Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi will visit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) early next month amid optimism that the Six-Party Talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula will resume soon.

Yang will visit Pyongyang July 2-4 as part of a three-nation trip that also takes him to Mongolia and Indonesia, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news briefing yesterday.

Yang's trip will follow a rare visit to the DPRK by US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who arrived in Pyongyang yesterday on a hastily arranged visit.

He was to meet DPRK Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, his counterpart in the six-nation talks, the US State Department said.

Hill, also the chief US nuclear negotiator to the Six-Party Talks, is to return to the Republic of Korea (ROK) today before traveling to Japan tomorrow.

Hill's visit follows the release of $25 million of DPRK funds frozen at a Macao-based bank - a key financial dispute that had blocked progress at the multilateral talks.

"We want to get the six-party process moving," Hill said at Pyongyang's airport. "We hope that we can make up for some of the time that we lost this spring and so I'm looking forward to good discussions about that."

China welcomed his trip. "We hope Hill's Pyongyang visit will help implement the actions that related parties committed to at the kick-off stage (in denuclearizing the peninsula) and be conducive to the normalization of US-DPRK relations," Qin said.

But he added the date for resumption of the six-nation talks has yet to be set.

Observers say sending a top US envoy to the DPRK even before it shuts down its reactor displays the Bush administration's eagerness to make progress on the nuclear standoff, and secure a foreign policy triumph amid the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Last year, the DPRK invited Hill to visit the country, but Washington did not accept the offer.

In a telephone conversation with ROK Foreign Minister Song Min-soon yesterday, Yang said China hopes that all the parties continue to honor their commitments and create a favorable environment for implementing the initial steps.

The DPRK has already invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the country for the first inspection since the agency's experts were expelled from the country in December 2002.

Source: China Daily