A senior Chinese Communist Party official held talks with North Korea on Sunday, state media said, as Pyongyang comes under growing pressure to return to nuclear disarmament talks.
The trip by Wang Jiarui, head of the Communist Party's international department, comes shortly before UN chief Ban Ki-moon's top political adviser Lynn Pascoe is due in Pyongyang.
Ahead of the flurry of visits, North Korea freed a US missionary who had been held since Christmas Day after he crossed into the country across the frozen river from China to protest at human rights abuses.
The official Korean Central News Agency said Wang met his counterpart Kim Yong-Il and "exchanged views on boosting the traditional relations of friendship… and on matters of mutual concern".
South Korean media have said Wang will also meet leader Kim Jong-Il and give him a message from President Hu Jintao encouraging the resumption of the six-party nuclear disarmament talks that China has hosted since 2003.
Sanctions-hit North Korea has come under increasing international pressure to return to the stalled negotiations, which also include South Korea, China, Japan, the United States and Russia.
Pyongyang withdrew from the six-party talks last April after the United Nations slapped harsher sanctions on the country in response to its missile and nuclear tests.
The North has said it is willing in principle to return to the talks, but has set two conditions — the lifting of sanctions and the United States agreeing to talks on a peace pact on the peninsula.
The 1950-1953 Korean war ended in an armistice which left the parties technically at war. The North says this has forced it to develop nuclear weapons to deter any US attack.
Rodong Sinmun, the North's Communist Party newspaper, renewed a call on Sunday for the United States to agree to a peace deal.
"The armistice agreement cannot prevent any accidental military clash," Rodong said. "The United States must make a bold and responsible decision to replace the armistice agreement with a peace accord."
The US and South Korean governments have rejected the offer, urging the communist state to first come back to talks and reaffirm its commitment to denuclearisation accords in 2005 and 2007.
Meanwhile, the UN envoy arrived in Seoul on Saturday for talks with Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan and other officials before he too heads to Pyongyang.
Pascoe, the UN under secretary general for political affairs, will visit North Korea from February 9 to 12 on a tour that also takes in China and Japan.
The United Nations could decide to ease sanctions if there is substantial progress on the nuclear talks. The punitive measures have hit the economy hard in a country which has relied on foreign aid to feed its people since it suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s.
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