However, China has received worldwide attention by hosting these talks despite the widespread pessimism that surrounded hopes after the failure of the Copenhagen meeting. The Tianjin talks marked the first time that China had played host in the 20-year history of international climate-change talks.

Many had been hopeful that by hosting the talks, China would have been able to use its growing clout and unprecedented willingness to help bridge rifts between developed countries and their developing counterparts.

After a week-long meeting in Tianjin, negotiators from more than 170 countries have still to prepare the negotiating text for the Cancun meeting, which starts on November 29.

'While some working groups have made headway by trimming down the negotiating text from 70-odd pages to 60 pages, we have seen a dramatic increase of pages of the final text in other groups which will submitted for discussions at Cancun,' a mainland negotiator said.

'We think we are making progress in terms of trying to include the different views of all parties, but whether this can be viewed as progress or not is open to interpretation as countries haven't reached consensus,' she said.

Indeed, frustration has been expressed over the lack of progress and particularly the fact that although big countries talk in the same language about the climate crisis, what they actually mean can be vastly different. For example, both US and China have talked repeatedly about learning lessons from the Copenhagen summit last year, which failed to reach a binding deal to tackle climate change. But they do not seem to have changed much.

Jonathan Pershing, the US deputy special envoy for climate change, accused China of back-pedalling on transparency pledges on domestic emission cuts that were included in the political agreement both parties helped broker in Copenhagen.

Su Wei , China's chief negotiator, said the biggest lesson was the mainland should never cut deals secretly with a small number of countries.

China has been criticise by rich developed nations and many developing countries since Copenhagen over its intransigence over reaching an accord.

Jennifer Morgan, climate and energy programme director at US-based World Resources Institute, said China's stance left her confused.

It appeared to be evading coming to terms with the issues and the difficult questions involved.

The lack of progress in Tianjin was largely a result of a lack of high-level commitment among leading countries to really tackle the problems of climate change in the eight months since Copenhagen, she said.

'They have to be ready to step out of the small tactical issues and into identifying the key choices that need to be made so they can make agreements and be willing to make compromises. We are not seeing that.

'I am also worried that if countries don't find ways of coming together in Cancun to make progress, it will be difficult to have any progress later in South Africa.'

Dessima Williams, a diplomat from Grenada and chairwoman of the alliance of small island states, yesterday urged the US and China to do more as leaders of developed and developing nations because the poorer countries were suffering from climate-change crisis.

'We are calling on those big powerful players to come to the table in a more efficient and urgent manner.'