Russo-Chinese summit: Leaders' bear hugs without beef

China seems anxious to develop "strategic partnerships" these days, first with the United States during Jiang Zemin's recent visit there, and now with Russia during Boris Yeltsin's just completed visit to China. Jiang and Yeltsin proclaimed a border settlement as a foundation of the new relationship but our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin, in an initial analysis of the Russo-Chinese summit, is skeptical of the substance.

HONG KONG (JP): While Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Russian President Boris Yeltsin did their best to conjure up the image of Russo-Chinese amity, they were not even able to produce the substance for what they proclaimed to be a new "strategic partnership".

There were bear-hugs a-plenty during the Beijing meetings and a flurry of agreements to sign, but no signs of any emerging alliance. The very fact that spokesmen had to deny that there would a return to the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s only served to underline the obvious: there are limits to Sino-Russian togetherness.

Essentially, a clearly reinvigorated Yeltsin took full advantage of a moment in history when the three top Chinese leaders whom he met were all educated in Russia, able to speak Russian -- Jiang himself, Prime Minister Li Peng, and National Peoples Congress chairman Qiao Shi. (Qiao, by being on Yeltsin's visiting list, once again enhanced the mystery surrounding him, by continuing to appear after he was purged from any leading party position at the 15th Party Congress. Chinese TV did not show any Yeltsin bear-hugs of Li or Qiao).

If any moral emerges from the two-day Yeltsin visit to China, it appears to be -- statesmen beware, in the newly-fashionable bear-hug business, Yeltsin is the master. First and last, Yeltsin has an uncanny knack of always getting to the center of the summit bear-hug pictures which immediately circulate across the globe.

Relatively diminutive East Asian leaders are placed at a special disadvantage when confronted with Yeltsin six foot six inch bulk. As with Jiang on Nov. 10, so at the Siberian Summit with Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto earlier in the month, Asian leaders end up looking like supplicants for Yeltsin's favor as they reach up to hug him.

Conversely, while Russia is no longer a full superpower, Yeltsin certainly conjures up the superpower image as be benevolently hugs his way around the diplomatic circuit.

Maybe because of the difficulty of eliminating bear-hugs from the footage, and also because Yeltsin was stealing the show with his spontaneous behavior, the main Chinese nightly news on television on Nov. 11 wrapped up the summit by only showing a still picture of Jiang and Yeltsin, while the off-camera presenter lengthily describing what had happened.

Perhaps the most important immediate conclusion to emerge from the Bear-Hug Summit is that international news agencies were guilty of misreporting when they sent the news around the world that the Russo-Chinese border problem had been "solved", that centuries of wrangling over the territorial demarcation between Russia and China were at an end.

For a start, Yeltsin and Jiang did not sign the treaty which would surely result if the border dispute had been totally concluded. It is understood that such a treaty is several years in the future. Behind closed doors the wrangling will probably continue.

Secondly, the text of the "agreement" on border demarcation signed by the two Presidents on Nov. 10 has not yet been released and may well remain secret. The agreement only covered the eastern sector of the Russo-Chinese border east of Mongolia.

Two areas of continuing disagreement were excluded from the eastern sector. The short 50 kilometers western frontier sector in between China's borders Mongolia and Kazakhstan was also not included. (The Russo-Chinese border, while still some 4300 km in length is, of course, much shorter than the former contentious Sino-Soviet border of over 7,000 km).

Third, it is already known that the border through some "islands" in the riverine sector of the western border along the Amur and Ussuri rivers was not included in Monday's agreement, though there are some hints of future joint use. It was on one of these islands, Damanski in Russian, Chenpao in Chinese, that the two nations fought bitter border battles in 1969.

Fourth, it is almost certain that no agreement has been possible on the complex reality surrounding Bear Island (to give its neutral English language name) lying right across the river from the major Russian city of Khabarovsk. In a nutshell, Bear Island is part of that Russian city. Yet any agreement based on known international principles for riverine borders would put place Bear Island within China.

Hence no doubt the secrecy surrounding what has been agreed, and what has not been agreed. Neither the Chinese side nor the Russian side want to give their respective domestic opponents any hint of the slightest concession over the emotional issue of national sovereignty.

To the contrary, both nations have an interest in conjuring up the illusion of greater border agreement than has probably been achieved. China no doubt hopes that this will put pressure on nations such as India, Vietnam and the Southeast Asian states bordering the South China Sea to be more accommodating in their land or sea border disputes with Beijing.

Russia, on the other hand, will be hoping that the "agreement" will pressure Japan to be as accommodating with the Russians over the Japanese claim to the Northern Territories as China may have been over Ussuri-Amur islands, and Bear Island in particular.

While it is obviously premature to end all thought of Sino- Russian border conflict, the summit did indicate that the two nations wish to play down their continuing differences, in part at least to try and put pressure on the one superpower in the Sino-Russian-American triangle.

In this connection, Chinese diplomats, with their love of sending "messages" through the arrangement of summits and lesser meetings, are no doubt gratified that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot was in Beijing the day after the Yeltsin summit for talks with Chinese counterparts, thereby unwittingly giving the image of the U.S. being worried over the substance of the Russo-Chinese summit.

It does not require a visit by Talbot for the U.S. to recognize that the current degree of Russo-Chinese bonhomie is in everyone's interest, the more so since the overall relationship remains weak.

As they began their rapprochement earlier this decade, Beijing and Moscow set targets for trade growth. These were wildly ambitious and have not been realized. Trade has declined rather than soared. The new aim of US$20 billion worth of trade by the 2000 appears so much wishful thinking.

While there have been several noteworthy sales of Russian weaponry to the Chinese military, no new developments in this field were announced at the summit. In part at least this is probably one more unseen cost of China's bellicosity in the Taiwan Straits in 1995 and 1996, which awakened Russians to the danger of supplying too much of their modern weaponry to a would- be neighboring superpower.

The most striking agreement signed at the summit concerned a US$ 12 billion pipeline deal capable of moving 20 billion cubic metres of natural gas a year from Siberia to China's eastern coast, from where it would also be made available to Japan and South Korea.

But even this planned project did not underline the independence of the Russo-Chinese "strategic partnership". Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng arrived in Japan on Nov. 11 for a six-day visit, during which, among other matters, he will hope to win Japanese financing for the pipeline.