Boris Yeltsin tries hard to please G-7 and China

While Russian and Chinese leaders undoubtedly hoped to put pressure on the U.S. and other industrialized countries through their display of summit amity in Beijing, beneath the surface things were not that simple. Boris Yeltsin was aiming to please both the G-7 and China, as well as improve his electoral prospects. The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin suggests that China was also concerned with sustaining its nuclear ambitions.

HONG KONG (JP): At the Sino-Russian summit in Beijing, Russian President Boris Yeltsin awarded himself a victory, which his Chinese hosts did not deny, but it seems highly unlikely that Yeltsin was able to fulfill a delicate mission for the Group of Seven industrialized countries and secure Chinese agreement to a total nuclear test ban.

During the summit, Yeltsin had talks with his counterpart President Jiang Zemin, Prime Minister Li Peng and the chairman of the National People's Congress Qiao Shi. The difficult task facing Yeltsin in Beijing was to persuade the top Chinese leaders to agree to a toughly-worded Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

This task devolved on him as a result of the decision taken by the just-concluded nuclear safety summit in Moscow to support the so-called Australian formula for a truly comprehensive test ban.

The nuclear summit was attended by the Group of Seven countries -- the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan -- as well as Russia and the Ukraine. The Australian formula for the CTBT is a strict ban on all nuclear tests without exception, even tests with zero-yield.

Earlier some countries at the CTBT negotiation in Geneva had suggested that very small test explosions should still be allowed, but by defining explosions as zero-yield and above, the Australian formula makes the test ban absolute.

Until now, the Chinese have held out for continued "small" nuclear test explosions for "peaceful purposes".

At the Moscow summit, all nine nations agreed that, in President Clinton's words, a strict CTBT zero-yield formula --- effectively 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, now or in the immediate future, to give the world that kind of certainty, remains very much in doubt, even though Beijing now knows that all the major powers favor an absolute test ban, and are extremely unlikely to accept to China's previous preference for continued small explosions.

One Chinese argument has been that having started later than the other nuclear powers, it needed more time and tests to develop its weapons. In fact, by some counts, China has already conducted more tests than the British, while remaining far behind Russia, the U.S. and France. The British, of course, have had the advantage of being able to share data from U.S. nuclear test results.

China has also indicated that it will continue testing until the CTBT Treaty is fully ratified and comes into effect -- rather than ending tests when it signs the treaty.

Another worry for the Chinese could be that they do not, as yet, have the means to undertake nuclear tests merely through computer simulation.

Certainly no evidence emerged at the summit that there had been any substantive change in the Chinese position. The Foreign Ministry official spokesman Shen Guofang took the precaution of stating that Chinese policy had not changed while Yeltsin was still on his way from Moscow, thereby avoiding any nuclear interference with the carefully calculated summit image of Russo- Chinese harmony.

"We believe nuclear explosions are one of the ways mankind makes peaceful use of nuclear energy," Shen said, in reaction to the Moscow summit, adding "We believe that the door to nuclear explosions should not be closed, at least for now."

After Yeltsin's relatively brief summit exchanges with Jiang Zemin, (far shorter than his meeting with Clinton in Moscow), Yeltsin, with typical braggadocio, claimed he had won a significant advance in nuclear diplomacy: "We agreed that China will join a decision at the eight-party summit on nuclear safety in Moscow to hold talks and reach an agreement on the complete end to nuclear tests this year."

It was a deft use of words stressing that China's official position has always been that it wants a CTBT by the end of 1996, -- and concealing the fact that a complete test ban is not the same as an absolute ban, as agreed in Moscow.

In an equally resourceful verbal display, Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen went as far as he could to back Yeltsin up: "Our consistent position is that we hope for an early conclusion to the test ban treaty, but it would not be in the interests of all if the treaty, once signed, was later discovered to contain loopholes."

This concealed the fact that a "loophole", for China, could be the complete exclusion of all "small" and "peaceful" nuclear tests, as under the Australian formula. Asked after the summit if China still followed the policy indicated in his statement two days earlier that "the door to nuclear testing should not be closed," Shen declined to say so.

"All I can say is that both China and Russia hope for an early conclusion," he said.

Theoretically, the refusal to repeat could mean Chinese acceptance of the Australian formula, but it seems far more likely that the refusal means the Chinese position favoring continued tests has not changed.

In the current hard-line debate within the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin could not dare to be seen giving in to Russian and G-7 nuclear entreaties. The fact that Yeltsin used a speech to 100 communist cadres in the Diaoyutai State Guest-house to say that communists in Russia were his biggest headache, and would cause a civil war if returned to power, could only have strengthened this Chinese inclination.

All told, the nuclear diplomacy at the summit thus symbolized the Sino-Russian get-together as a whole -- long on image, short on substance.

Yeltsin tried hard to please both the G-7 nations and China, while China did its best to please Yeltsin. But China's fundamental, and potentially obstructive position, vis-a-vis the CTBT, almost certainly did not budge.

This being so, it is ironically relevant to wonder if underlying and unchanging Russo-Chinese rivalry could affect the degree that Yeltsin himself budged on the CTBT issue, when negotiating with the G-7 nations in Moscow.

Yeltsin's acceptance of the absolute ban on nuclear tests was conditional on the CTBT remaining consistent with Russian interests. With one eye firmly fixed on nationalist rivals in the presidential election, Yeltsin made it clear that Russia reserved the right to resume nuclear tests and to leave a future CTBT treaty if Russia's supreme interests were threatened.

One obvious way in which the Russian military would demand such a resumption of testing would be if China's continued nuclear testing was seen to be neither small nor peaceful.