This after China had previously backtracked from a statement that a second round of talks should not go ahead unless a document on the first round was inked.

"The issue of some kind of document was raised in this morning's meeting," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a briefing after the first day of what looks likely to be three days of talks in Beijing.

"As for some of the details, I think this has to be worked out. The Chinese side wishes to see a good document," he said.

The meeting among delegates from China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia was the first since an initial round of six-way negotiations broke down in acrimony in August.

In early January, China said it hoped to see a document emerge from the new round of six-way talks on the festering nuclear standoff as a concrete expression of progress.

Chinese diplomats, including top North Korean envoy Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Yi, had been in close contact with counterparts abroad to put the results of the first round of talks into writing, the foreign ministry said then.

This followed earlier Chinese statements that it did not think a second round of talks should go ahead unless success was guaranteed.

However, in mid-January it emerged that China had changed its mind and did not absolutely insist on a document.

"In the end, the United States and North Korea could not find a set of words that would overcome their profound substantive differences and corrosive mutual distrust," Asia scholar Richard C. Bush told a briefing on January 15.

"So China signalled a couple of weeks ago that the talks should proceed even if a statement was not possible at this time," said Bush, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

WAR.WIRE