"China's envoy on the Korean issue Ning Fukui will begin a visit to the United States this afternoon," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular news conference.

"This is another concrete step China is taking to continue to advocate peace and promote the resumption of six-party talks."

Liu said Ning will meet with officials from the State Department and White House but did not release details on what message Ning will relay from Chinese leaders.

China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said Sunday Pyongyang was willing to participate in six-party talks but urged other parties to address the North's concerns.

Ning's visit is the latest diplomatic effort to revive the talks since US President George W. Bush's State of the Union address.

South Korea's top nuclear negotiator Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon will this week visit Russia, one of the six countries involved.

North Korea declared on February 10 it had nuclear weapons and withdrew indefinitely from the nuclear talks due to a "hostile" US policy.

Li Sunday refused to say whether China actually believed that North Korea had such weapons, but insisted that the nation's Stalinist leader Kim Jong-Il remained committed to the goal of a non-nuclear Korean peninsula.

The North also said Thursday that it ended a self-imposed 1999 moratorium on testing long-range missiles.

The two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have met three times in a bid to resolve the nuclear standoff that erupted in 2002 when the US accused Pyongyang of operating a secret uranium-enrichment program.

China, the North's ally, brokered three sets of six-way talks which produced little progress with the final round held in June 2004. North Korea boycotted a fourth round, originally due to be held in September last year.

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