At the first Japan-China security talks in over two years, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing also indicated Beijing was against holding talks without Pyongyang, Japan's Kyodo news agency said.

The suggestion of five-way talks if North Korea were to refuse to return to the negotiating table had been receiving some interest in Seoul and Washington.

But Li told a senior Japanese diplomat at the security talks in Beijing that the foreign ministers of all six countries involved should meet on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Kuala Lumpur on July 28

The ARF is a 12-year-old annual forum on security in the Asia-Pacific region that was initiated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

It now involves foreign ministers from 25 countries, including the two Koreas, Japan, the United States, China and Russia -- all members of the six-party nuclear talks.

North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-Sun is due to attend the ARF.

"We agreed that since the ministers of related countries will gather at the ARF meeting, we should utilize the opportunity as much as possible to set the conditions for the resumption of the six-way talks," said Tsuneo Nishida, Japanese deputy foreign minister for political affairs, who met with Li, according to Kyodo.

The chief Japanese and South Korean delegates to the six-nation talks, which have been suspended since November, had already agreed on Thursday that a gathering on the sidelines of the ARF was the correct way forward.

North Korea's test-firing of ballistic missile tests on July 5 had most recently put China-Japan relations to the test.

Japan had urged UN Security Council members to support a binding resolution that would impose sanctions on the North for launching the missiles.

But China, the North's most important ally and a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, strongly opposed the measure in favor of diplomatic negotiations.

A watered-down version that dropped a reference to authorize sanctions or military action was finally passed unanimously on the weekend.

The six-way Korean nuclear talks have been stalled since November when Washington rejected Pyongyang's demand for the lifting of US sanctions on a Macau bank accused of money-laundering on the North's behalf.

China and Japan have held nine security meetings since 1993, although the last one was in Tokyo in February 2004.

The meeting was agreed to by both countries' foreign ministers in May on the sidelines of an Asian forum in the Qatari capital of Doha, amid a slight easing in tensions between the perennially feuding neighbors.

China has scaled back senior official encounters with Japan primarily over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors 14 World War II criminals among 2.5 million war dead.

The shrine is seen by China and South Korea as a symbol of Japan's militarist past.

Friday's meeting was attended by senior foreign and defense officials including Nishida and China's vice foreign minister, Wu Dawei, China's chief delegate to the stalled six-nation talks on North Korea.

The Japanese and Chinese foreign ministers would also hold bilateral talks on the sidelines of the ARF meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Japan's foreign ministry said Friday, according to Kyodo.

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