China has debriefed South Korea on the meeting between the Chinese envoy Dai Bingguo and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il on Friday night, Yonhap News Agency reported Saturday.
“North Korea’s stance didn’t seem to have changed much,” the report said, citing an unnamed diplomat, who apparently declined to go into details.
Much attention was mounted on Dai’s meeting with Kim on whether China, North Korea’s largest economic benefactor, was able to persuade North Korea to contain its belligerence, in the aftermath of the latest Yeonpyeong artillery shelling.
“It seems like the North told Dai more or less the same thing that it had already stated (publicly) regarding the Yeonpyeong attack and also the nuclear issue,” another diplomat, also unidentified by name, said in the report.
This diplomat also said: “I suspect the North claimed that the shelling was a response to South Korea which it claimed provoked first.”
China’s official Xinhua News Agency said on Tursday Dai and Kim “have reached an important consensus through candid and in-depth talks on the Korean Peninsula and the relations between two countries.”
The report didn’t specify what the “consensus” was.