South Korea's Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik arrived in Beijing on Monday for talks with senior Chinese officials about North Korea, amid recent intensive diplomatic efforts among participants in the Six-Party Talks to revive the long-stalled negotiations.
Yu is visiting as "the guest of South Korea's embassy to China," China's foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said on Monday.
"The relevant countries have recently engaged in helpful contacts. China hopes all the countries will seize the opportunity and keep up the current momentum to revive the Six-Party Talks and solve problems within this framework ," Liu added.
China has hosted the Six-Party Talks since 2003. These also include the two Koreas, the US, Russia and Japan, and aim to end the North's nuclear program. However, North Korea quit the talks in April 2009, a month before it launched a second atomic weapons test.
Today, Yu is scheduled to meet with China's State Councilor Dai Bingguo in the afternoon, after having talks with Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Wang Jiarui, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPC, according to the Korea Herald newspaper.
Yu will also meet with senior Chinese scholars tomorrow and visit Tang Jiaxuan, a former state councilor, before returning home.
The rare visit by Yu, former South Korean ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, comes on the heels of a trip to the US two weeks ago.
He is likely to urge Beijing to take a tougher stance on the North Korean nuclear issue, South Korean observers told the Korea Herald.
Howver, Lü Chao, director of the Korean Research Center at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, disagrees.
"Yu is recognized as a pro-China figure in South Korea. It is easier for him to take advantage of his wide-ranging network in China's diplomatic circles to ask Chinese officials to pass on some words to Pyongyang," Lü told the Global Times.
Yu's visit also comes one year after a deadly shelling of a South Korean border island by the North, in which two soldiers and two civilians died.
"We cannot give rice to people who fire a cannon" unless North Korea "acknowledges its wrongdoing in committing the provocations" and promises these will not happen again, Yu said in a meeting with South Korean residents in Beijing on Monday, according to the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency.
"The North has so far expressed the most modest willingness to rejoin the stalled talks, and stated it is impossible for Pyongyang to admit any wrongdoing. But the longer the stalemate drags on, the more possibility there is that North Korea will be pushed in the wrong direction," Lü warned.
Global Times - Agencies