Meeting follows China-North Korea consultation
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill returned to Beijing on July 11, four days after visiting Seoul and Tokyo. According to a diplomatic source in Beijing, Hill met Chinese foreign affairs minister Li Zhaoxing the next day and the two discussed Beijing’s recent contact with Pyongyang. The diplomatic source said that China’s chief nuclear negotiator Wu Dawei and his North Korean counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-kwan, met in Pyongyang the night of July 11 to discuss the North’s recent missile tests and possibly restarting some kind of dialogue on the issue. The contents of their conversation were delivered to Beijing through the Chinese ambassador to North Korea, the source said. Regarding the Pyongyang meeting, another diplomatic source expected some sort of condition to be demanded by the North in exchange for dialogue on the issue, remarking that "North Korea will not give a ’present’--returning to the six-party talks--to Wu Dawei without securing something first."Before the meeting, Hill said that he was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the situation, citing that the night before, North Korea and China had held a practical discussion for the first time. Pyongyang should carefully listen to Beijing’s concerns, he said. At the meeting with Secretary Hill, Minister Li explained the results of the North Korea-China consultation in Pyongyang the day prior. Following the meeting, Hill said that he had agreed with China to delay the U.N. Security Council vote, in the anticipation that Beijing’s diplomatic efforts with Pyongyang might bear fruit. Hill, representing Washington’s stance on the matter, urged Pyongyang to stop its missile tests, to return to the six-nation talks, and to promise to abide by the tenets of the September 19 Joint Statement made at the fourth round of six-party talks in 2005. That statement represented a move to stop the North’s nuclear weapons program with the help of all six nations involved. In the meantime, in an interview with Japanese public news service NHK, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said, "I sent a message to China on what conditions North Korea should satisfy to prevent the U.N. resolution against it."
