China would accept a unified Korea, WikiLeaks

North Korea's closest ally China doubts its own influence over Kim Jong-Il's regime and would support the peninsula's reunification if it collapses, leaked US documents said Monday. 

Reuters

The Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan revealed that Beijing considers North Korea's nuclear programme to be "very troublesome", according to a memo obtained by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

Ambassador Cheng Guoping "said China hopes for peaceful reunification in the long term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short term".

In another cable, a Chinese official whose name was removed said that Beijing believed North Korea had "gone too far" after carrying out its second nuclear test and firing a missile.

The official told a US diplomat "that Chinese officials had expressed Chinese displeasure to North Korean counterparts and had pressed [North Korea] to return to the negotiation table […] unfortunately those protests had had no effect," it said.

WikiLeaks has outraged the US government with its massive release of sensitive data. The memos became public a week after North Korea shelled a South Korean border island, killing four people and sending tensions soaring.

Many US experts believe that China wants to preserve the status quo on North Korea, fearing that a collapse would trigger a flood of refugees and bring a united and US-allied Korea to its border.

But senior South Korean official Chun Yung-Woo is quoted in a cable as saying that more "sophisticated" Chinese officials have come to believe that North Korea "has little value to China as a buffer state" since its first nuclear test in 2006.

Chun also said that South Korea believed that North Korea "had already collapsed economically" and would "collapse politically" two to three years after [President Kim Jong Il] dies”.

The leaks come as two top North Korean officials arrived in Beijing for talks on Tuesday as tensions on the Korean peninsula continued to rise.