Warming Sino-Soviet Ties Stir U.S. Concerns : 2 Giant Nations Could Redirect Military Power or Deal More With Each Other at West’s Expense

During the 1950s, when China and the Soviet Union were linked in a formal alliance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called on the United States to launch an international crusade against what he called “monolithic, atheistic communism.”

Now, in a vastly changed world and after nearly three decades of enmity, China and the Soviet Union are about to normalize their relations once again--and U.S. policy-makers and scholars are beginning to worry about what this profound change will mean for American foreign policy.

Questions of Policy

Will the two huge nations redirect their military might away from each other and toward other areas such as Southeast Asia and Japan? Will they find that their separate efforts to reform their Communist economic and political systems propel them toward increased dealings with one another at the expense of the West?

In its official statements on the rapprochement, the United States has been maintaining the appearance of cool equanimity. “We think the relaxation of tensions between the Soviet Union and China would be healthy for world peace and stability,” Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci said during a trip to Beijing last September.

But U.S. experts admit that these public remarks are, to some extent, a pose.

“We don’t want to be seen as standing in their way, and we couldn’t stop them anyway,” one U.S. official said.

“The more nervous and frightened we seem about this, the more leverage we give to China and the Soviet Union,” added Harry Harding, a scholar on Asian affairs for the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In fact, American officials are not alarmed in the same way that Dulles was in the 1950s. Nonetheless, they acknowledge that the restoration of relations between China and the Soviet Union will raise some new concerns for the United States.

2 Likely to Meet

If all goes according to plan, U.S. officials say, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who direct the world’s two largest Communist parties and the world’s two largest standing armies, probably will meet next spring in Beijing.

A Reagan Administration official warned in a recent interview that the United States does not want to see China and the Soviet Union develop military contacts or forge extensive ties between their Communist parties.

“I’m not alarmed by the pace of events so far, but I’m cautious enough to make sure our interests aren’t being harmed,” this official said in an interview. “. . . So far, our interests have not been hurt. They’ve kept us in the loop.”

American scholars foresee two possible long-range dangers for the United States.

The first, which might be called the “freed troops” theory, holds that China and the Soviet Union, no longer forced to direct huge amounts of military power toward one another, might be tempted to devote these resources elsewhere--China toward Southeast Asia, for example, or the Soviet Union toward Japan.

“This frees the Chinese to look at all of Asia, to be much more involved,” Thomas W. Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute said. “And where the Russians have been fixated upon China within Asia, now they don’t have to do that anymore. A post-rapprochement Soviet Union will have greater military resources that could be directed against Japan and against U.S. forces in Japan.”

The second worry is of what might be called the “new convergence” between China and the Soviet Union. Scholars say it is at least conceivable that as their domestic reform programs unfold, China and the Soviet Union may at some point decide that they have much more in common with one another than either of them has with the West.

Economic Reform

In China, the Communist Party leadership has been forced recently to slow the market-oriented economic reforms that it began a decade ago and that the Soviet Union is only now beginning to imitate. Meanwhile, Gorbachev has gone further than the Chinese in carrying out political reforms.

“There may be some in China who will ask, ‘Where has the West gotten us?’ ” Harding said. “They may say: ‘Sure, we have gotten some technology, some capital. But the West doesn’t provide any economic model for us. The West doesn’t have any experience in problems such as the lifting of price controls.’ ”

The concern about redeployed Soviet and Chinese troops is the more urgent. According to U.S. estimates, the Soviet Union has about 50 divisions with about half a million troops in Soviet Asia near the Chinese border. Until the mid-1960s, by contrast, the Soviet army maintained no more than 16 divisions positioned near China.

The Soviets also maintain four divisions with about 60,000 troops in Mongolia, a Soviet ally. These troops are of special concern to China because they are within easy striking distance of Beijing and because they are in a position to cut off Chinese forces in Manchuria from the remainder of the country.

