Boris Yeltsin tries hard to please G-7 and China

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.