BEIJING — North Korean leader Kim Jong Il reportedly discussed his country’s nuclear program with China’s president at a meeting yesterday, just days after Vice President Dick Cheney urged Beijing to do more to defuse a growing threat from Pyongyang.
Mr. Kim told China’s leader that he was ready to give up his country’s nuclear programs if the United States changed its “hostile attitude,” a South Korean newspaper reported, according to Reuters news agency.
“Kim reportedly explained the reasons behind the nuclear weapons to Hu and added that North Korea is willing to give up nuclear developments if the United States changes its hostile attitude,” South Korea’s most widely read daily, Chosun Ilbo, said, quoting a Chinese source.
Mr. Kim’s visit was reported by South Korean media but not confirmed by China’s Foreign Ministry, which in the past has released information about the secretive leader’s visits only after he returns home.
Early yesterday, a convoy of armored cars with tinted windows was seen carrying a delegation from the main Beijing train station to a government guesthouse where Chinese leaders usually receive visiting leaders. Mr. Kim reportedly traveled to China by train.
The reports said Mr. Kim talked with President Hu Jintao over lunch about North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program and asked for economic aid. They said the visit would last four days.
Mr. Cheney, who met with Mr. Hu last week, prodded China to pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, citing new evidence that the North has atomic weapons.
“Time is not on our side,” a senior U.S. official quoted Mr. Cheney as telling Chinese leaders.
Washington wants China to use its leverage as the North’s last major ally and the leading supplier of food and energy for its ailing economy.
The U.S. official said Mr. Cheney gave Chinese leaders information from a top Pakistani nuclear scientist suggesting that North Korea had at least three nuclear devices and is capable of making more from both plutonium and enriched uranium.
China says it wants a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and has hosted two rounds of talks on the issue with the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia. Beijing is trying to organize a third round within the next few months.
China’s Foreign Ministry said it had “no information” on Mr. Kim’s meeting with the Chinese leader, which would be the first since Mr. Hu became president last year. When Mr. Kim visited China in 2000 and 2001, neither side announced the trips in advance.
A special train carrying Mr. Kim and his entourage of about 40 senior party and government officials arrived in Beijing yesterday morning, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
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