North Korea, however, reiterated its opposition to further discussions without concessions from Washington.

Ning Fukui, Beijing's special envoy for Korean Peninsula affairs, said "sincerity, flexibility and patience" were needed to get multilateral talks back on track.

"There were some reasons for the failure of the talks to take place as scheduled but current difficulties are merely temporary," Ning was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency when he met with top South Korean foreign ministry officials here.

"I believe an early resumption of the talks will be possible should the United States and North Korea show sincerity, flexibility and patience."

Ning, the deputy chief of the Chinese delegation to the talks which also include the two Koreas, Japan, Russia, and the United States, arrived here earlier Wednesday.

Six-party talks were last held in June in Beijing but a scheduled fourth round in September failed to materialize when North Korea declined to show up.

Ning, Beijing's special envoy for Korean Peninsula affairs, is on a three-nation tour that includes the United States and Japan, a foreign ministry official said.

His trip is part of Chinese efforts to salvage the six-nation talks.

There was little sign of flexibility from Pyongyang on Wednesday. North Korea repeated that it had no plans to return to multilateral talks, accusing the United States of pursuing regime change in the communist state.

Citing the passage last month of a US law on North Korean human rights, Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency accused the United States of seeking to "isolate and stifle" the communist regime "under the pretext of human rights".

"The DPRK (North Korea) has no justification to sit with the US at the moment, to say nothing of the six-party talks for the solution to the nuclear issue," the news agency said.

The bill, passed last month, offers financial support to private, non-profit human rights and democracy programs and for increased US broadcasting into North Korea, among other initiatives.

South Korea's conservative main opposition Grand National Party welcomed the US bill and urged the government to take a tougher stand against North Korea.

But South Korea's ruling camp has criticized it as provocative and likely to hurt inter-Korean ties or prompt North Korea to harden its position further in talks on its nuclear ambitions.

Pyongyang blamed US hostility and South Korea's past clandestine nuclear experiments for its boycott of the September talks, but analysts and officials said the Stalinist state may be waiting out the US elections on November 2.

Ning is scheduled to hold talks here with South Korea's lead negotiators at the six-party talks, Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-Hyuck and Cho Tae-Yong, head of the Foreign Ministry's task force on the nuclear issue.

The Chinese envoy is to depart Thursday for the United States.

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.