The United States asked China in 2007 to stop a shipment of ballistic missile parts going from North Korea to Iran through Beijing and indicated that the U.S. government was fed up with China’s unwillingness to crack down on such trade, according to reports Sunday based on U.S. diplomatic cables.
Another cable highlighted U.S. concern this year that Chinese firms were supplying North Korea with precursors for chemical weapons – in what would be a violation of U.N. sanctions.
A third cable, quoting an unidentified Chinese contact interviewed in January, claimed that China’s Politburo ordered Chinese hackers to break into Google’s computer systems last year as part of a massive effort by Chinese state-backed saboteurs to infiltrate the e-mail accounts and databases of political dissidents and foreign governments.
The cables were among more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic missives released Sunday by Wikileaks. Details of their contents were first reported in the New York Times and the British newspaper the Guardian among other outlets.
