Sino-Soviet Summit to Turn Page to New Era : Gorbachev’s Meetings This Week in Beijing Will End Intense Rivalry, Have Global Impact

Thirty years of intense rivalry between the world’s two great Communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, will come to an end when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev meets with Deng Xiaoping and China’s other top leaders here this week for a historic summit whose impact will be felt worldwide.

Gorbachev, who arrives here Monday for the first Sino-Soviet summit meeting since 1959, is coming to open a new relationship between China and the Soviet Union--one that ends the hostility that nearly led to war between the two countries in the late 1960s but also one that does not re-create the old Communist alliance that so frightened the West in the 1950s.

Virtual War Footing

The four-day summit, both Chinese and Soviet officials say, will bring to an end the long, acrimonious quarrel over who has been truer to Marxist-Leninist ideals and move the two neighbors away from the confrontation that had both virtually on a war footing for many years.

The angry denunciations of each other as the main threat to world peace have already given way to cooperation on a growing number of international issues, to rapidly expanding trade and development projects and to warmer bilateral relations than have been seen in a generation.

Although the summit agenda includes several difficult issues, notably their disputed 4,500-mile border through Central Asia and the Far East and the continuing conflict in Cambodia, both sides have said that they expect the talks to place their relationship on what they call “a good neighborly” basis as well as to open the way for extensive economic cooperation.

As Deng, China’s senior leader, put it earlier this year, the summit will “look toward the future without arguing over the issues of the past.”

And Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, commented in Moscow last week that the Soviet Union expected that “normal, good neighborly relations will develop with China and will be beneficial not just to our two countries but also to the entire international community.”

So great a factor has the Sino-Soviet rivalry been over the past three decades that the summit meeting, the result of more than six years of difficult negotiations between Beijing and Moscow, seems certain to rank in international impact with President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972.

“This trip goes beyond its immediate, practical consequences, and it goes beyond symbolism as well,” Prof. Vladimir S. Myasnikov, deputy director of the Soviet Institute of Far Eastern Studies and one of his country’s leading specialists on China, said in a Moscow interview. “Given the hostility that has existed between us, this trip is historic, truly world-historic in character.”

The Sino-Soviet rivalry, rooted deeply in ideological disputes of a bygone era as well as in problems that have festered between the two countries for centuries, became a major element in the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, between East and West, in the Asian-Pacific region and in the Third World, even as far away as southern Africa.

Triangular Geopolitics

The two countries’ rapprochement will bring an end to the triangular geopolitics through which the United States for more than a decade balanced its confrontational and often tense relationship with the Soviet Union through the counterweight of closer ties with China, placing Beijing under the protective U.S. nuclear umbrella and making it a virtual ally of the West for a time.

The Beijing-Moscow rivalry, once so sharp that it divided the whole Communist movement and much of the Third World, will be removed from the continuing strife in Cambodia and Afghanistan and from other international disputes where it had long been a complicating factor.

Improved relations, moreover, will allow China, the world’s most populous nation, and the Soviet Union, the largest, to shift more of their resources to economic development, their overriding priority today.

Both countries are already reducing the costly defenses they built in the 1960s and 1970s out of fear of a calamitous war along their border, and they are discussing the possibility of a step-by-step demilitarization of that long frontier.

“What is happening is of extraordinary importance for us and for China,” Roy A. Medvedev, a prominent Soviet historian who was recently rehabilitated by the Communist Party after 20 years as a dissident, said of the improvement in Sino-Soviet relations. “It is certainly a new era in Soviet development and a new era in socialism, and it will have a worldwide impact because of the impact that the conflict had worldwide. . . .

“This conflict has cost us both greatly,” Medvedev continued. “We interrupted economic relations, though they were complementary and quite beneficial to both of us. In the Soviet Union, we had this huge army--more than 100 divisions, if you included reserve and support troops--along the border, and in China they had even more. And through our ideological rigidity, upholding the rectitude of our position, we heavily distorted our political and economic development.”

The two countries’ rapprochement, based on a degree of mutual respect that was not present before, should also greatly strengthen reformist trends in socialist countries, which are now closely watching the Soviet Union’s determined push for greater democracy and China’s experiments with market socialism.

Pacific Influence

“This summit is important not only to our two countries, but it will influence the Pacific region and the whole world,” Zhao Dalun, deputy director of the Institute for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the Chinese People’s University, commented in an interview here. “And not only will relations of the two countries be normalized, but also, it goes without saying, the relations between the two (Communist) parties.”

