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BEIJING, Tuesday (Reuters) China, unnerved by the festering North Korean nuclear crisis, is pushing a compromise format for talks that it hopes will satisfy both Washington and Pyongyang and bring them back to the table, diplomats said on Tuesday.

Washington has insisted on multilateral talks while Pyongyang demands bilateral talks with the United States before any multilateral discussions. To break the impasse, Beijing supports a multilateral framework for the negotiations that would allow for bilateral meetings on the sidelines, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official told a briefing for Western diplomats.

"Multilateral first, bilateral contacts subsequently and even in a separate room," said one diplomat who attended.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and his South Korean counterpart Roh Moo-hyun had agreed to pursue that format in Beijing last week, he said..

Meanwhile A senior Chinese official handed a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in what diplomats said was a move to try to persuade Pyongyang to agree to multilateral talks on its nuclear ambitions.

In an overnight report, the North's official KCNA news agency said Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, who visited Moscow earlier this month, had met Kim on Monday. "The special envoy courteously handed a personal letter from Hu Jintao, general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party of China and president of China, and presented his gift to Kim Jong-il," KCNA said.

KCNA did not say what Hu had written, nor what the envoy discussed with Kim, but diplomats say Dai was sent to talk about the nuclear crisis.

Meanwhile Momentum is building to formally suspend a multibillion dollar nuclear power project under construction in North Korea by the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union, U.S. and diplomatic sources said.

Members of the the Korean Energy Development Organization, the project developer, began working-level talks in New York on Monday on the issue of what suspension would mean and its likely impact on Pyongyang, the sources told Reuters. The meeting comes as Washington presses Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions by organizing an international crackdown on North Korean counterfeiting and trafficking in narcotics and missiles.

"If we're going to be ordered to suspend, we'd like to see it done in an orderly and safe manner and in a manner that doesn't make things worse," one diplomat said. Some analysts say suspension would be seen as effective termination of the project and this could undermine any chance of a peaceful resolution of the North Korea nuclear crisis.

Others say it is a logical and overdue extension of U.S. policy since senior Bush administration officials have long made clear they have no intention of allowing the North to take control of a nuclear power reactor. No formal decision on the $5 billion project is expected at this week's meetings, a State Department official said.

The "consultations will identify only technical and legal aspects of the light water reactor project that require eventual consideration by the senior board with respect to the future of the project," he said.

But the diplomat said "there is momentum building towards a suspension" of the project, which involves nearly 1000 workers at the North Korean site known as Kumho. Other U.S. sources echoed this assessment.

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