Rice in China to seek progress on North Korea

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North Korea has promised to abandon all nuclear weapons and programmes in exchange for economic and diplomatic incentives in a 2005 agreement between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

However, the deal has been stymied by Pyongyang's failure to meet an end-2007 deadline to disclose its nuclear programmes.

A senior U.S. official said Rice hoped her Asian trip would act as "a real catalyst to get over this bar of a good declaration" and she particularly wanted help from China, the North's major trading partner and traditional Communist ally.

"We continue to believe that if anyone is capable of convincing the North that this kind of transparency is the only way forward, it's the Chinese," said the official, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy.

According to U.S. officials and analysts, the sticking point has been Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any nuclear technology it may have transferred to other nations, notably Syria, as well as its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.

The United States has questions about any possible North Korean role in a suspected Syrian covert nuclear site that was bombed by Israel in September. Syria has denied having a nuclear programme but the case remains murky.

INAUGURATION

Rice, who attended South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's inauguration in Seoul on Monday, arrived in Beijing on Tuesday and flies to Tokyo on Wednesday.

She has no plans to visit Pyongyang, where the New York Philharmonic orchestra will play a concert featuring the works of Antonin Dvorak and George Gershwin on Tuesday.

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