In an apparent change of its approach to China, the administration of President Barack Obama has privately started accusing Beijing of "enabling" North Korea to start a uranium enrichment program and to launch attacks on South Korea, The Washington Post reported late Sunday.
Citing an unnamed senior US official, the newspaper said that Washington is moving to redefine its relationship with South Korea and Japan, potentially creating an anti-China bloc in Northeast Asia.
The report came as South Korea's military began a major live-fire exercise amid high tensions following North Korea's deadly bombardment of a border island last month.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff said the firing exercises by warships or land artillery units had started in 29 locations, including off one of five frontline islands near the disputed Yellow Sea border with the North.
The North on November 23 killed two civilians and two marines and destroyed 29 homes in an artillery attack on Yeonpyeong island, sending regional tensions soaring.
It said it was retaliating for a South Korean artillery drill which had lobbed some shells into waters it claims as its territory.
In recent meetings with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing and in Washington, US officials said that China was turning a blind eye to North Korean violations of UN Security Council resolutions, international agreements and a 1953 armistice halting the Korean War that China helped to negotiate, the report noted.
"The Chinese embrace of North Korea in the last eight months has served to convince North Korea that China has its back and has encouraged it to behave with impunity," the paper quoted a senior administration official as saying. "We think the Chinese have been enabling North Korea."
The US exasperation with China over the Korean peninsula has been evident since June, when President Obama accused China of "willful blindness" in remaining silent over North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship in March, The Post noted.
But the administration's position now that China is in effect partially to blame for the problems is new, the report said.
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