CHINA SENDS NORTH KOREAN TO PHILIPPINES.

Byline: The New York Times

China defused a five-week diplomatic crisis Tuesday by spiriting a senior North Korean defector out of the country and sending him by special plane to the Philippines, where he is expected to stay for a decent diplomatic interval before traveling to South Korea.

The defector, Hwang Jang Yop, an ideological mentor to Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, was the most senior member of his country's hard-line elite ever to defect.

He arrived at the Clark Special Economic Zone, a former U.S. military base in the Philippines, just after noon aboard a China Southern Airlines Boeing 737 that had carried him and three escorts from the south China port of Xiamen.

``What I can tell you is that through consultations among all sides, the problem has already been solved,'' a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Cui Tiankai, told reporters at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. Shortly after that, the official New China News Agency reported that Hwang ``left China today for a third country.''

None of the governments involved in the arrangements for Hwang's departure from China disclosed the conditions for his safe passage to South Korea.

Monday, a senior South Korean official said Hwang would remain in a ``third country'' for ``a considerable period of time'' before going on to Seoul. This condition was presumably intended as a gesture to spare China the image of having its territory used as an escape route from North Korea.