The U.S. point man on North Korea will embark on a tour of South Korea, China and Japan this week to discuss ways to ease tensions and resume the six-party talks on the North's denuclearization, the State Department said Sunday.
The trip by Stephen Bosworth, U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, comes amid conciliatory gestures from the communist nation after the North's shelling of a South Korean frontline island in November that heightened tensions to the highest level since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Bosworth "will travel to the Republic of Korea, China, and Japan on January 3-7, 2011," spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement, adding he, accompanied by Sung Kim, special envoy for the six-party talks, will arrive in Seoul Tuesday and then go to Beijing and Tokyo Wednesday and Thursday to "meet with senior government officials to discuss the next steps on the Korean Peninsula."
Bosworth's trip comes ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit to Washington on Jan. 19 for a summit with U.S. President Barack Obama.
North Korea is expected to be among the topics, along with the Chinese currency yuan's revaluation and enhancing bilateral ties.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi is due in Washington Monday to prepare for the summit.
China, chair of the six-party talks on North Korea's denuclearization, has called for the early resumption of the nuclear talks without any conditions attached to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea last month revealed a uranium enrichment plant that it claims is producing fuel for power generation, triggering concerns that the facility could serve as a second way of producing nuclear bombs with highly enriched uranium.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak appeared to take a less stringent attitude last week when he called for the North's denuclearization this year through the six-party talks, whose last session was held in December 2008 over lingering tensions after the North's nuclear and missile tests and other provocations.
In Seoul, Lee reiterated in his New Year's address, "The door for (inter-Korean) dialogue is still open."
In its New Year's message, the North had made a similar call for dialogue with South Korea to ease tensions and pledged its nuclear dismantlement.
North Korea had also put forth a series of conciliatory gestures through New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson who visited Pyongyang last month.
Richardson said that Pyongyang had agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency back to its Yongbyon nuclear facilities, negotiate the sale of 12,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, the establishment of a military commission consisting of representatives from the two Koreas and the United States, and an inter-Korean military hotline to prevent conflicts at the Yellow Sea border.
The reinstatement of the international nuclear monitors is among the preconditions Seoul and Washington have put forth before the reopening of the multilateral nuclear talks, involving the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan and Russia.
North Korea expelled IAEA monitors in early 2009 in the wake of U.N. Security Council sanctions for its missile test. Months later, Pyongyang detonated its second nuclear device, after the first detonation in 2006, drawing harsher U.N. sanctions.