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BEIJING, Jan 3 (AFP) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was due to make a brief stopover in Beijing Thursday, less than 10 days after his previous trip to China, for talks with his traditional ally ahead of a key South Asian summit in Nepal.

Islamabad's ambassador to Beijing, Riaz Hussain Khokhar, said renewed regional tensions between India and Pakistan sparked by last month's attack on the New Delhi parliament would top the agenda.

He said Pakistan had requested the meeting with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji.

"By coming to Beijing again, he wants to show that he has the support of China" in the standoff with India, one western diplomat in the Chinese capital said.

Musharraf, who left Pakistan Thursday on a China-bound flight, would meet with Zhu before attending a banquet that evening.

He would then fly from Beijing to the southwest Chinese city of Chengdu to board a flight to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal where leaders of seven South Asian nations were gathering for a regional summit.

The stopover comes on the heels of a state visit to China by Musharraf between December 20 and 24 when the two allies agreed to strengthen their already warm relations.

"President Musharraf won't meet Chinese President Jiang Zemin (during the stopover) because he saw him not so long ago," the diplomat said.

Musharraf has stressed that Sino-Pakistan ties remained strong despite his country's participation in Washington's war on terror launched in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Musharraf previously visited China in the summer of 1999, but that trip was cut short after clashes erupted in the disputed Kashmir region which is divided between India and Pakistan.

China has steered clear of voicing open support for Pakistan in the latest tensions sparked after New Delhi blamed the December 13 attack on its parliament on alleged militants backed by Islamabad.

Instead Beijing, which fought a bloody border war with India in 1962, has called on the two nuclear rivals to show restraint.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan Thursday appealed for a de-escalation in the tense stand-off, Chinese state media said.

In a telephone conversation Powell and Tang expressed their hopes that the two South Asian nuclear rivals would find a peaceful solution to their dispute, the Xinhua news agency reported.

"If the situation spins out of control and results in a major armed conflict, it will not only mean that both India and Pakistan will suffer," Tang said according to Xinhua.

"It will also impact the Afghan peace process and endanger stability and development in South Asia and Asia as a whole," Tang was quoted by the agency as saying.

In the first signs of a thaw in the South Asian standoff, Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Sattar shook hands Wednesday at the opening of a regional ministerial meeting in Kathmandu.

The meeting takes place ahead of Friday's summit of leaders from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

SAARC, founded in 1985, groups Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

According to Pakistani sources, Musharraf decided to travel to Nepal via China in order to avoid flying over India which closed its air space to Pakistani planes from January 1.

India said it would allow Musharraf to fly over its territory en route to the summit if he requested. But Pakistani officials said the president did not want to accept an offer that was not available to other Pakistanis.

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