China can be the key to solving the North Korea puzzle. The Pyongyang government keeps saying it’s making nuclear weapons, and now a second secret plant for making weapons-grade plutonium is suspected. The Bush administration keeps threatening pre-emptive attack and pressing for “regime change” but hesitates for fear of triggering a major war in northeast Asia.

China has informed U.S. officials that North Korea has agreed to drop its demand for initial one-on-one talks with the United States, according to The Washington Post. In return, says China, Washington must abandon its insistence that the talks also include Japan and South Korea. That would mean a return to the format involving only North Korea, China and the United States. Washington continues to press for the five-party format but is said to be considering a three-way meeting.

There’s more to it than that. North Korea’s slight concession probably rests on a Chinese plan to permit informal direct U.S.-North Korean conversations at the same time – something the Bush administration adamantly opposes.

China appears to be working gradually toward an agreement in which North Korea would abandon its nuclear-weapons program in return for a security guarantee plus energy and food aid from the United States. That’s what the Clinton administration envisaged when it negotiated an agreement in 1994. Bush spokesmen often charge that Pyongyang violated that agreement by renewing its nuclear weapons program. True enough, but that violation came after four years of foot dragging by the United States. While providing limited aid, Washington continued to hamstring the North Korean economy and made no move toward what Pyongyang saw as the main part of the deal – access to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, eventual normalization of relations with Washington and reunification of the two Koreas.

If China is, indeed, the key, Washington will do well to listen to it. China has a strong interest in a peaceful, de-nuclear Korean peninsula, stronger than that of the United States. A new war in Korea would bring a massive rush of Korean refugees across the border into China. So would a seemingly humanitarian U.S. plan to admit up to 300,000 North Korean refugees to the United States. The only way they could get here would be through China, and that’s what China wants to avoid at all costs.

The Bush team would do well, too, to listen better to what Pyongyang has to say, specifically its statement last month that it was developing a “nuclear deterrent” not in order to “blackmail others,” but to reduce the expense of its conventional force. Pyongyang does, understandably, feel threatened by being named by President Bush as part of an axis of evil and by the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, not to mention the 38,000 U.S. troops deployed at its southern border.

While halting the North Korean nuclear weapons program gets always more difficult, a security guarantee, a peaceful peninsula, and a political and economic normalization would reduce North Korea’s need for such expensive defense, whether nuclear or conventional.

That’s what China wants, and it should be what the United States wants. Getting there will be tough, but skillful and flexible diplomacy are better vehicles than threats and pressure.