North Korea's delegation arrived in Beijing today on the eve of talks aimed at resolving a nuclear crisis around a six-way negotiating table.
As the parties prepare for talks, the United States and North Korea remain poles apart. Pyongyang has demanded concessions, including a non-aggression pact and an end to what it perceives as a hostile policy from Washington, before agreeing to anything on its nuclear program.
The United States, saying it will not give in to blackmail, wants the unconditional, verifiable and irreversible scrapping of the North's nuclear program before any concessions. Japan and South Korea are siding with the United States, while Russia and China are historic allies of the North.
China said today it was opposed to sanctions, pressure or war as a means of solving the North Korean nuclear crisis.
"We disagree with such actions as making sanctions or inserting pressure, and even oppose war," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Yi as saying.
Diplomats from South Korea, the United States, Japan and Russia arrived in the Chinese capital yesterday. Ten months into the crisis, the only real consensus among the five is that the Korean peninsula should remain free of nuclear weapons.
The United States said in October North Korea had admitted to a clandestine program to enrich uranium to build nuclear weapons, violating agreements with the United States as well as international commitments.
The isolated communist nation has since thrown out UN nuclear inspectors, become the first state to pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted its Yongbyon plant, sparking fears it may have reprocessed spent fuel rods there into plutonium for weapons.
In a sign of the high tensions on the Korean peninsula, a South Korean navy vessel fired two warning shots after a North Korean patrol boat crossed a disputed sea border at the world's last Cold War frontier.