There are several flaws in what would otherwise have been a momentous shift in Chinese policy. The Chinese Foreign Ministry is not a major centre of power in Beijing. Its minister is not even a member of the Politburo. The mid-level diplomat whose indiscretions so warmed the hearts of those seeking the Pyongyang regime's doom is paid to do just that: to tell Westerners what they most want to hear. He even played to fellow feeling by regaling his US audience with colourful tales about Kim Jong-il's drinking habits. Seoul speculation about the imminent demise of the Pyongyang regime is scarcely newsworthy either. 

North Korea is a vital buffer for the Chinese to counter the heavy US regional presence in Japan and South Korea. That is why 40 per cent of its foreign aid goes there, as well as 50,000 tonnes of oil per month. The idea that Beijing might use this aid to rein in Pyongyang is a Western illusion, since Chinese policy is posited on absolute respect for individual state sovereignty in which human rights play no role. Instead, Beijing takes an entirely instrumental view of Pyongyang's dangerous incalculability, which serves to distract US attention from Taiwan, just as, in reverse, Eisenhower's skilful bluff of involving Taiwan in the Korean War forced the Chinese to the negotiating table in 1953. China uses North Korea's periodic bouts of insanity to gain leverage on other issues by advocating multilateral attempts to defuse each crisis, talks which promise more than they deliver in curbing North Korea's nuclear aspirations, which is why the US refuses to get involved. 

The Chinese have also blocked access to Wikileaks for a further reason. They will not have appreciated revelations that North Korea shipped ballistic missile components to Tehran via Beijing, and especially the intelligence that Chinese officials, and their ambitious offspring, used bribes to acquire personal stakes in mineral mining operations in North Korea. This raises a wider concern. 

China is destined to be an enormously important global power in the near future. However, having abandoned its role as chief patron to national liberation movements, all it espouses as a guiding principle is ruthless defence of its access to food, oil and raw materials needed to cushion its burgeoning middle class, the indispensable precondition for continued Communist Party rule, allied with an entirely amoral pragmatism towards the external effects of the internal affairs of allies. In that sense, China will be different from the two evangelising superpowers of the 20th-century Cold War.