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North Korea dispatched one of Kim Jong Il’s top aides to Beijing the same day as leaked U.S. diplomatic dispatches showed China is increasingly willing to consider a unification of Korea under the South’s control.

Choe Thae Bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, left for Beijing today for talks with Chinese leaders, state-run Korea Central News Agency reported. Choe met China’s President Hu Jintao in the Chinese capital on Oct. 2 and accompanied Kim on a trip to the city in May, according to KCNA.

Choe’s visit comes after China proposed on Nov. 28 that negotiators from the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the U.S. meet in Beijing early next month to defuse tensions following a Nov. 23 North Korean artillery attack on a South Korean island that killed four people. A U.S. Navy aircraft carrier is now conducting exercises in the Yellow Sea off the Korean coast.

Japan rejected the Chinese proposal yesterday. Talks can’t be held only because North Korea has “run amok,” Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. Nicholas Snyder, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, said “clear steps by North Korea are needed to demonstrate a change of behavior.” South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it would consider China’s call for talks “very cautiously.”

China is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and a source of much of the country’s food, fuel, and foreign currency. The two countries have been allies for 60 years since fighting together against U.S.-led forces during the 1950-53 Korean War. The two countries share a 1,415-kilometer (880 mile) border.

Unreliable

A leaked Feb. 22 diplomatic cable provided to the Guardian by WikiLeaks.org said that South Korea’s then-vice foreign minister, Chun Yung Woo, told U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens that young Chinese Communist party leaders don’t think North Korea is a reliable ally. Chun also said two unidentified Chinese officials told him they believed Korea should be unified under the South.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday said the Obama administration “strongly condemns” the unauthorized release of more than 250,000 diplomatic documents that WikiLeaks began posting two days ago. State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said she “can’t provide veracity of anything WikiLeaks has released to the media,” adding the agency’s policy is to refrain from commenting on specific leaked materials.

China hopes the U.S. will “properly handle” the situation caused by the leaked messages, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters in Beijing today.

South Korea’s foreign ministry spokesman Kim Young Sun said it would be “inappropriate to comment on other countries’ diplomatic documents.

‘Regrettable’

‘‘If it is true that details of diplomatic discussions have been leaked, it is regrettable,’’ Kim said.

The U.S. is pressing China to censure North Korea for the shelling of Yeonpyeong island. China has avoided blaming its ally of 60 years, instead criticizing joint naval exercises by South Korea and the U.S. in the Yellow Sea that began Nov. 28.

Chun, now South Korea’s national security adviser, told Stephens that China ‘‘has much less influence than most people believe’’ over Kim Jong Il’s regime, according to the Feb. 22 cable cited in the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper.

Chinese officials told U.S. diplomats that their efforts to cajole North Korea had been rebuffed, and that the U.S. was the only country with real influence, according to a leaked June 17, 2009, cable. “The United States was the key while China was only in a position to apply a little oil to the lock,” the cable cited an unidentified Chinese official as saying.

‘Spoiled Child’

A separate message from Beijing said China’s vice-foreign minister He Yafei in April 2009 told an American diplomat that North Korea’s missile tests were designed to get the attention of the U.S. and that the government in Pyongyang was acting ‘‘like a spoiled child.” Two months later, U.S. Ambassador to Kazakhstan Richard Hoagland sent a cable saying his Chinese counterpart, Cheng Guoping, told him North Korea was a “threat to the whole world’s security,” the Guardian said.

The cables all predate a surge in diplomatic activity between China and North Korea this year.

Kim made an unprecedented two visits to China this year, meeting with President Hu Jintao on both occasions. In October, Zhou Yongkang, a member of China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee, stood next to Kim during a Pyongyang military parade. Later that month, top Chinese general Guo Boxiong visited North Korea, marking the two countries’ “victory” over “imperialist” U.S.-led forces during the 1950-53 Korean war.

China also refrained from criticizing or blaming North Korea over the March sinking of a South Korean warship. An international panel found evidence that a North Korean torpedo was responsible for the sinking, which killed 46 sailors.

WikiLeaks.org, a nonprofit group that releases information that governments and businesses want to keep confidential, has over the past two days posted on its website what it says are secret, confidential or in some cases unclassified U.S. embassy cables.