N. Korea Is Willing to Return to Nuclear Talks, China Says

Chinese officials said Tuesday that North Korea’s premier had told them the country might be willing to return to nuclear disarmament talks, despite its threat to indefinitely boycott the negotiations and its claim that it had expanded its atomic arsenal.

“If conditions are right in the future, North Korea is willing at any time to participate at the six-party talks,” Premier Pak Pong Chu told his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

The spokesman, Liu Jianchao, didn’t say what those conditions were. But the North previously demanded that the United States end its “hostile policy” and apologize for having referred to the country as an outpost of tyranny.

Washington has appealed to China’s communist leaders to prod their ally back to the bargaining table, and suggested that North Korea might face sanctions if it didn’t cooperate.

Wen told Pak the six-nation talks were the “only real, pragmatic way to resolve the nuclear issue,” Liu said. The two leaders were meeting at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s parliament, in central Beijing.

Pak also was scheduled to meet with President Hu Jintao. His trip includes a stop in Shanghai, China’s financial capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, visiting Beijing, hinted at sanctions Monday, saying that if talks failed to produce a nonnuclear North Korea, “we’ll have to look at other options.”

Rice said she had appealed for China to use its status as the North’s main ally and aid donor to draw it back to the talks, which also include South Korea, Japan and Russia.

China is believed to supply the North with up to a third of its food and a quarter of its energy. Beijing insists it has little influence over the Stalinist regime.

Analysts say the North’s declaration last month that it had nuclear weapons might prompt China to coerce the country back into talks. But they say Beijing might be holding out for a U.S. overture that would make the North return willingly.

A North Korean official said last week during a visit to South Africa that it was up to Washington to create the right conditions for new talks. China has organized three rounds of talks so far.

U.S. and Chinese diplomats met last week in Shanghai with their counterparts from Japan and South Korea to discuss possible steps to get North Korea back to the bargaining table. The North is seeking aid and a peace treaty with the United States.

Tension between the U.S. and North Korea flared in 2002 when Washington said the regime had begun a nuclear program in violation of a 1994 pact that gave it oil and other aid for abandoning such efforts.