China Rebuffs U.S. on N. Korean Nuclear Effort

China threw cold water Thursday on Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s diplomatic initiative to have Asia’s leading powers join together in pressuring North Korea to abandon its effort to acquire nuclear weapons.

At a press conference here, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen told reporters that “we don’t know about” the nuclear weapons program in North Korea, which is China’s neighbor and longtime ally. And he said that the world should leave it primarily up to North Korea and South Korea to work out their problems.

“We do not wish to see any international pressure” on North Korea, Qian declared.

Over the past several days, Baker has been proposing that the United States, Japan, China and the Soviet Union team up in some kind of multilateral action to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. A senior State Department official said the U.S. aim was for these four powers to “work together to try to press the recalcitrant party (North Korea) to change its position.”

China’s rebuff to the U.S. initiative on North Korea came only a day before Baker is scheduled to visit Beijing. He will be the most senior U.S. official in China since the regime’s bloody crackdown on democracy demonstrations at Tian An Men Square in 1989.

The Chinese rejection on Thursday demonstrated the difficulties that Baker has been having in figuring out how to head off North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons.

After a meeting Thursday with Baker, South Korean President Roh Tae Woo voiced some misgivings, saying he flatly opposes any formal arrangement in which the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union and China--the four major powers in East Asia--meet with the governments in Seoul and Pyongyang to deal with Korean problems.

The South Koreans are reluctant to give China, the Soviet Union and Japan--all powerful neighbors and sometime adversaries--too great a role in determining their future.