Prospects for fresh talks about ending North Korea's suspected nuclear programme look brighter after the United States and South Korea said they saw encouraging signs in a Chinese diplomatic initiative.
A day after the two Koreas traded machinegun fire across their heavily armed border, South Korea's focus turned to Chinese efforts to persuade communist North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions and end a crisis that erupted nine months ago.
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, key allies of US President George W. Bush, are also visiting the region to add urgency to the latest flurry of diplomatic activity.
Howard emerged from talks with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun on Friday saying China's efforts to coax its old ally North Korea to the negotiating table were "promising". He said Roh "believes that North Koreans in the end will act rationally".
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo is to brief US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington on Friday on his meeting last weekend with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
Dai is believed to be carrying a letter from Chinese President Hu Jintao to President Bush, a senior Bush administration official said.
South Korean diplomats in Beijing briefed by Dai were quoted anonymously in the Seoul media as saying they were told Pyongyang was ready to follow up the three-way talks held in April between US, North Korean and Chinese officials in Beijing.
Washington has said it will keep pressing for five-way talks that include South Korea and Japan, the countries most directly threatened by a nuclear-armed North Korea, but it has not excluded three-way discussions.
"There is very active diplomacy that is pointing in the direction of getting multilateral discussions started again, but (I'm) not going to count the chickens before they're hatched," a senior State Department official told reporters.
Chinese intelligence services have concluded in recent weeks that North Korea is producing enough weapons-grade plutonium and has all the components needed to make nuclear-tipped missiles, the Asian Wall Street Journal reported today.
That finding "is touching off urgent Chinese diplomacy to defuse Pyongyang's standoff with the US", the Journal said in its front-page report from Beijing.
Howard said he was encouraged by China's active role.
"China is a country more than any other that can influence North Korea and that is demonstrated by history," he said. China fought on North Korea's side against the US-backed South in the 1950-53 Korean War and now provides vital food and energy.
Howard said he and Roh agreed that "form should not take precedence over substance" when it comes to who joins the talks.
Howard backs US initiatives to curb North Korean trafficking in drugs, counterfeit currency and missile parts. He said Roh welcomed the proposed interdiction policy.
Blair, who was due in Tokyo on Friday in the latest leg of his tour of the United States and Asia, will meet Roh on Sunday.
South Korea got a fresh reminder of the misery in North Korea on Friday when a 37-year-old man walked across the mine-infested border to the South, saying he wanted to escape a difficult life in the North, the South Korean Defence Ministry said.
Defections across the heavily guarded frontier are rare. Most defectors flee to China before settling in a third country.
North Korea remained silent on Friday on the previous day's shooting incident. The South's army said its troops returned fire after the North fired on an observation post in the Demilitarised Zone, the divided peninsula's fortified frontier.
The North has in the past raised tensions before climbing down for a compromise or concession. The nuclear crisis erupted last October when U.S. officials said Pyongyang admitted it had a covert atomic weapons programme.