SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea will press on with two business projects in North Korea, ignoring America’s claims that a tourism venture is a source of revenue for Kim Jong Il’s cash-strapped nation that is under U.N. sanctions for a nuclear weapon test.

Prime Minister Han and representatives from the ruling Uri Party Wednesday agreed the Mount Geumgang tourism project and the Gaeseong Industrial Park have “no direct correlation to the U.N. Security Council’s resolution,” the prime minister’s spokesman in Seoul, Kim Seok Hwan, said. “They reconfirmed that the two projects need to continue.”

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill yesterday indicated the American government opposes the project that takes South Koreans to the North’s Mt. Geumgang. Mr. Hill and Secretary of State Rice are visiting Asian officials to stiffen support for the sanctions from China, Russia, and South Korea. Rice arrived in Seoul this afternoon.

The U.N. Security Council’s resolution, passed unanimously on October 14, says member states must prevent material for North Korea’s weapons program from entering the country and freeze related financial assets.

Seoul-based Hyundai Asan Corp., a unit of Hyundai Group, runs the tourism venture.

Former Hyundai Group Chairman Chung Mong Hun committed suicide in August 2003 after being charged with illegally funneling $450 million to North Korea to enable the June 2000 summit between former President Kim of South Korea and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il.

Mr. Chung, who was 54, jumped from his 12th-floor office in downtown Seoul after prosecutors questioned him for three days over the payments.

Hyundai’s venture with North Korea, which began ferrying South Korean tourists to the North Korean resort in 1998, symbolizes attempts to reunify the two Koreas through business ties, a dream of Mr. Chung’s late father and Hyundai Group founder Mr. Chung Ju Yung, who was born in the North.

The government provided about $5.2 million in subsidies last year to encourage visits to the mountain, including trips by schools and colleges, up from 3 billion won in 2004, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported today, citing an unidentified government official.

South Korea won’t halt the project because of its symbolic significance to North-South relations and because it’s privately run, according to the Seoulbased newspaper.

Gaeseong industrial complex is a South Korean-funded business park to enable South Korean businesses to use the North’s cheap labor. The 25-acre park is an hour’s drive from Seoul and Inchon, the nearest South Korean port, and two hours from Pyongyang.

“Gaeseong is trying to deal with a longer term issue of economic reform and for me, I don’t see the purpose of the Geumgang mountain tourism project in the same light,” Mr. Hill said Wednesday.

North Korean officials denied that the Kim Jong Il regime was using funds from South Korean companies in the Gaeseong Industrial Park to help fund its nuclear weapons program, according to Choson Sinbo, a Japan-based pro-North Korean newspaper.

The report cited Chung Yong Chol, a Gaeseong city councilman, saying the American and conservative factions in South Korea insist North Korea’s government appropriate the North Korea workers’ wages to invest in its nuclear weapons program. He called the idea “preposterous.”