North Korea has displayed a shift to a dialogue phase by dispatching a high-level envoy to China last week, a pro-North newspaper published in Japan said over the weekend.
In a Saturday article on the visit of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's envoy to Beijing, the Choson Shinbo said that Pyongyang appears to have signaled its intention to shift toward dialogue for peace and prosperity, citing Chinese media reports that envoy Choe Ryong-hae, the director of the General Political Bureau of North Korea's People's Army, mentioned the willingness to rejoin the long-suspended six-party talks.
Considering the status of the newspaper, the North Korean leadership seems to have again displayed its expectations for dialogue, experts in Seoul said.
The Choson Shinbo went on to say that envoy Choe's visit has widened China's diplomatic position as the host of the six-party talks, opening the way for "peace diplomacy" that will urge the United States to come up with measures to resolve the crisis.
"If the phase is changed from confrontation to dialogue, efforts to avoid conflict wished by the U.S. president himself should be made first," the paper said.
Choe met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday, during which he conveyed Pyongyang's willingness to open dialogue on the issue with "concerned parties." According to China's official news media, Choi's remarks came in response to Xi's call for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
South Korea's government, however, feels North Korea's policy direction expressed through Choe lacks specifics, according to officials in Seoul.
"North Korea appears to have delivered its intention to resume dialogue to China, and the two sides seem to have shared the need for dialogue," a high-ranking official in Seoul said.
But the official painted a cautious picture of the outlook for the resumption of dialogue, noting Pyongyang's failure to mention denuclearization.
Another Seoul official also said North Korea failed to mention denuclearization and the six-party talks in its media coverage of the outcome of Choe's Chinese trip.
"North Korea and China are still wide apart as far as the denuclearization issue is concerned," the official said.
Also clouding the outlook for the resumption of dialogue, the North poured out raw criticism of South Korean President Park Geun-hye in an official statement released on Saturday.
Using Park's name for the first time since her inauguration in late February, the spokesman for the Policy Department of the North's National Defense Commission issued a statement and said, "Park Geun-hye, puppet president of South Korea, openly revealed her sinister intention to stand in confrontation with the DPRK (North Korea) again on Thursday."
"When meeting with the director of the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies and his party that day, she said that the north has played a 'game' escalating the tension on the Korean Peninsula. Recently she was so pitiful as to coquettishly behave, blustering that the north is attempting a new 'gamble' called new line on simultaneously pushing forward economic construction and the building of nuclear force," said the statement.
"Personally hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK, she made such reckless remarks as uttering the north cannot succeed in implementing the above-said line. She foolishly tried to shift the responsibility for having strained the overall situation on the Korean Peninsula onto the north."