During a speech to the United Nations on Dec. 7, Gorbachev pledged to remove “a major portion” of the Soviet troops in Mongolia. He also promised, as part of an overall reduction of 500,000 in Soviet troop strength, to “reduce significantly” the number of troops in Soviet Asia. However, Gorbachev did not say exactly how many troops would be withdrawn from the divisions along the Chinese border.

Some U.S. experts say that fears about the future of the Soviet troops in Asia--and of the forces in China’s 3.5-million-member People’s Liberation Army that have been arrayed against them--are exaggerated. One U.S. official denounced what he called “the manipulative, pessimistic school of history that it’s best for us to tie up lots of troops on the Sino-Soviet border.”

“It’s extremely expensive to relocate divisions,” this U.S. official said. “It’s never seemed to me that we’re going to see a major redeployment of Soviet forces. That’s not going to solve Gorbachev’s problems. He’s trying to lower military overhead in an economy that is floundering.”

Similarly, other U.S. experts minimize the danger of a “new convergence” between China and the Soviet Union.

Need for Technology

“The need of both the Soviet Union and China is for commodities and technologies that are in the possession of Japan, the United States and Western Europe,” said University of Michigan Prof. Michel Oksenberg, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security aide for China. “I refer to telecommunications, computers and other high-technology material.”

For the last several years, as they have moved slowly but steadily to upgrade their ties with the Soviet Union, Chinese officials have sought repeatedly to reassure the United States that under no circumstances will the two huge countries return to the alliance of the 1950s.

In fact, history has shown that alliance to have been a shaky one. China was never happy being treated as a weak and dependent younger brother. Chairman Mao Tse-tung had a sometimes testy relationship with Soviet leader Josef Stalin and downright icy dealings with Nikita S. Khrushchev.

The split began in the late 1950s. Mao was pursuing the radical economic policies of China’s Great Leap Forward at a time when Khrushchev was criticizing Stalin. Mao also distrusted Khrushchev’s efforts to ease tensions with the United States.

“Mao . . . found himself more in tune with the Stalin of 1929 than the Khrushchev of 1959,” wrote Donald W. Treadgold, a historian at the University of Washington. By 1969 there were serious border clashes between China and the Soviet Union, and in the United States, the Richard M. Nixon Administration began moving to normalize ties with China.

Normalize Relations

U.S. experts say the current moves by China and the Soviet Union to normalize relations date back about six years. With China and the United States at odds over the Reagan Administration’s early support for Taiwan, then-Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev made overtures to Beijing. China, seemingly embarrassed by Third World criticisms of its close ties to the United States, announced that it would pursue an “independent” foreign policy.

At about the same time, after George P. Shultz replaced Alexander M. Haig Jr. as secretary of state, senior Reagan Administration officials concluded that the United States was putting too much emphasis on its ties with China. “We’d sort of skewed our policy towards China, rather than Japan,” explained a Reagan Administration official.

In his very first speech as the Soviet leader in 1985, Gorbachev said he planned to give a high priority to restoring Sino-Soviet relations. Still, only one year ago, when Gorbachev publicly suggested the possibility of a summit with Deng, the Chinese leader quickly rebuffed him.

U.S. experts say the rapid improvement in ties between the Soviet Union and the United States helped Deng change his mind. “We are moving with the Soviets, and so there’s no reason the Chinese shouldn’t,” one American official said.

American officials say that in the short term, at least, the countries with the most to lose from the normalization between China and the Soviet Union are those that have been receiving Soviet support.

“The real losers in this process are Vietnam and North Korea,” a senior State Department official said.

“The Soviets are beginning to concede a sphere of influence to China within Southeast Asia,” observed a Reagan Administration official.

Possible changes such as these are what cause American experts to worry about the impact of a summit between Gorbachev and Deng.

“I guess our government position is that we welcome this,” the Brookings Institution’s Harding said. “I think that goes a little too far.”