BEIJING (AFP) - - China's special envoy on Darfur has urged the West to do more to promote a peaceful settlement to the conflict in the African region, state media reported Wednesday.

Liu Guijin, who will begin a six-day tour of Britain and Sudan on Thursday, made the remark in an interview with the China Daily, following growing criticism of China's alleged failure to pull its weight on the Darfur issue.

"Major rebel groups still refuse negotiations and are offering no conditions. That's the major reason why political progress lags behind the African Union-UN peacekeeping mission," Liu told the paper.

"Western powers can exert more positive influence on those rebel leaders because many of them live in Western capitals."

For example, Abdel Wahid Mohammed Nur, whose Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) spearheaded a 2003 uprising at the start of the current spiral of violence, lives in exile in Paris, the China Daily said.

China is Sudan's main overseassupporter and arms supplier and has come under growing pressure to use its influence on the East African regime to end the bloodshed in Darfur, in the west of the country.

This has put China on the defensive, apparently prompting it to step up efforts to show the world that it is part of the Darfur solution, not the problem, with Liu's upcoming trip to Sudan part of that effort.

Activists have sought to pile the pressure on Chinese authorities this year as the world's spotlight has increasingly turned on China ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August.

Hollywood film-maker Steven Spielberg said last week that his conscience would no longer allow him to work on the Olympics as an artistic consultant while Sudan's government carried out genocide in its Darfur province.

On the same day, a group of Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes wrote an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao, asking him to push Sudan to end the atrocities in Darfur.

According to the UN, about 200,000 people have died in Darfur from the combined effects of war, famine and disease since 2003, when a civil conflict erupted pitting government-backed Arab militias against non-Arab ethnic groups.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday expressed alarm over renewed violence in Darfur.