SEOUL - A senior Chinese official was in North Korea yesterday and a top U.N. political envoy was slated to arrive a day later in a new push to have the reclusive state return to stalled nuclear disarmament talks. The high-profile engagement this week with the North may bode well for reviving the six-country nuclear talks that North Korea has boycotted for a year, and could lead to a reduction of tensions on the troubled peninsula, analysts said.

The destitute North is under pressure to return to the nuclear talks, where it can win aid to prop up its broken economy, due to U.N. sanctions imposed after its nuclear test in May 2009 and a botched currency revaluation that sparked inflation and rare civil unrest. Chinese Communist Party international affairs chief Wang Jiarui flew to North Korea at the weekend. Wang met Kim Jong-il last year, and received a denuclearisation pledge from the North Korean leader.

On Monday, Wang met Choe Thae-bok, a high-ranking North Korean ruling party official. Wang is expected to stay until Tuesday and have discussions with Kim Jong-il, the South’s Yonhap news agency quoted sources as saying. Following him, Lynn Pascoe, UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, would visit North Korea from Tuesday through Friday to discuss what he said would be “a wide array of issues”.