Li Gun, head of the North Korean delegation to working level sessions of six-nation talks, met Assistant Foreign Minister Shen Guofang and China's ambassador for the Korean peninsula Ning Fukui Monday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The agency said they discussed "the Korean nuclear issue" without going into details.

It was not clear whether the talks were continuing Tuesday. The Chinese foreign ministry had no immediate comment.

On Monday, North Korea said it "had nothing to expect" from a fresh round of six-nation talks because of what it called a hardline US policy on the stand-off.

"It is clear that there would be nothing to expect even if the DPRK (North Korea) sits at the negotiating table with the US under the present situation," a foreign ministry spokesman told the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

The United States responded that it was proceeding as usual, expecting a next round of talks before the end of September.

"At this point, we're working with the Chinese, with the other parties and think that we'll be moving forward on this shortly," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

A third round of talks which brought together the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia in Beijing in an effort to resolve the impasse ended in June without tangible progress.

The stand-off over North Korea's quest for nuclear weapons erupted in October 2002 when the United States accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium, violating the 1994 nuclear freeze of its separate plutonium producing program.

Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program, but has again fired up its once-mothballed plutonium-based program.

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