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A ranking Chinese Communist Party official is expected to travel to North Korea next week in an apparent effort by Beijing to push Pyongyang into rejoin moribund nuclear disarmament negotiations, Reuters reported (see GSN, Feb. 4).
A diplomatic source in Beijing told the Yonhap News Agency that Communist Party international affairs head Wang Jiarui is set to visit Pyongyang. He met last year in the North Korean capital with with leader Kim Jong Il, who is said to have reaffirmed his support for denuclearization.
As its largest economic ally, Beijing is believed to hold the most sway over Pyongyang. Heightened U.N. Security Council sanctions passed in the wake of North Korea's second nuclear test last May have left the country more battered than ever.
"This will be a very difficult year, a year of crisis for [the] North," said Cho Min, of the Korea Institute of National Unification. "The visit may turn out to be the only way to get the urgent transfusion" (Herskovitz/Kim, Reuters/Yahoo!News, Feb. 5).
The international community is seeking to persuade Pyongyang to return to the six-nation talks that also involve China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The talks were last held in December 2008. After taking several steps along the path toward disarmament, North Korea declared the talks "dead" last spring.
Washington said yesterday that recent tensions with Beijing over the decision to approve a weapons sale to Taiwan have not negatively impacted the two world powers' cooperation on the North Korean nuclear issue, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Feb. 2).
"We see eye to eye with China with respect to our concerns about North Korea," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Feb. 4).
Despite this week's decision by President Barack Obama not to place North Korea back on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, the United States "obviously" will continue to monitor Pyongyang for possible WMD proliferation, Crowley said, according to Yonhap.
"We will continue to look at the evidence surrounding North Korea's activities," Crowley said. "And if it eventually meets the criterion of the law, then we'll consider different judgment."
After being on the terrorism sponsor list for decades, North Korea was formally removed in 2008 as a goodwill gesture by the Bush administration as part of its efforts to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear operations.
"We obviously have considerable concern about activities involving North Korea, its proliferation of dangerous technologies within the region and around the world," Crowley said (Hwang Doo-hyong, Yonhap News Agency, Feb. 4).