A split over North Korea deepened Thursday as China said to talk with the nuclear-armed regime was better than to "brandish weapons", while the United States, South Korea and Japan planned new war games.
Tensions have spiked on the Korean peninsula after the hardline regime last week launched a deadly artillery attack on the South and deepened fears about its atomic programme by boasting about a new uranium reprocessing plant.
The United States this week staged naval manoeuvres with the South and on Friday starts its largest-ever exercise with Japan — roiling both Pyongyang and its long-time patron Beijing, which considers the waters its own backyard.
Beijing has come under pressure to come down hard on the regime of Kim Jong-Il, who this year twice visited the powerful neighbour that has given Kim's impoverished country a lifeline of food, energy and diplomatic cover.
Washington, Tokyo and Seoul have snubbed Beijing's proposal for six-way crisis talks that would also include Moscow and Pyongyang — instead scheduling their own three-way foreign ministers' talks in Washington next Monday.
China complained it was being unfairly criticised for urging dialogue, and suggested talks with the North would be more helpful than military exercises, as South Korea also readied for new live-fire drills next week.
"Those who brandish weapons seem to be justified. China as the host of the six-party talks is criticised for calling for dialogue. Is that fair?" Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.
Asked about the US-Japan "Keen Sword" exercise, which will include South Korean observers, she said: "Military alliances or the brandishing of force cannot solve the (Korean) peninsula issue. The only solution is dialogue."
Jiang also defended China's refusal to publicly take sides in the impasse or condemn Pyongyang for its attack, saying: "Under the current circumstances, it's not right to push the international community to take sides."
The North triggered the latest crisis when on November 23 it shelled a South Korean border island, killing two marines and two civilians, in what it said was a retaliatory attack over a South Korean live-fire drill.
In the South the first shelling of its civilian areas since the 1950-53 Korean war has caused far greater outrage than the sinking of a warship in March that killed 46 sailors, for which Seoul also blames the North.
Rattled and furious, South Korea has moved more troops and guns to its frontline islands near a contested maritime border in the Yellow Sea, determined to show it will strike back hard if provoked again.
"The danger of further attacks from North Korea is high," National Intelligence Service director Won Sei-Hoon was quoted as telling a closed session of parliament's intelligence committee on Wednesday.
He said the North struck at a time of heightened volatility as its leader, Kim Jong-Il, 68, is planning to hand power to his 27-year-old son, Kim Jong-Un, while new economic turmoil has ravaged the closed-off country.
From Monday, South Korea plans five days of artillery drills in 29 locations, including on some of the flashpoint border islands.
The US and Japan on Friday start their biggest ever military exercise, a previously announced eight-day drill involving 44,000 troops, 60 warships and 500 aircraft in southern Japanese waters close to South Korea.
The drill comes as Tokyo-Beijing ties remain strained by their worst crisis in years, triggered by Japan's arrest of a Chinese fishing boat skipper after collisions with its patrol boats in a disputed part of the East China Sea.
On the broader diplomatic front, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to meet the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan in Washington Monday, for talks that exclude China.
US Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, earlier said China needed to "step up" pressure on North Korea and that its call for six-nation talks "will not substitute for action".
UN International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano meanwhile voiced "great concern" over Pyongyang's report this week on a state-of-the-art new nuclear facility which US experts warn could make weapons-grade uranium, supplementing the plutonium it has used for atomic bombs so far.
Russia's deputy nuclear envoy Grigory Logvinov, on a visit to Seoul, was quoted as saying by Seoul foreign ministry officials that the programme "is a violation of UN Security Council resolutions".
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