Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, who serves as Beijing's chief nuclear negotiator in the six-way talks, arrived in Seoul from Beijing to hold a series of meetings with South Korean officials, they said.

Coinciding with Wu's visit, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon renewed a call for North Korea to return to the six-way talks aimed at curbing its nuclear weapons drive.

"The government has urged and now urges again North Korea to return to six-way talks without any delay," Ban told a weekly briefing at the foreign ministry.

Wu's official itinerary in Seoul began with talks with Ban.

Ahead of the 50-minute closed-door meeting, Wu told Ban that Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing had sent him to South Korea "to exchange opinions,"

Wu said China and South Korea have agreed to denuclearize the Korean peninsula for peace and stability in the region and to continue to push for six-way talks.

He moved on to meet with Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-Sik and Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon, who leads the South Korean team to the talks.

There have been intense diplomatic efforts to revive the talks since the Stalinist state on February 10 announced it possesses nuclear weapons and was withdrawing indefinitely from the discussions.

Wu's trip to Seoul heralds another busy round of diplomacy, as Ban earlier said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would visit South Korea and other East Asian countries later this month for talks on North Korea.

South Korea's chief nuclear negotiator Song also plans to visit Russia next week for talks about North Korea, Ban added.

The foreign ministers of South Korea and China already held a telephone conversation Monday to repeat their joint call for North Korea to return soon to six-party talks.

Top negotiators from South Korea, the United States and Japan met in Seoul Saturday to fine-tune their strategy. They jointly urged Pyongyang to drop any preconditions for returning to talks.

The two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, have met three times since 2003, with the last round held in June. North Korea boycotted a fourth round scheduled for last September, citing "hostile" US policy.

North Korea has reportedly indicated that it would return to negotiations by June to meet a US-set deadline for the Stalinist state to come back to the dialogue table.

But Ban denied setting a deadline for North Korea to return to talks.

The nuclear standoff erupted in October 2002 when the United States accused North Korea of operating a program based on highly enriched uranium.

Pyongyang denied that charge but restarted a plutonium-based program frozen under a 1994 arms control agreement.

South Korean officials have dismissed North Korea's latest claim to have nuclear weapons as a tactic to win concessions from the United States ahead of new talks.

But Washington believes the Stalinist state may already possess one or two crude nuclear devices.

All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.