Boris Yeltsin to boost Sino-Russian ties at summit

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): Soviet President Boris Yeltsin, fresh from his summit with U.S. President Bill Clinton, arrived in Beijing Wednesday for the third Sino-Russian summit in three years.

En route Yeltsin stopped over for some electoral campaigning in the Russian far eastern city of Khabarovsk, from where he was quoted as saying that there are no real problems between China and Russia.

It is most unlikely that Yeltsin believes this -- but he has to get re-elected. It is also most unlikely that the Chinese believe the adulatory coverage that has been ordered to appear in China's controlled newspapers in advance of Yeltsin's arrival.

While numerous agreements will be signed during the bilateral summit in Beijing, and a subsequent pentagonal summit in Shanghai, the result of Yeltsin's three-day trip is likely to be a further tactical improvement in Russo-Chinese ties rather than any major step towards a strategic alliance.

This summit should have taken place about six months ago, soon after Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States in the autumn, but it was postponed because of Yeltsin's health, and his lengthy stay in hospital due to heart problems.

So, while last year Jiang would have briefly conveyed the image of being able to speak to the two other sides of the Sino- American-Russian diplomatic triangle, today it is Yeltsin who is better able to communicate that image. Clearly, at the moment Russia has better ties with the U.S. and with China, than Washington and Beijing have with each other.

On the one hand, Yeltsin comes to Beijing from the nine-nation nuclear summit in Moscow (the Group of Seven plus Russia and Ukraine) together with his bilateral meetings with Clinton and other world leaders.

On the other hand, as Clinton flew from Tokyo to Moscow last week he ostentatiously avoided China, not even using Chinese airspace on the Tokyo-Moscow flight of Air Force One. While visiting Beijing is evidently no longer considered a boon in U.S. presidential election campaigns, for Yeltsin all the summitry is evidently a windfall, as he pursues his come-from-far-behind re- election bid with gusto.

But with resurgent Russian nationalists becoming a major factor in the presidential election, and with border agreements already arousing controversy in the Russian far east (as reported in the Jakarta Post on April 23) Yeltsin will also have to tread warily.

Likewise, Jiang Zemin will probably be less forthcoming with his Russian guest on his re-election prospects than were the Group of Seven leaders in Moscow, lest he open himself to charges of hurting the chances of the currently front-running communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov. In the current hardline atmosphere within the Chinese Communist Party, a communist president and restoration in Russia would obviously be preferred.

Beneath his external bonhomie, Yeltsin has almost certainly not forgotten that when he was standing on a tank trying to put down an attempted coup in Moscow, China was busy recognizing the coup-makers.

Behind the contrary personal and political attitudes, the summit will illustrate a very basic shared interest which brings Russia and China closer together: Russia needs export markets for its arms production, while the Chinese military needs to upgrade its technology via Russian weapons imports.

So far, the best visible example of this tendency has been the sale of two squadrons of SU-27 jet fighters to the Chinese, or roughly 50 aircraft. The sale of the last 24 of these jets will probably be confirmed at the summit. A further contract under which an early model of the SU-27 will be produced in larger numbers within China itself will almost certainly be signed, too.

But even here the limits of rapprochement quickly become visible. China would like to manufacture more advanced models, while the Russian military is wary of giving China too big a lift up the technology ladder. There may be another deal on submarines but, again, the Russians are likely to go on selling the relatively old and slow "Kilo" diesel class of patrol submarines.

The border agreements due to be finalized at the summit will be watched carefully -- if their full texts are released -- for indications of just how much of the Sino-Russian border has been demarcated, and how much of the border remains too problematical for easy resolution.

The former Sino-Soviet border has now become a five-way border between China and Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The leaders of these five nations will meet in Shanghai on Friday for a pentagonal summit which will conclude with the signing of a treaty guaranteeing peace along their mutual borders.

In substance if not in name it will be a non-aggression pact, since the treaty evidently stipulates that none of the five will attack the other. It is also said to prohibit threatening exercises from being conducted against each other.

One difficult task facing Yeltsin in Beijing will be to persuade the Chinese to agree to a toughly-worded Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This task devolved on him as a result of the decision taken by the nuclear summit in Moscow to support the so-called Australian wording for the comprehensive test ban.

The Australian formula is for a strict zero-yield ban on all nuclear tests. The Chinese continue to hold out for continued nuclear tests for peaceful purposes.

At the Moscow summit all nine nations agreed that, in President Clinton's words, a strict zero-yield formula --- allowing only nuclear testing by computer simulation --- "is the only kind of treaty that can give the people of the world the certainty that they really are seeing the end of the nuclear age of the big weapons".

At the Moscow summit, Clinton suggested, and the other nations endorsed the idea, that Yeltsin take up the issue directly with the Chinese leaders and try to bring them around to accepting the zero-yield formula. At his joint press conference with Clinton in Moscow, Yeltsin indicated his acceptance. "All agreed that this year we have got to sign the treaty on banning testing in any size of test forever and forever," Yeltsin said, "We are going to do a little work, especially with China".

Whether the Chinese will want to give the world that certainty, or to give Yeltsin credit for a significant advance in nuclear diplomacy, remains to be seen.