China said on Tuesday it would abide by United Nations sanctions aimed at punishing ally North Korea, as some Chinese banks announced they had begun restricting cash flows into the impoverished country.
However China also indicated, three days ahead of a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice aimed at shoring up Chinese support for the UN action, that it would take into account its own interests in handling the crisis.
"The Chinese side has always implemented the Security Council's resolutions
seriously and in a responsible manner. This time is no exception," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters. He then qualified the remark.
"We will act in accordance with our commercial regulations and domestic law."
His comments came after the United States on Monday urged Beijing to honour its "responsibilities and obligations" under Saturday's UN Security Council resolution that imposed a range of sanctions on North Korea.
The White House's comments came amid specific concerns that Beijing might not carry out border inspections of cargo moving in and out of North Korea, as agreed to by Saturday's UN Security Council sanctions package.
The inspections aim to prevent the cash-strapped North Korean regime from selling material for an atomic bomb to terrorists or rogue states, but China's UN ambassador, Wang Guangya, expressed "reservations" over the measure.
Traders in the north-eastern Chinese city of Dandong, the main border trade link with North Korea, said they had been notified that customs inspections would be tightened, but the extent of the tougher regime remained unclear.
"We were notified by customs officials that inspections at the border will be more strict and sensitive materials will not go over," Wang Zhanguang, a trader with the Dandong Yongxinghe Trading Company, told AFP.
"We mainly export goods for daily use, so we don't think that the sanctions are going to affect us very much."
Liu did not comment specifically on the cargo inspections measure on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, some Chinese banks said Tuesday that they had suspended or restricted financial transactions with North Korea following the UN sanctions, but again the extent of the measures were unclear.
An official at China Merchants Bank, which runs a joint venture with North Korea's Daedong Bank, said it had stopped all financial transactions with North Korea from Monday.
"After the UN sanctions, we have cut off all remittances to North Korea in all currencies," a manager at the international remittance branch of China Merchants Bank's head office told AFP.
"We don't know when this will resume because it's a complicated situation, a sensitive thing," said the woman, who did not want to be named.
A clerk at the Bank of China's branch in Dandong also said it had cut all transfers of foreign currencies on Monday, although she claimed that was due to a computer malfunction.
The Bank of China's head office in Beijing said only that it was continuing a ban on remitting US dollars and euros into North Korea that was imposed in the middle of this year following earlier US sanctions.
However a clerk at the Dandong branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the nation's largest bank, said it had not received any orders from Beijing to restrict financial transactions with North Korea.
When asked about any tightening of cash flows into North Korea, foreign ministry spokesman Liu said only that all countries were obliged to act in accordance with UN regulations.