As the Japanese, South Korean and Russian teams left, China was eager to put a positive spin on the four-day talks which ended with only a vague agreement to establish working-level groups and reconvene sometime before June.

"Despite a harsh Beijing spring wind, China, North Korea, the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia used reason and wisdom in the second round of six-party talks to give new hope to the peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue," the leading People's Daily said in an editorial.

The most optimistic result of the talks was that all sides were able to hold "substantial discussions" in a cool and calm atmosphere, it added.

All sides also recommitted themselves to a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, it said.

The United States, whose team left Beijing Saturday, also expressed satisfaction after the talks, while Pyongyang blamed Washington for a lack of real progress.

Washington said that despite North Korea's failure to admit to a uranium-based weapons program it was happy with the way the talks appeared to have isolated North Korea from the other participants.

"While key differences remain that will need to be addressed in further rounds of discussions, this round of talks made progress on a regularized process for the peaceful and diplomatic resolution of this issue," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington overnight.

In Beijing Saturday a senior US official told journalists the talks were "very successful in terms of moving the agenda towards our goal of the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling (CVID) of the DPRK's (North Korea's) nuclear program.

"CVID is now more on the table than ever. It's been accepted by all the participants except the DPRK," he said, arguing that Pyongyang found itself increasingly isolated during the negotiations.

North Korea's chief delegate Kim Kye-gwan said: "These talks could not produce substantial and positive outcomes."

"The future prospects are wholly dependent on the United States," he said at a rare press conference at the North Korean embassy in Beijing following the talks.

The Stalinist regime insists it must be compensated before abandoning its nuclear program, while the United States insists that North Korea must act first before receiving any security guarantees or economic and energy aid.

China had been pushing hard for some sort of joint document to emerge from the discussions, which started Wednesday, but instead a chairman's statement was all that resulted.

The talks ended despite a joint offer on the second day from China, South Korea and Russia to give energy aid to the starving Stalinist nation in an effort to coax North Korea into beginning the process of freezing its nuclear weapons program.

Japan and the United States refused to participate in the offer, but jointly said they "respected" the gesture of the three nations.

The meeting did however see small progress in Japan's efforts to resolve its bilateral dispute with North Korea on the kidnapping of Japenese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies.

Pyongyang promised to continue discussing the problem at the government level, although it stressed the issue was irrelevant to the nuclear talks.

Chief Japanese delegate Mitoji Yabunaka praised the United States for bringing up the issue in its keynote address to the meeting "in an explicit way."

Yabunaka, head of the foreign ministry's Asian affairs bureau, told the meeting Japan would extend economic aid to the North only after the two countries normalized ties by solving the nuclear and abduction issues.

WAR.WIRE