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BEIJING (Reuters) - The official China Daily lashed out at the United States on Friday, saying recent remarks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were "hawkish and dangerous" after he warned North Korea of his country's military might.

Rumsfeld on Monday said it would be a mistake for North Korea to feel emboldened over its nuclear weapons program while world attention was focused on Iraq. He said the U.S. military was capable of fighting two major conflicts at once.

"This is a hawkish and dangerous warning," the English-language China Daily said. "It will poison the warming relations between the two sides on the Korean peninsula."

Rumsfeld's comments reflected U.S. anger at "being inconvenienced at a delicate stage of its war-planning against Iraq," China Daily said in an editorial.

The newspaper took a harsher line than any Chinese Foreign Ministry official has taken thus far during the stand-off.

Beijing renewed a call for dialogue between North Korea and the United States after U.S. criticism of Pyongyang's recent move to remove U.N. monitoring equipment at a nuclear reactor.

North Korea has since moved fresh fuel to the reactor, which the United States says must remain shut because it can produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

China, communist North Korea's main ally, said on Tuesday it wanted to see the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons, repeating a statement it has made several times in recent weeks.

U.S. envoys stopping in Beijing recently have tried to persuade China to use its leverage over its reclusive neighbor. But a U.S. official said on Thursday China and Russia had yet to show interest in curbing Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.

There was no immediate Chinese comment on the charge.

North Korea, denounced by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran, mothballed the reactor under a 1994 non-proliferation deal with the United States. But the UN's nuclear watchdog has said North Korea plans to restart the reactor within two months.

China fought alongside North Korea against the United States in the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce between the North and South. The United States has 37,000 troops stationed in the South.