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Kim vows to revive nuclear talks

S KOREA: North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il vowed during a visit to China this week to try to revive stalled nuclear disarmament talks, Beijing media said Friday in its first confirmation of the secretive trip.

“Kim said that the DPRK (North Korea) will work with China to create favourable conditions for restarting the six-party talks,” Xinhua news agency said, without specifying whether he made a firm commitment to return to talks.

Kim’s five-day visit, which ended Friday, was shrouded in secrecy but widely seen as an attempt to secure aid to shore up his country’s crumbling economy.

China, which hosts the nuclear negotiations, was expected in return to press its ally to come back without preconditions to the talks, which Pyongyang angrily abandoned in April 2009.

Xinhua, reporting Kim’s meeting with President Hu Jintao, said the two leaders agreed that “relevant parties” in the negotiations “should demonstrate sincerity and make positive efforts for pushing forward the six-party talks”. Pyongyang’s official media separately confirmed that Kim had ended his visit but made no mention of the meeting with Hu or the nuclear talks.

“Party and state leaders and people of China accorded with utmost sincerity warm welcome and cordial hospitality (to Kim),” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

Analysts said the North may make a further announcement later about the talks, as it did during Kim’s last trip to China in 2006.

A month after quitting the nuclear negotiations, the hardline communist North staged its second atomic weapons test - incurring toughened UN sanctions, which further damaged its economy.

It is desperate to improve living standards and ease serious food shortages — worsened by a bungled currency revaluation — in advance of a possible power handover.

Kim, who suffered a stroke in August 2008, is widely thought to be preparing for an eventual transfer of power to his youngest son.

Chinese state television broadcast footage of the meeting between Kim and Hu, showing the 68-year-old Kim looking frail and elderly with thinning hair. SEOUL, Friday, AFP

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