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SEOUL: A senior Chinese official trying to restart nuclear disarmament negotiations was expected to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il Monday, reports said, as the two Koreas held separate talks on reviving stalled tourism projects.
The visit by Wang Jiarui, head of the Chinese Communist Party's international department, comes shortly before UN chief Ban Ki-moon's top political adviser Lynn Pascoe is due in Pyongyang.
South Korean media forecast that Wang, who has met Kim many times in the past, would hold another meeting later Monday on the last full day of what Beijing calls a "goodwill" visit.
China hosts the six-party nuclear talks which its ally North Korea quit last April, a month before staging a second nuclear test.
As conditions for returning, the North wants Washington to agree to hold formal peace talks and seeks a lifting of United Nations sanctions.
In an apparent conciliatory gesture to Washington, Pyongyang on Saturday freed a US missionary who had crossed the border last December 25 on a lone campaign to publicise its rights abuses.
Pascoe was Tuesday to begin a four-day visit to Pyongyang and has said he will discuss "the entire range of issues".
The North, hit by tougher sanctions for its missile launches and nuclear test last year, has been pushing to revive business projects with the South despite cross-border sabre-rattling from Pyongyang's military.
The two sides began talks Monday about a possible resumption of tours which earned the cash-strapped communist state tens of millions of dollars a year before they were suspended.
Discussions went ahead despite a rise in military tensions sparked by the North's live-fire artillery exercises late last month near the disputed sea border.
South Korea's unification ministry said it would demand safety guarantees before it restarts tours to the North's Mount Kumgang resort.
Seoul suspended them after North Korean soldiers in July 2008 shot dead a Seoul housewife who strayed into an off-limits military zone at the resort.
Five months later, Pyongyang shut down a day trip for South Koreans to its historic city of Kaesong as ties worsened.
The North was long hostile to the South's conservative government, which linked major aid to progress in denuclearisation. It blamed Seoul for the tourist's death and refused to let it hold an on-site investigation.
The unification ministry, which reported the start of Monday's talks at Kaesong, said the North must explain how the tragedy happened and put in place measures to prevent any recurrence.
About 1.9 million visitors, mainly South Koreans, have visited the Seoul-funded Kumgang resort since in opened in 1998. Over a decade the tours earned the impoverished North a total of US$487 million.
- AFP/sc
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