‘Already Know Everybody in Town’ : Kremlin’s Envoys Selling New Soviet Look in China

Soviet diplomats Viatcheslav F. Lukjanchuk and Valery I. Biryukov began working in Shanghai four months ago. Like many other newly arrived foreigners here, they are obliged for the moment to operate out of local hotel rooms.

But later this year, they and 10 other Soviet diplomats will move into one of the choicest pieces of real estate in all of Shanghai--the old Soviet consulate along the Bund, or waterfront, of the Huangpu River. The building, constructed in 1914 under Czar Nicholas II, was closed 25 years ago and has been used ever since as a seamen’s club. Now, it will serve once again as the base of Soviet operations in China’s largest city, the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party.

In a sense, Lukjanchuk and Biryukov are traveling salesmen for a product--the Soviet Union--that for a time had a corner on the China market but that later fell into disfavor. Their sales pitch, the same one used by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is simple: The Soviet Union has changed and China should take another look.

“The Chinese and the Soviets are at the same stage of construction,” Lukjanchuk said in a recent interview. “They have a great number of similarities in their internal life. We both are socialist countries.”

“I believe that China and the Soviet Union have passed that period of their childhood when there were arguments about who was the leader of the socialist movement,” Biryukov added. “We have grown up. Both of our countries can concentrate on economic development. We understand their problems.”

No other country has been permitted to open a consulate along the Bund, and the return of the Soviet diplomats has raised some eyebrows here.

“They’ve been here for three months now, and they already know everybody in town,” one European diplomat in Shanghai said.

The reopening of the consulate in Shanghai demonstrates the rapid change in Sino-Soviet relations over the last three years.

At the high levels of diplomacy and Communist Party leadership, China and the Soviet Union, once such bitter enemies that they fought a series of bloody border skirmishes in 1969, have been moving slowly and warily towards a rapprochement.

Policy Objections

China continues to object strongly to several aspects of Soviet foreign policy, particularly that country’s support for Vietnam, its invasion of Afghanistan and its stationing of troops along Chinese borders. Although the Chinese Communist Party has moved to restore relations with its counterparts in Eastern Europe, it has held back from re-establishing party-to-party links with the Soviet party.

The truly rapid development in Sino-Soviet relations can be seen at the grass-roots level--in trade, cultural exchanges, technological cooperation and an easing of tensions along the two countries’ 4,000-mile-long border.

Last year, trade between China and the Soviet Union jumped by more than a third to $2.6 billion. The Soviet Union is now China’s fifth largest trading partner, behind Japan, Hong Kong, the United States and West Germany. Sino-Soviet trade is now seven times greater than it was in 1982.

Sea Trade Up

Much of the trade is conducted by rail across the land borders. But more and more of it is coming by sea from the Soviet Far East into Shanghai, China’s largest port. According to Lukjanchuk, last year Soviet ships made an average of two calls a month to Shanghai; in January and February of this year, 60 Soviet ships made port calls here.

A festival of 19 Soviet movies was just held in Beijing, and the films are now being shown here. Western diplomats say the number of courses in Russian at Chinese universities has increased markedly. With the help of satellites, the Soviets are importing new Soviet television programming into China, too.

All these efforts are aimed at bringing about what the Soviet Union hopes will be a dramatic upgrading of its relations with China, an upgrading that would greatly help the Soviet Union’s strategic and military position in Asia.

Gorbachev’s Offer

In his very first speech after taking office in 1985, Gorbachev placed stress on improving relations with China. Last July, in a far-reaching address in Vladivostok, he offered China a territorial concession in the border dispute along the Amur River, a reduction in Soviet forces in Mongolia along the Soviet border and general talks aimed at reducing Soviet and Chinese ground forces.

The Chinese reaction to Gorbachev’s initiative has been ambivalent. On the one hand, Chinese officials continue to mistrust Soviet objectives; on the other hand, they are interested in the overtures and are watching them carefully.

“My own opinion about Soviet foreign policy is that up to now, they have made only tactical, not strategic changes,” said one Chinese official involved in foreign policy planning, who declined to speak on the record. “But within China now, there are some people saying that strategic changes have taken place in Soviet foreign policy.”

Comparison Made

Chinese officials are especially interested in Gorbachev’s domestic reforms. They often try to compare his drive to revive the Soviet economy and overhaul the bureaucracy with China’s own economic liberalization efforts since 1978.

