Chinese President in bid to keep N Korea on dialogue table

BEIJING—Chinese President Hu Jintao spent a second day in North Korea, gently pushing the country’s dictator, Kim Jong-Il, to stay at the nuclear negotiating table and engage in bolder economic reforms.
“I had frank, sincere and deep talks with General Secretary Kim Jong-Il yesterday,” Hu told Kim Yong-Nam, the nation’s number two. “We reached an important consensus,” Hu was quoted as saying by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.
Hu was not quoted as elaborating on the consensus, but the agreement may have included a promise by Kim Jong-Il, made on Friday, to participate in six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear program. “The DPRK will honor its commitments and attend the fifth round of talks as scheduled,” Kim told Hu according to the China Daily, using North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The fifth round of six-party talks involving the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States is expected in Beijing in November. Hu’s three-day visit, his first to North Korea as China’s leader, may be of particular significance, coming just weeks before he goes to South Korea, said Dae-Sook Suh, an expert on Korean affairs at the University of Hawaii.
“His mission to Pyongyang, perhaps, is to offer substantial Sino-South Korea economic guarantees to North Korea to persuade Kim Jong-Il to relax in his negotiation with the United States and Japan,” he said. At the last round of six-nation talks in September, North Korea agreed to a statement of principles under which it would give up its nuclear weapons program in return for energy and security guarantees.
But soon after agreeing to the statement, Pyongyang said it would not dismantle its nuclear arsenal before the United States supplies it with a light-water atomic reactor to generate electricity. The United States says North Korea, a self-avowed nuclear power, must first disarm before getting incentive bonuses, including the nuclear reactor.
Saturday afternoon Hu visited an experimental farm outside Pyongyang, Chinese state television said, showing footage of him dancing with well-fed children from a kindergarten at the facility.
“We’re so happy to see how your production has developed and how your lives have improved,” Hu was shown telling a smiling farmer on TV. “The important thing is to make your country even better under the leadership of General Secretary Kim Jong-Il, and we hope your lives will be even happier”.
While North Korea’s nuclear program is expected to top the agenda during Hu’s trip, economic reform in the Stalinist country is likely to come in a close second, observers said. Hu himself broached the sensitive subject at a banquet held in his honor late Friday, touting the economic achievements brought about by reform in China, without directly telling his hosts to emulate its giant neighbor.
“We have constantly perfected the socialist system, while exploring and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Hu said in a speech published by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. “It has profoundly changed the face of China, causing an uninterrupted rise in the productive capacity, the overall national strength and the standard of living of the people,” he said.
North Korea, one of the poorest nations on earth, has kicked off cautious reform in recent years, but analysts said China would like to see more.
A cause of lingering friction between the two countries is the constant stream of North Korean refugees escaping poverty by fleeing into China.
“Continued economic stagnation creates many problems, not the least of which is the flow of North Korean refugees,” said Jing-dong Yuan, an expert on Northeast Asia at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies. “This puts Beijing in a dilemma of choosing between repatriating the North Koreans and facilitating their passage to South Korea, a policy option that can appease neither simultaneously”.

—The Daily Mail-China News news exchange item