Chinese leaders are said to have grown increasingly frustrated with their North Korean allies China ‘would allow unified Korea’
Chinese leaders are said to have grown increasingly frustrated with their North Korean allies Senior Chinese officials have said the Korean peninsula should be reunified under Seoul’s control, according to leaked classified US diplomatic cables.
They are said to have told an ex-South Korean minister China placed little value on the North as a buffer state.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei meanwhile allegedly said Pyongyang was behaving like a “spoiled child”.
The US says the disclosures by the Wikileaks website are an attack on the international community.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that every country had to be able to have honest, private dialogue with other countries about issues of common concern.
But she said she was confident that partnerships the current US administration had worked hard to build, would withstand this challenge.
The US was taking aggressive steps against those who “stole” the information, Mrs Clinton added.
The whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks, and the newspapers which have published the cables say they have done so in the public interest.
“[China] would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance’”
US Ambassador Kathleen Stephens Diplomatic cable, February 2010Media response to revelationsIs Wikileaks right to release secret documents?US embassy cables: The background
One document published on Monday relays a discussion over an official lunch in February 2010 between former South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo and the US ambassador to Seoul, Kathleen Stephens.
The minister is said to have revealed that a new, younger generation of Chinese leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally, and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula.
Mr Chun confidently had predicted that North Korea “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically two to three years after the death of Kim Jong-il”, despite his efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Ms Stephens wrote.
“Describing a generational difference in Chinese attitudes toward North Korea, Chun claimed [name redacted] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [Republic of Korea] control,” she added.
Mr Chun said the Chinese officials “were ready to ‘face the new reality’ that the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state – a view that since North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People’s Republic of China] leaders.”
“Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly ‘not welcome’ any US military presence north of the DMZ [Demilitarised Zone],” the ambassador’s message said.
“The PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance’ – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China,” it added.
Analysis
This latest batch of cables appears to provide an insight into China’s thinking about its North Korean ally. That this comes at a time of renewed tensions on the Korean peninsula in the wake of the North’s shelling of a South Korean island makes this even more interesting.
The key cable dates back to February. In it, the then South Korean vice foreign minister tells the Americans that the Chinese are fed up with the North Korean regime’s behaviour and would not oppose Korean re-unification.
This is all fascinating stuff but seasoned Korea-watchers caution that this is a very “South Korean” view of the policy debate in Beijing. Other cables though do deal with direct Chinese-US conversations. In April 2009, after North Korea fired a missile over Japanese territory a Chinese official referred to North Korea as “a spoiled child”.
So there does indeed seem to be growing frustration with Pyongyang in at least some circles in Beijing. And that’s useful to know at a moment like this. China is the key player in this crisis. Only it can broker some kind of talks with Pyongyang. But is this South Korean assessment – as reported to Washington – an accurate reflection of Beijing’s current thinking? The answer to that is we simply do not know.
Another cable reveals that China’s Vice Foreign Minister, He Yafei, told the US charge d’affaires in Beijing that North Korea was behaving like a “spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.
Mr He said Pyongyang “wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a ‘spoiled child’ in order to get the attention of the ‘adult'”, the diplomat wrote.
“China therefore encouraged the United States, ‘after some time’, to start to re-engage the DPRK,” he added.
A second dispatch from September 2009 said Mr He had downplayed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s trip to Pyongyang, telling the US Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg: “We may not like them… [but] they are a neighbour.”
He said the Mr Wen would push for denuclearisation and a return to talks.
A few months later, the Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan is alleged to have described North Korea’s nuclear programme as “a threat to the whole world’s security”.
A cable from the US embassy in Seoul in January 2009 cited officials as claiming that Chinese President Hu Jintao deliberately “pretended not to hear” his South Korean counterpart, Lee Myung-bak, when he asked whether China had thought about the North Korean domestic political situation and whether Beijing had any contingency plans.
The communications between the US State Department and its embassies and consulates around the world were sent between 1966 and 2010.
WikileaksWebsite with a reputation for publishing sensitive materialRun by Julian Assange, an Australian with a background in computer network hackingReleased 90,000 secret US records of US military incidents about the war in Afghanistan and 400,000 similar documents on IraqAlso posted video showing US helicopter killing 12 people – including two journalists – in Baghdad in 2007Other controversial postings include screenshots of the e-mail inbox and address book of US vice-presidential candidate Sarah PalinReaction to Wikileaks revelations What is Wikileaks? Where the cables came from Cable leak: Startling or damaging?
Among the other revelations is a report that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, among other Arab leaders, urged the US to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Other concerns aired in the cables include the possibility of Pakistani nuclear material falling into the wrong hands, allowing militants to make an atomic weapon. The widespread use of computer hacking by China is also reported.
Wikileaks has so far posted only some of the 200 of the 251,287 messages it says it has obtained. However, all of the messages have been made available to five publications, including the New York Times and the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
No-one has been charged with passing them to Wikileaks, but suspicion has fallen on US Army Private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak of a classified video.
The cables release is the third mass Wikileaks release of classified document; it published 77,000 secret US files on the Afghan conflict in July, and 400,000 documents about the Iraq war in October.
Wikileaks argues the release of the documents has shed light on the wars, including allegations of torture and reports that suggest 15,000 additional civilian deaths happened in Iraq.
Ecuador has reportedly offered Wikileaks founder Julian Assange residency in the country.
“We are ready to give him residence in Ecuador, with no problems and no conditions,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas.
He praised people like Mr Assange “who are constantly investigating and trying to get light out of the dark corners of information”.
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