Beijing Plays Coy with Moscow

...The discernible Chinese strategy is to obtain trade and economic benefits from the Soviet Union without sacrificing political independence...

...The reason for this is that the Deng Xiaoping leadership has no intention of re-establishing the kind of intimate relationship with the USSR that prevailed in the 1950s, when China felt decidedly the subordinate partner...

...Beijing continues to press Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev to have Hanoi withdraw its troops from Cambodia...

...Although these developments undeniably point to a warming of SovietChinese relations, the ever adamant Chinese insist that "normalization" cannot occur until the Soviets remove "three obstacles...

...today it has the United States, Western Europe and Japan—all far more attractive sources for the technology and investments that China needs for economic development...

...And a handful of Russian language teachers have already arrived to help China replenish its now small reservoir of Sovietologists, following a generation of neglect of Soviet studies and Russian...

...A Vietnamese pullout is not imminent, though, and even if it were there would remain the other two obstacles: Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and the large Soviet presence along the USSR-China frontier and in Mongolia, which lies between the two powers...

...Furthermore, the Gorbachev regime has begun domestic reforms every bit as radical in outline as those the Chinese have attempted—as Deng himself has noted...

...It has been unable or unwilling to respond with anything more imaginative than talk of the "three obstacles...

...The main one is the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, as Chinese Prime Minister and acting Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang emphasized during a recent trip to five Eastern European allies of die Soviet Union...

...Some 200 advanced Soviet students are scattered among Chinese universities, chiefly in Beijing...

...In their view, the Chinese use the three obstacles like the control rods in a nuclear reactor, raising or lowering them to excite or calm relations with Moscow...

...Although they do not say so, the Chinese may be moving cautiously out of an awareness that closer relations with Moscow could cause alarm in the United States, Western Europe and Japan...

...A new economic and trade commission also has met twice...

...Faced with these developments, Beijing appears unmoved...

...Senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping has said that once this process actually starts, he would be willing to violate his self-imposed moratorium on foreign travel and meet with Gorbachev anywhere in the Soviet Union...

...Indeed, despite Chinese rhetoric to the contrary, Soviet officials in Beijing and some Western diplomats consider Soviet-Chinese ties to be as normal as they are going to be in the immediate future...

...China and the Soviet Union have been holding talks toward normalization twice a year since 1982, and there was a hint of progress during the 10th and most recent round when the Soviets appeared disposed for the first time to actually discuss the three obstacles...

...EXPLOITING THE THREE OBSTACLES' Beijing Plays Coy with Moscow By Mark Hopkins Beijing Chinese construction workers are crawling all over a lovely 19th-century Victorian mansion along Suzhou creek in Shanghai...

...That prompted an alarmed Mao Zedong to prepare for war with the USSR and to order millions of Chinese to dig—by hand—underground factories and military facilities...

...They were originally launched in 1969, following serious frontier clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops along the Usurri River...

...The Deng leadership refuses to entertain a restoration of ties between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties, effectively severed during the thunderous ideological debates of the early 1960s, even as it renews party relations with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria...

...Even if we eliminated the three obstacles, " commented one Soviet official, "the Chinese would find a fourth...

...Gorbachev, meanwhile, is doing what he can to persuade China that its strategy is obsolete...

...Deng Xiaoping recently remarked to foreign visitors, "Some people say that Chinese-Soviet relations will improve rapidly, but I don't think so...

...In addition, border talks have been resumed for the first time in some 14 years...

...At the sprawling Soviet Embassy in Beijing—the largest the USSR maintains anywhere, with a population of 300 (including resident families and security crews)—the sophisticated Ambassador, Oleg A. Troyanovsky, is cutting a high profile after only a year on the job...

...Beijing's call for a unified Europe—meaning East and West—and its pursuit of its own dealings with Eastern Europe are apparently intended to keep the Soviets slightly off balance...

...Whatever the case, Beijing's aloofness could prove untenable as Gorbachev's policy of establishing greater Soviet influence in the Pacific increasingly puts China on the defensive...

...Or it may be that they are getting most everything they want from the Soviet Union without having to give a political inch...

...In October Deng Xiaoping will preside over this country's 13th Communist Party Congress...

...Shipyards in Shanghai and four other Chinese port cities will soon be repairing Soviet merchant vessels again, too...

...Zhao Ziyang, in an interview with Hungarian television, said: "No substantive progress has been made in the political relations between China and the Soviet Union because there are obstacles to be removed...

...It will thus be necessary for the Deng leadership to demonstrate whether it is ready to match the Gorbachev initiatives...

...In the year since Gorbachev's speech in the Soviet port city of Vladivostok offering to talk with the Chinese anywhere, at any level, about anything, Beijing has played a waiting game...

...In addition, the Soviets are assisting with the modernization of old Chinese factories that they equipped back in the 1950s, those ecstatic years of Moscow-Beijing friendship when Soviet economic and military aid poured into the newly established People's Republic of China...

...Americans will recall that he previously led the USSR's delegation to the United Nations...

...At the same time, he has made numerous conciliatory gestures: He has admitted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake (the Soviet Union's "bleeding wound"), withdrawn a division from Mongolia, indicated a willingness to talk about Cambodia, suggested that Zhao stop in Moscow during his recent trip, and renewed the proposal for a nonaggression pact with China...

...When they finish the renovation now under way a dozen Soviet diplomats will move in to reopen the USSR's Shanghai consulate, closed for more than two decades during the worst years of Soviet-Chinese relations...

...Among the documents to be presented will be a foreign policy statement charting China's international goals for the next five years...

...It put off an exchange of foreign ministers' visits, agreed upon in principle by Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian and his Soviet counterpart Eduard A. Shevardnadze at the United Nations in October 1985, and has been noticeably reserved in public statements...

...Nevertheless, diplomatic channels have been active for some time now...

...He has been entirely agreeable to the idea of Eastern European leaders opening a path to Beijing along which the Soviet Union might one day travel as well...

...American military forces in the Pacific, less concerned about what the United States officially regards as a "friendly" China, are considered by Beijing as a bulwark against the Soviet air, naval and missile detachments in the Far East...

...In those years a newly Communist China had nowhere else to turn for economic and military assistance...

...Mark Hopkins, a specialist in Soviet and Eastern European affairs, has spent the last three years in China...