[imText1]State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s special envoy to North Korea, met Kim Jong Il on Thursday.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Councilor Tang delivered President Hu’s verbal message to Kim Jong Il and discussed North Korea’s nuclear issue.
The fact that Kim Jong Il met Councilor Tang suggests higher possibility of the six-party-talks member states ministerial meeting.
And U.S. Secretary of State Rice’s planned visit to Beijing Friday would be a turning point in the NK nuclear crisis.
China seems to be struggling to keep its hope for diplomatic resolution alive, although a UN resolution blaming Pyongyang is passed and North Korea is resisting. Councilor Tang might have asked Kim to return to the talks and refrain from additional nuclear tests.
Whether the ministerial talk in Beijing would include five participants or six depends on the outcome of Tang’s visit to Pyongyang. If North Korea accepts Tang’s offer to participate in the six-party foreign ministers’ meeting, negotiations would resume, at least for a while. And subsequently, additional nuke tests would be interrupted as well.
It cannot be certain if North Korean foreign minister would come to Beijing for the parley. Also, even if NK does participate in the foreign ministers talk, still the chance the six-party talks would recommence is low.
Post-nuclear-test North Korea will never voluntarily comeback to the roundtable, where total diplomatic isolation awaits. Instead, Pyongyang regime will insist on the talk to be for mutual nuclear-disarmament.
It is obvious that North Korea would urge Washington to have bilateral negotiations rather than the multilateral six-party talks. The Bush Administration., however, is having difficulty with neither a proposal of revocation of financial sanctions nor allowing the axis-of-evil to stockpile nuclear warheads.
Moreover, there is virtually no possibility of the U.S. believing in North Korea’s commitment not to export nuclear weapons.
Thus, despite the Chinese effort for diplomatic solution, the current situation is most likely to end up with full-scale sanction after S. of S. Rice’s Beijing trip.
Kim Jong Il, misunderstanding the value of his nuclear bomb, is missing the incompatibility between the international society and his nuclear ownership.
