Lee has come under pressure to take a tougher line against Pyongyang after his military's counter-fire following North Korea's deadly artillery strike on a border island last week was seen as feeble.

The speech comes as the US and South Korean navies stage a potent show of force against North Korea, carrying out a four-day joint naval exercise led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington.

The drill has riled China, which sees the Yellow Sea as its own backyard and on Sunday called for emergency talks on the crisis.

Beijing, the isolated North's sole major ally, offered to host "emergency consultations" early next month among chief envoys to the stalled six-nation talks on the North's nuclear disarmament.

Its top envoy on North Korea, Wu Dawei, stressed the proposal did not constitute a formal resumption of the negotiations but said he hoped they would lead to such a resumption soon.

The United States reacted cautiously, with Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warning against rewarding Pyongyang's "bad behaviour", adding that the regime was trying to "get attention".

"It's hard to know why China doesn't push harder," he told CNN, adding that Beijing tries to keep the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il under control but "I'm not sure he is controllable."

China has come under strong international pressure to use its privileged relationship with the communist North in the wake of the artillery strike, but has refrained from condemning Pyongyang.

"Unfortunately China is not behaving as a responsible world power," Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Sunday.

"I cannot believe that the Chinese should, in a mature fashion, not find it in their interest to restrain North Korea. So far, they are not," he told CNN.

South Korea's presidential office said Lee, in a meeting Sunday with visiting Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo, urged China to take "a fairer and more responsible stance in its relations with the two Koreas".

Lee added that the South "has tolerated the North's constant provocations since the (1950-53) Korean War but would respond strongly if the North makes a additional provocation".

Seoul's foreign ministry said China's proposed meeting "should be considered very carefully" given the North's disclosure of a uranium enrichment programme and nuclear reactor construction, and its attack on the island.

Japan said it would deal with the proposal cautiously while cooperating with South Korea and the United States. Russia and the North itself are the other members of the talks.

Tensions remain high after the North's artillery strike on Yeonpyeong island last week, which killed four people.

People on the island scurried to bunkers Sunday after hearing explosions -- apparently a firing drill miles away on the North's mainland.

South Korean defence officials have warned that the North may use the naval war games being held far to the south as a pretext for a new attack on the island.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted defence officials describing the drill as "high-intensity" and saying Monday's practices "include a live-fire exercise by multiple aircraft from the George Washington, which will shoot mock targets in waters".

Washington says the drill is "defensive in nature" and aims to send a message of deterrence to the North.

It is one of a series of exercises announced in May after a Seoul-led multinational investigation found overwhelming evidence that a North Korean torpedo had sunk a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

Tuesday's bombardment of a non-military area, which killed two civilians and two marines and injured 18 people, was the first shelling of a civilian area in the South since the war.

Pyongyang said it was retaliating for a South Korean firing drill in what it regards as its own waters around the contested border. It has expressed regret at the two civilian deaths but said the South used them as human shields.

The North "will deal a merciless military counter-attack at any provocative act of intruding into its territorial waters in the future, too," ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said Sunday.

"A club is the best thing for a mad dog," Pyongyang's official news agency said of the US-South Korean naval drill, echoing the Korean proverb employed by a South Korean newspaper about the North's regime.

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