China to join axis of evil?

Sanction North Korea? Sanction China?

China, is the "most likely" provider of North Koreas new toys - its new high tech uranium enrichment facility, Bret Stephens in WSJ writes december 7th.

Chinese diplomats will tell you again and again that Chine is a responsible partner and will aim at pacifying the North Korea. The recent documents published by Wikileaks tell a different story. China will not want to see North Korea collapse. As a consequence China secretly protects and supports the regime. An WSJ leader points to a series of revelations:

"An October report by the Congressional Research Service notes that the "seaborne cargo of North Korean arms seized in Dubai in July 2009 had visited several Chinese ports and was transported from Dalian, China, to Shanghai aboard a Chinese ship, again without a Chinese effort to conduct a search. Overland routes for procurement of WMD-related goods are reportedly also common, due to the participation of Chinese entities."


"Resolution 1874, adopted by the U.N. Security Council last year after the North conducted its second nuclear test, forbids the sale of luxury goods to North Korea—goods Kim Jong Il uses to buy off his elites. Yet China exported $136.1 million worth of such goods to North Korea in 2009, including "160 luxury cars (made in China) to directors of provincial committees of the Korean Workers Party and to municipal committee secretaries."


"Why the warm embrace? In one of the most interesting of the leaked cables—a report of a conversation last year between Lee Kuan Yew and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg—Singapore's Minister Mentor suggests an answer. "The Chinese," he said, "do not want North Korea, which China sees as a buffer state, to collapse. [South Korea] would take over in the North and China would face a U.S. presence at its border."

"Mr. Lee is right that Beijing must make hard-headed calculations regarding the North: China cannot escape its shared border, and the effects of the North's collapse would be immediately felt on its side of the Yalu.""

Providing luxury cars, airspace and transit havens is one thing, offering advanced nuclear technology is another.

In another article in WSJ Bret Stephens writes China is behind a number of WMD proliferation cases the last decades and has in stead of contibuting to international stability and safety added to the mounting problems in the Middle East and Asia by helping even the most lunatic regimes to develop WMD production capacity and technology.

Stephens writes about a US top nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker that recently toured the sites in North Korea and came back with fresh and disturbing news:

"Nor was that all. Mr. Hecker also writes that "The control room was astonishingly modern. Unlike the reprocessing facility and reactor control room, which looked like 1950s U.S. or 1980s Soviet instrumentation, this control room would fit into any modern American processing facility."
[...]

North Korea is not the only country being helped on the WMD path by China. Pakistan is one. CIA testified in 1997 that "China was the most significant supplier of WMD-related technology to foreign countries."

"In 2002 came news that Chinese experts had worked on Iran's nuclear facility in Isfahan. That same year, the Washington Times reported that a Chinese company had sold North Korea 20 tons of tributyl phosphate, a key ingredient for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. And thanks to WikiLeaks, we know that China facilitates North Korean weapons exports—over insistent U.S. protests—to sundry foreign destinations.

"It's time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry Sokolski notes, what's the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it's so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.

"This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned—and the North's facilities destroyed."