. He will meet with Glyn T. Davies, the State Department’s special envoy on North Korea, and other American officials.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said at the regular news briefing on Friday that Mr. Wu would be in Washington at the invitation of Mr. Davies and would participate in “an in-depth exchange of views” on the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Mr. Wu was chairman of the so-called six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program that involved both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States. The talks were suspended in 2008 after North Korea withdrew from them.
During his visit to Beijing last week, Mr. Kerry said the United States would be interested in talks on North Korea, but he set a precondition: North Korea must promise to give up its nuclear weapons. The North’s government, led by Kim Jong-un, has rejected that condition.
Since Mr. Kerry’s visit to Beijing, North Korea has insisted that if the United States wants dialogue, it must end economic sanctions against North Korea and stop current and future joint military exercises with South Korea.
Mr. Kerry said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday that the United States was not willing to reward North Korea for merely returning to the negotiating table. But he suggested that the North’s statement might be a positive sign and expressed interest in pursuing whether it might be possible to start negotiations.
“That’s the first word of negotiation or thought of that we’ve heard from them since all of this has begun,” Mr. Kerry told the panel. “So I’m prepared to look at that as, you know, at least a beginning gambit — not acceptable, obviously, and we have to go further.”
The Obama administration has expressed gratitude to China for its support of stiffer economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations after North Korea detonated its third nuclear bomb in February.
But the administration has been frustrated by the seeming unwillingness or inability of China, North Korea’s main ally and economic patron, to clamp down on the North’s nuclear weapons program, which has expanded since the end of the six-party talks.
China seems reluctant to change its fundamental policy of preventing the collapse of North Korea, an outcome that could result in the unification of the Korean Peninsula, potentially putting a close American military ally on China’s doorstep.
Apparently in an effort to encourage China to take bolder action against North Korea, Mr. Kerry spoke warmly of his talks in Beijing, his first as secretary of state.
He told the Senate panel that China was worried about North Korea’s provocative actions. “The last thing they would want, I’m convinced, is a war on their doorstep of a completely destabilized Korean Peninsula,” he said.
Separately, a senior editor of an influential Chinese newspaper, Study Times, who was suspended from his job after criticizing China’s ties to North Korea, said in an interview on Friday that China and the United States needed to work together to solve the North Korean situation.
The editor, Deng Yuwen, now a freelance writer, said he doubted that North Korea would agree to join talks on its denuclearization.
The provocative threats from North Korea over the past few months have “forced the U.S. and China together,” Mr. Deng said.
“They must work on it together,” he said. “China cannot handle it by itself, and neither can the U.S.”
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