“In the past, we used to learn a lot from the Soviet Union. This time, in their economic reform, they have learned a lot from China,” said Song Tingming, head of the research bureau for China’s state commission on economic reform.

Now, those who advocate change in China and the Soviet Union are studying each other’s policies. Song said that Chinese officials, who have been trying to draft a new law that may define the role of the Communist Party in state-owned enterprises, are looking carefully at a new enterprise law proposed in the Soviet Union earlier this year.

Advantage Sought

Economically, the Soviet Union is hoping to take advantage of China’s trade problems with the West and Japan.

When China first opened its doors to the outside world eight years ago, it was eager to buy the most advanced technology available anywhere in the world and often spent huge sums to import it.

Now China faces a severe shortage of foreign exchange. Furthermore, it has sometimes found that the highest levels of technology are often hard to operate and service in China. Trade with the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe may not provide the most advanced technology, but it is conducted in barter and therefore requires no spending of hard currency.

“Beijing has realized that the Soviet Union can supply perfectly adequate industrial equipment in exchange for silk ties and bamboo shoots,” Ta Kung Pao, a pro-Communist newspaper in Hong Kong, observed a few weeks ago.

‘Heavy-Duty’ Cars

The new Soviet diplomats in Shanghai press the theme that the Soviet economy and Soviet products are more suitable for a developing country such as China than advanced products from the West.

“The Chinese buy a lot of Soviet cars, like Volgas,” Biryukov said. “They find them suitable for local conditions, because the roads are not so developed. The cars are not luxury cars, but they are sort of heavy-duty.”

Asked whether he could envision a time when Soviet cars might be assembled in China, as are such Western cars as Jeeps, Volkswagens and Peugeots, Viatcheslav replied: “This is not any more in the realm of science fiction.”

Most of all, the new Soviet courtship of China is based on the premise that the two countries should simply forget the era of enmity of the 1960s and 1970s.

‘China’s Internal Problems’

“They (the Chinese) know that there is no plan for the Soviet Union to capture China, and there never has been,” Lukjanchuk said. “Anti-Sovietism here was caused by China’s internal problems.”

(In fact, according to the memoirs of former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger, in 1969 the Soviet Union sounded out U.S. officials about their reaction to a Soviet nuclear strike against China. U.S. officials let it be known that they would not remain passive in the face of such an action. A similar account is provided in a book by a Soviet defector, former U.N. Under Secretary Arkady Shevchenko.)

The Soviets officially opened their Shanghai consulate last December, at the same time that China reopened a consulate in Leningrad. It is located in temporary quarters near the Shanghai airport.

Interviews Granted

By all appearances, it will be a high-profile operation. In the current era of glasnost , or openness, as Gorbachev calls his policy, the Soviet diplomats grant on-the-record interviews and sponsor cultural exhibitions. Soviet Consul General Felix Strok, who worked in the Soviet consulate here in the 1950s, recently held his first press conference for journalists.

Meanwhile, workmen are restoring the old consulate. The building is in the heart of downtown Shanghai, alongside the spot where the Suzhou Creek runs into the Huangpu.

Neither the U.S. nor British government was permitted to move back into the consulates they occupied in Shanghai before the Communist takeover of China in 1949. But when the Soviets vacated their consulate in 1962, they kept the lease to the building. Last year, they persuaded China to let them move back into their old quarters.

Difference in Properties

“We understand that some other governments are jealous,” Lukjanchuk said. “But the Chinese have an answer. They say that you have to understand the difference between the properties of socialist states and those of capitalist states, which were nationalized in 1949.”

The Soviet consulate has endured all of the twists and turns of 20th-Century Chinese history.

It was closed from 1927 to 1934, at a time of friction between Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and the Soviet Union. After reopening for four years, it was closed again from 1939 to 1945 by the occupation forces of Japan.

At the height of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the early 1950s, it was one of nine Soviet consulates in China. The Shanghai consulate provided a base from which the Soviet Union helped to supervise the Chinese economy and took up roughly half of China’s foreign trade.

Soviet officials hope that the old consulate will be restored and in operation this summer, or at least by Nov. 7, in time for their celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

“This time, we hope it will be open for 10,000 years,” Biryukov said.