The fourth round of the talks had been scheduled to be held in September but nuclear-armed North Korea refused to participate, blaming both US "hostile" policy and secret nuclear experiments in South Korea.

Some reports said Pyongyang wanted to wait for the outcome of the US elections.

Li told reporters after talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the State Department that China and other parties to the talks -- the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia -- as well as "the entire international community" felt the six-party forum was the "only feasible and correct option" to end the crisis.

He acknowledged that "some new complicating factors and new difficulties" hampered the talks but said "actually, this has required all of us to continue to adopt a more patient and more creative approach in finding a solution."

Li stresed that "nothing is more precious than peace."

Powell said it was premature to discuss the possibility of bringing the nuclear dispute to the UN Security Council if efforts to woo North Korea back to the talks failed.

"I think that the six-party framework is what we should be concentrating on, and not any other means of dealing with this right now," he said.

"And I'm quite confident that the six-party framework is a framework in which this matter will be dealt with for the foreseeable future, because it serves the interests of all parties," Powell said, citing particularly North Korea's neighbors.

"They had as much of an interest and an even greater equity in seeing a denuclearized peninsula than does the United States," he said.

The nuclear stand-off intensified in October 2002 when the United States accused North Korea of operating a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 agreement.

Pyongyang has denied running the uranium-based program but has restarted its plutonium program.

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