Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Wednesday the situation in Syria had reached a crucial stage but a political solution was the only way to end the bloodshed.

Yang was speaking during talks with UN-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who expressed hope China would play "an active role" in efforts to end the crisis.

"A political resolution is the only pragmatic option in Syria," Yang was quoted by the state Xinhua news agency as saying.

China is generally suspicious of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations and has repeatedly called for mediation on Syria.

Both China and Russia have exercised their veto in the UN Security Council to block resolutions aimed at putting more pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Yang acknowledged that the situation was worsening, saying it was now at "a crucial stage".

"The international community should spare no efforts to collaborate with and support diplomatic mediation, while enhancing humanitarian assistance to Syria," the minister added.

Yang had met the Syrian president's envoy in August and an opposition delegation the next month, both times stressing the need for dialogue, according to the foreign ministry's website.

He warned the opposition about outside forces directing any political transition, while he told the president's envoy that both sides in the conflict should work with international mediation efforts.

Analysts say China's hesitancy in supporting further action in Syria may stem from its discomfort with Western-led military intervention after last year's uprising in Libya, which eventually led to the fall of leader Moamer Kadhafi.

China opposed military action in Libya but did not veto a March 2011 Security Council resolution authorising the operation. Yet it believes the West misinterpreted the resolution and went too far.

Michael Stephens, a Royal United Services Institute analyst based in Qatar, said China has eased its backing of Assad during the course of the conflict.

"There was a more overt support for Assad which has now changed to trying to find a solution," he said. "They've condemned violence on both sides and as a result... it doesn't allow them leverage on either side."

Brahimi, who succeeded former United Nations chief Kofi Annan after he quit over what he called a lack of international support, is due to present new proposals for resolving the Syria conflict to the UN Security Council next month.

His two-day visit to China, which ends Wednesday, came after he met Russia's foreign minister in Moscow on Monday and described the conflict, now in its 19th month after a failed four-day truce last week, as going from bad to worse.

Brahimi had hoped the truce, timed for the Muslim Eid Al-Adha holiday, might lead to a longer ceasefire and a political solution to a conflict that rights groups say has claimed 35,000 lives.

"I have said it and it bears repeating again and again that the Syrian crisis is very, very dangerous, the situation is bad and getting worse," he said in Moscow. "If that is not civil war, I do not know what is."

A Syrian fighter jet on Tuesday dropped bombs inside the capital Damascus for the first time since the conflict began, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, in an escalation from helicopter gunships.

The military also renewed shelling of the northern city and province of Aleppo and other parts of the country.