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Powell woos China over Iraq, N. Korea
BEIJING, China -- China's stance on the key issues of disarming Iraq and North Korea will be the focus of talks between United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Powell, who arrived in China Sunday from Japan, will also meet with Vice President Hu Jintao and Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan. The United States is keen to convince China not to block a new resolution on Iraq which will be presented to the United Nations Security Council next week.(Full story) China's support for a "multilateral approach" to dealing with North Korea's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons will also be high on the agenda. Powell is expected to push the line that it is in China's best interests to take a more active role in reining in Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. China has seemed reluctant thus far to use its influence against its longtime ally, a major recipient of Chinese aid. "China has a role to play and I hope China will play that role," Powell, in a reference to North Korea, told reporters Sunday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, en route to Beijing, noted that China had supported a successful move in the International Atomic Energy Agency recently to refer the North Korean nuclear issue to the Security Council. The Bush administration welcomed that step as affirmation of global uneasiness over the issue, which Washington suggests undercuts North Korea's insistence that the North and the United States should address the issue one-on-one. Ahead of Powell's visit to Beijing, a top North Korean official, Kim Yong Nam, met Friday with Chinese officials. China's official news agency, Xinhua, said the two sides promised to enhance friendship between their countries, but the report gave no other details. Powell met earlier with Japanese leaders as part of an Asian visit designed to win backing for U.S. policies on Iraq and North Korea. The United States says both nations are developing weapons of mass destruction and has labeled them, along with Iran, part of an "axis of evil." On the issue of Iraq, Powell said the new resolution to be put to the U.N. would be "simple" and "directly to the point" in asking for the 15-member council to take decisive action on Iraq. Powell said Japanese officials had offered support for the U.S. stand on disarming Iraq and on pursuing a "multilateral" diplomatic approach to North Korea. "We agreed that the North must verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear weapons program," Powell said. "Unless North Korea ends its program, it cannot expect the benefits of relations with the outside world." The world is ready to assist the secretive communist state, whose economy is in ruins and can barely feed its own people, but only after it abandons its nuclear ambitions, he added. "We stand ready to help, but that help can only come when North Korea has abandoned its programs to achieve a nuclear weapons capability, something that the international community thought it had done years ago," Powell said. Pyongyang denies it has a nuclear-weapons program, saying it was forced to pull out of the 1994 Agreed Framework because the United States stopped fuel shipments. Washington says it froze the supplies because North Korea admitted it was developing a nuclear weapons program. Powell had high praise for Japanese leaders, calling the relationship between Washington and Tokyo "among our most important and certainly one of the more robust we have in the world." -- CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief Rebecca MacKinnon, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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