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By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

The US and China have been discussing a roadmap to resume the six-party talks, but the two countries remain unable to settle their differences, a report says.

This was the conclusion of a report published on June 10 about the Quadrilateral Meeting on North Korea and the Future of the Korean Peninsula, organized by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP) last month and attended by 33 civilian experts and bureaucrats from South Korea, the US, China, and Japan. A number of important figures from the four countries attended the meeting, including Oh Joon, South Korean ambassador to the United Nations; Glyn Davies, the US State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy; Zhu Feng, professor at Peking University in China; and Kazuyoshi Umemoto, Japan’s deputy permanent representative to the UN.

“The U.S. is not prepared to return to the talks ”on a wing and a prayer;“ there must be some serious steps towards denuclearization by Pyongyang. . .Beijing now believes that it has gone as far as it can in applying pressure on North Korea,” the NCAFP said in its report on the meeting.

“As a result, a gap has developed between the United States and the PRC over how to handle North Korea.”

According to the report, the primary objective for the US is dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, while China, which prioritizes stability on the Korean peninsula, is worried that putting excessive pressure on North Korea could result in its regime collapsing.

“The United States and China have been in extended discussions on this issue for the past year. Still it does not appear as if China and the United States have yet reached complete agreement on a ‘roadmap’ back to the Six-Party Talks,” the report offered as analysis.

During the meeting, a variety of discussions were also held about the relationship between Korea and the US after unification. While the South Korean participants argued that Korea needs to maintain its alliance with the US even after unification, Chinese delegates warned that if Korea maintains its alliance with the US and Japan after unification, it could trigger a new cold war in Asia, the report said.

In regard to ways of resuming the six-party talks, it must be made clear that, if North Korea takes preliminary measures such as freezing testing of nuclear weapons and missiles, permitting the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to resume inspections, and suspending all of its nuclear programs, the other five parties will relax economic sanctions and will enter into a discussion to replace the armistice with a peace treaty, the NCAFP concluded.

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