Senior American and North Korean diplomats met in New York this week to discuss normalizing relations between the two countries for the first time in history.

The talks between the Bush administration and the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il, which President Bush assigned to the “axis of evil” in his first term, represent a major shift in U.S. policy and come less than a month after a tentative resolution to the nuclear proliferation crisis in the Asian Pacific.

As a result of the recent agreement, North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program but received guarantees from the West that the government in Pyongyang would be provided with energy subsidies and that a series of bilateral talks between the North and its main international opponents would begin shortly.

This week’s meeting in New York, which took place over two days, signals the new approach in American policy that has developed over the course of the nuclear confrontation — a policy of cautious engagement is gaining ground over stonewalling Kim, the previous tactic.

The top U.S. negotiator for the North Korean issue, Christopher Hill, described the talks on Tuesday as “very good, very businesslike, very comprehensive.”

Apart from Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, the diplomats also discussed taking North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terror as well as lifting some economic sanctions imposed by the American government.

In contrast to the optimistic attitude with which the New York talks concluded, the first bilateral meeting between North Korea and Japan ended in a bitter stalemate on Thursday. Japanese and North Korean officials walked away from the negotiating table in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi after a mere 45 minutes.

At issue was Japan’s unresolved fury over a series of kidnappings beginning in the 1970s, in which North Korean agents allegedly abducted Japanese citizens from Japan and brought them to North Korea.

Although efforts of former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi drew some concessions from the Kim regime on the issue, it remains unresolved and has only grown in controversy since the election of Koizumi’s conservative successor, Shinzo Abe.

Abe insisted that his government would provide no aid whatsoever to North Korea until Pyongyang satisfied his conditions for settling the history of the abductions once and for all.

The conservative government of Abe recently provoked international anger and outrage when the prime minister endorsed a group of right-wing politicians who maintain that imperial Japan did not conscript hundreds of thousands of women as sex slaves during World War II. Self-identified victims of this policy from China, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and even the Netherlands decried Abe’s pledge to support the right-wingers’ drive to revise the history of Japanese wartime atrocities.

North Korean diplomats also met with officials from the South Korean government in the first high-level bilateral talks since the Kim regime tested a nuclear weapon last October.

The talks, which took place in the North Korean capital, provided for the resumption of several cooperative activities that were suspended in the aftermath of the October test.

The two nations agreed to continue allowing family reunions for Koreans living in separate states after the catastrophic war of 1950 to 1953.

They also planned to move forward with proposals to build railway lines to cross the border, linking the two countries, and South Korea rejected the North’s requests for a full restoration of aid.

In China this week, Parliament is debating an unprecedented piece of legislation that would ensure the protection of private property under the law. The measure would legalize all individual property and assets; nothing of its kind has ever been proposed in Communist China.

The law, originally proposed in 2002, has been altered significantly from its original form in response to intense opposition.

Supporters of the law say that providing a legal basis for property rights will encourage entrepreneurial spirit, bolstering the commercial success that has been driving the manic growth of the Chinese economy.

If the law passes, however, Western observers do not expect it to change Beijing’s policy of appropriating rural lands for industrial or commercial purposes, which is one of the factors in China’s rural-to-urban flight and one of the principal motivators of political discontent among the Chinese people.

Also this week, the ruling Communist Party has taken an opportunity to criticize the United States’ record on human rights, in a reversal of traditional roles.

The U.S. government, which released a report on human rights on Tuesday, has long frustrated the Chinese leadership by highlighting Beijing’s poor human rights record on the international stage.

The new report by the Chinese government, released on Thursday, states, “as in previous years, the State Department points the finger at human rights conditions in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but avoided touching on the human rights situation in the United States.” The document criticizes the United States for violence in Iraq, for the November 2005 massacre in Haditha and for prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also discusses violent crime within the United States.

Sources: BBC News, The New York Times, Deutsche Welle, Asahi Shimbun, The Times of London, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Seoul Times