Beijing support for Korea reunification not so clear, despite leaked cables

Is China really willing to dump its old ally, North Korea? Would Beijing support a German-style reunification of the Korean peninsula in which economic powerhouse South Korea absorbed its wretchedly poor communist neighbor?

These may have been the impressions left by a stash of U.S. diplomatic cables relating to North Korea made public this week by WikiLeaks. But analysts who have followed the long entanglement of China and North Korea say that much of the information in the outed memos amounts to little more than dinner party chatter that reflects outdated opinion or wishful thinking.

“This is opposed to Beijing’s declared position and would go against China’s perceived interests,” said Shi Yinhong of Beijing’s Renmin University, speaking of a leaked cable that suggested China was prepared for the collapse of North Korea and for the country to be reunited under a South Korean-led government in Seoul. “Besides, it is just an American diplomat quoting a South Korean diplomat quoting a Chinese diplomat.”

The reunification discussion was reported in a memo sent by the U.S. ambassador in Seoul, Kathleen Stephens, after a lunch in February 2010 with a senior South Korean official, Chun Yung-woo, who is now national security advisor. He told Stephens, paraphrasing Chinese officials, that the younger generation of the Chinese leadership was fed up with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and ready to “face the new reality” on the peninsula. North Korea “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically two to three years after the death of Kim Jong Il,” Chun was reported to have said in the cable.

Although China would not want a U.S. military presence north of the 38th parallel, which now divides the two Koreas, it could live with a unified Korea under Seoul’s control because its “strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan and South Korea,” according to the cable.

The Chinese government has refused comment on the leaked diplomatic dispatches, among more than 250,000 provided in advance by WikiLeaks to several news outlets. “We don’t want to see any disturbance to China-U.S. relations,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei in a press briefing Tuesday.

The cables involving North Korea and China include a series of unflattering revelations and characterizations.

One of the most intriguing: An unnamed Chinese official complained to an American diplomat about shadowy business deals with North Korea. He said Chinese investors were buying mineral rights in North Korea that had provided the cash for the construction of 100,000 new apartments in Pyongyang and implied that the so-called “princelings” — the children of high-ranking Chinese officials — were enriching themselves in North Korea.

“The children of high-ranking North Korean and Chinese officials hijack the most favorable investment and aid deals for their own enrichment. When the child of a high-ranking official hears of a Chinese aid proposal to North Korea, he will travel to North Korea to convince the relevant official to follow his instructions.... At each step, money changes hands, and the well-connected Chinese go-between pockets a tidy sum,” said an excerpt of a cable published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, one of five media organizations to receive the documents in advance.

The WikiLeaks revelations could actually prove more embarrassing to Seoul than to Beijing. In South Korea, it is taboo for officials to speak openly about Kim’s personal life or the possibility of North Korean collapse for fear of inflaming Pyongyang, but in private — or, as it turns out, in conversation they think is private — officials have felt free to let loose. In February, Kim Sung-hwan, then national security advisor and now foreign minister, told Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell that there were “credible reports of unrest in the North” and that North Korean police had “recently found a bomb on a passenger train en route from Pyongyang to Beijing.”

The South Korean presidential office in Seoul on Tuesday issued a terse statement saying “our government has not considered North Korea’s regime change or made it a policy.”

To some extent, the North Korea files are a case study in the inner workings of diplomacy, replete with rumor and derogatory comments (an “arrogant Marx-spouting former Red Guard” says South Korea’s Chun of top Chinese negoiator Wu Dawei) that had not been made public, in large part because they hadn’t been substantiated or simply weren’t ready for prime time.

“A lot of this is dinner party conversation,” said Scott Snyder, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who has studied Korean-Chinese relations for years. As for the conduct of the U.S. diplomats whose musings came to light, he says: “I came away with the impression they were pretty much doing the job they are supposed to do.”

“The leaks show you how sausage is made, but they don’t really teach you anything new about U.S. foreign policy,” Snyder said.

Throughout the diplomatic traffic, Chinese officials repeatedly implore their U.S. counterparts to negotiate directly with North Korea to prevent the expansion of its nuclear program — something China has said publicly for some years as well.

In April of last year, shortly after North Korea launched a multistage rocket that Western officials feared was a test of Pyongyang’s ability to deliver a nuclear warhead, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told the charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that North Korea was behaving like a “spoiled child,” trying to get the attention of the United States.

Analysts said that the more derogatory comments were probably made by Foreign Ministry officials, who are less hard-line — and wield less power — than the officials from the Communist Party’s International Liaison Department who actually control China’s North Korea policy.

“These are likely from the people who are pro-Western and pro-South Korea,” said Chung Young-chul, a professor at Sogang University’s Graduate School of Public Policy in Seoul.

Moreover, Chung notes that some of the conversations described in the diplomatic cables took place in early 2009, during a period of high frustration with Pyongyang. Later in the year, he said, there was a major discussion about North Korea’s strategic importance at high levels of the Chinese government that resulted in a tilt toward propping up Pyongyang.

In the first seven months of this year, Chinese exports to North Korea rose nearly 30%, according to Chinese customs statistics. The reclusive Kim Jong Il has made two trips to China in 2010, receiving lavish red carpet welcomes, and in October, Chinese Politburo member Zhou Yongkang had a front row seat at a military parade where Kim’s son and designated successor made his public debut.

Two senior North Koreans — Kim Yong Il of the ruling Workers’ Party and Cho Tae Bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly — arrived Tuesday in Beijing in response to China’s call for talks over the crisis that resulted from the artillery attack last week on a South Korean island in which four people were killed.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that the U.S. continues to press its argument that China needs to rein in North Korea.

“And I think you’ll see progress on multilateral discussions around this over the next few days,” he said.

The United States, Japan and South Korea have been resisting China’s proposals for a resumption of multinational talks over North Korea, saying such discussions would be pointless unless North Korea provided concrete assurances that it was willing to make concessions.

Among other revelations about China to emerge from the cables: Diplomats complained that Beijing was failing to stop the export of North Korean missiles to Iran through China’s territory. And an unnamed Chinese source told a diplomat that China’s Politiburo was behind a cyberattack on Google.

Since Monday, the WikiLeaks website and many news articles about it have been blocked on the Internet in China.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and Ethan Kim in The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.