<Kanwa news March 14> In response to the request of Japan and Russia to join the quadrilateral negotiation on the Korean Peninsula issue, the strategic scholars of China and the USA deem it unnecessary. It shows that both China and the USA hope to continue to dominate the current quadrilateral negotiation. As Xi Lai Wan of the Research Institute under China's Institute of Contemporary International Relationships indicated to the KWIC reporter, both the USA and Japan are allies and it is more realistic for the USA to take the full responsibility for the resolution to the Korean Peninsula issue.

In addition, the Chinese scholar also believes that it is unrealistic to have any conception of holding a multilateral negotiation on the security protection in Northeast Asia before the Korean Peninsula issue can be resolved to a certain extent. This is because Northeast Asia is not Europe.

When answering the questions raised by the KWIC reporter on this issue in Hawaii this month, the Russian ambassador to South Korea, Evgenny V. Afanasiev, emphasized that it would be of greater significance for Russia to suggest a hexahedral negotiation attended by Japan, the USA, China, North Korea, South Korea, and Russia itself. According to him, the significance is that the negotiation will eventually form the structure for the future multilateral negotiation on the regional security protection so that the former will have a more extensive coverage and its topics will become diversified. Thus, the impact of the hexahedral negotiation is far more than the Korean Peninsula issue. At the same time, Ambassador Afanasiev denied the possibility for Russia to sell weapons to North Korea ( Kanwa news Andrei Pinkov).

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