UNITED NATIONS - Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as "culprits" and developing countries as "victims," China's top climate envoy said.

The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a "historical responsibility" to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, said Ambassador Yu Qingtai.

"The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that's what a culprit means," he said in an interview this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change.

The United States and China are the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Washington has argued it should not have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the U.S. economy while countries like China and India are not required to make similar cuts.

Yu disputed that view, calling China "a victim" of climate change and stressing that its economy only started to grow in the last 25 years.

"It's not logical to ask China ... to cap its emissions or reduce its emissions in the same manner as a developed country is supposed to do," he said.

Yu said the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" for developed and developing countries was accepted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

It is enshrined, he said, in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set binding targets on industrial countries to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases while exempting developing countries like China and India.

The same principle must be "the essential foundation" of the agreement that will replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, he said.

Wealthy nations are "the culprits, the countries who are responsible for the creation of this problem," Yu said. Developing countries are "victims ... (that) face the common task of achieving economic and social development so that their people can enjoy a better standard of living."

In December, delegations from nearly 190 countries agreed at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Bali, Indonesia, to adopt a blueprint for controlling global warming gases before the end of next year.

Yu said that agreement reiterated the principle of different responsibilities for rich and poor nations.

If it is abandoned, he warned, "people will just disperse and go their own ways and do their own things. So this principle is the very foundation for international cooperation."

The Kyoto pact requires 37 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gases by a relatively modest 5 percent on average. The Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 - and by at least half by 2050.

The Bush administration opposed the Kyoto treaty, but signed on to the agreement reached in Bali.

While the total amount of emissions in China and the U.S. may be the same, Yu said, China's population of 1.3 billion is four times the population of the United States.

"No one can expect China to accept that an American, for no other reason than being born an American, should enjoy an emission entitlement right four times as (large as) the Chinese. That is not right," Yu said.