CHINA URGING AFGHANISTAN TO RESTART PEACE TALKS WITH TALIBAN

[China is a member of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, which is promoting the peace process. That process is at such an early stage that the nations are still talking about mechanisms for holding more formal discussions that would, in theory, involve representatives of the Taliban. The group, which also includes Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan, is expected to meet in February in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.]

By Edward Wong

Wang Yi, left, the Chinese foreign minister, walking with his Afghan counterpart,

Salahuddin Rabbani, on Tuesday at the Foreign Ministry in Beijing.

Credit Pool photo by Mark Schiefelbein

BEIJING — Chinese officials are urging the government of Afghanistan to restart peace talks with the Taliban after the last round of discussions collapsed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said.

The statement by China late Tuesday was a sign that its leaders were asserting their commitment to the nascent peace process despite problems after the major countries involved learned last year that a Taliban founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had been dead for two years. That caused a split in the Taliban ranks and raised questions among the participants in the talks.

China is a member of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, which is promoting the peace process. That process is at such an early stage that the nations are still talking about mechanisms for holding more formal discussions that would, in theory, involve representatives of the Taliban. The group, which also includes Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan, is expected to meet in February in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

The Afghan and United States governments are hoping that China will exert greater influence in the talks on Pakistan, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s and is a Chinese ally.

Li Yuanchao, the Chinese vice president, and Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, met in Beijing on Tuesday with Salahuddin Rabbani, the Afghan foreign minister.

Afterward, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced: “Wang Yi said that as a peaceful mediator of the Afghan issue, China supports the ‘Afghan-led and Afghan-owned’ reconciliation process. China appreciates the move by the Afghan government to restart the negotiations with the Taliban.”

The announcement said this was “the right approach to achieve long-term stability in Afghanistan.”

Fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan government has worsened in the last year, as the Taliban have occupied more land and laid siege to important cities. The death toll of Afghan soldiers and civilians in 2015 reached its highest point in years.

The Xinjiang region in far western China shares a border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and according to Chinese officials and analysts, Chinese leaders are concerned that ethnic Uighurs in the region are coming under the influence of violent, radical groups from outside China. Violence between Uighurs and ethnic Han has been rising in Xinjiang in recent years. Afghan officials say they have captured dozens of militant Uighurs in Afghanistan.

President Xi Jinping of China has announced strategic economic plans for China and Central Asia, and a peaceful Afghanistan could play a bigger role in those plans. According to the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Rabbani told Mr. Wang on Tuesday that “Afghanistan is willing to continue to expand its mutual interests with China and actively participate in the construction of ‘One Belt, One Road,’ ” a reference to the name that Mr. Xi uses for his regional economic plans.

The Foreign Ministry also listed points on which China and Afghanistan had reached consensus, including an acknowledgment of Afghanistan’s desire to be a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, two multinational institutions of which China was a founder.

On Monday, the day of Mr. Rabbani’s arrival in China, Peking University, one of the country’s leading universities, hosted a news conference to discuss a 2015 survey of Afghans conducted by the Asia Foundation, a nongovernmental organization based in San Francisco. The results showed that Afghans’ optimism and confidence in their government and their country’s future had plummeted to the lowest points in a decade. Representatives of Chinese commercial interests in Afghanistan were at the news conference and raised questions about the country’s stability.

Follow Edward Wong on Twitter @comradewong.

Yufan Huang contributed research.

@ The New York Times