Already, both Chinese and Soviet officials see political changes under way in Asia as a result of their improved relations. The Cambodian conflict is being pushed toward a solution, China and India are on friendlier terms, as are India and Pakistan, and South Korea is winning recognition from socialist countries.

The Soviet Union, which is determined to play a major role in Asia in coming decades, sees better relations with China as a basic requirement for its acceptance in the region, and it plans to make its next diplomatic push on improving relations with Japan, with which it has a serious territorial dispute.

Foreign Policy Diversity

These shifts, particularly those by Moscow, are “a very important historical change from a bipolar world to a multipolar one,” Wang Yizhou, an associate professor at China’s Institute of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Tse-tung Thought, said in an interview here, arguing that with the end of their long confrontation, both will now be able to have greater diversity in their foreign policies.

Alexander I. Bovin, one of the Soviet Union’s top political commentators, said that the importance of the summit--Gorbachev will meet not only with Deng, China’s senior leader, but also with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party’s general secretary, Premier Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun--will lie in “simply talking civilly, candidly and in a comradely way to each other . . . after 30 years of cursing back and forth.”

“We don’t need anything concrete, no agreements, no pieces of paper,” Bovin said in a Moscow interview. “We have to learn how to talk, how to talk with each other as comrades, how to come and go without a big deal, how to live as good neighbors, helping each other. We need to develop a feel for one another as neighbors, as socialist countries, as great powers.

‘Not Frighten Others’

“But we have to do all this in a way that we do not frighten others, particularly in the United States, Japan or Europe, and make them think we are plotting a campaign to spread world revolution. . . . That we no longer are treating each other as enemies does not make us allies like we were in the 1950s.”

The enormity of the political, economic and ideological shifts that lie behind the summit amaze even specialists on Sino-Soviet relations who have seen the rapprochement slowly growing for almost a decade.

“Huge, dramatic changes are occurring now in both countries, and these domestic developments virtually dictated the normalization of relations,” Lev Delyusin, a leading China scholar at the Soviet Institute of Oriental Studies, said in an interview in Moscow. “Both of us now are more pragmatic, both of us have stopped thinking that we are going to reach communism tomorrow, both of us realize that Marx and Lenin did not leave us a blueprint for building socialism and both of us are trying to work out down-to-earth policies that produce results and that make people’s lives better.”

Such a realization, first in China and more recently in the Soviet Union, removed the ideological basis for the dispute, which began in 1956 when Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the Soviet leader, denounced the crimes and personality cult of his predecessor, dictator Josef Stalin.

Chairman Mao, who shared many of Stalin’s ideas and who was beginning to develop his own personality cult, objected to Khrushchev’s assessment, arguing that Stalin’s achievements far outweighed any political errors.

‘Very Hostile Move’

“Mao took the dethroning of Stalin as a very hostile move,” Medvedev, who as a historian has specialized in Stalinism and in the politics of Soviet leadership, said in an interview in Moscow. “Mao also saw himself, not Khrushchev, as Stalin’s true heir and the leader of the world Communist movement. For him, Khrushchev was not an authority at all.”

Mao and Khrushchev also quarreled in 1959 over Moscow’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. Mao feared that this would prevent Beijing’s recovering of Taiwan, which was held, then as now, by the Chinese Nationalists.

Moscow had already rejected a 1958 plan, disclosed recently by retired Soviet President Andrei A. Gromyko, the country’s longtime foreign minister, to lure the United States into an attack on the Chinese mainland so that Soviet nuclear weapons could be used against the American troops. Khrushchev then abrogated a Soviet commitment to provide China with the technology and expertise needed to develop its own nuclear weapons.

“The dispute over nuclear weapons brought all the political and ideological differences into the open,” Medvedev recalled. “The distrust intensified. We saw the Chinese as very dangerous and likely to get us into a nuclear conflict. They saw us as renegades to the revolution and people who did not honor commitments. The stage was set for a conflict that continued for 30 years.”

Khrushchev and Mao also feuded personally. “Khrushchev, who had both a temper and a loose tongue, called Mao things like ‘old galoshes’ and other things that are too earthy to repeat, and Mao told people he found Khrushchev stupid and half-literate,” Medvedev said. “Each knew that the other would hear.”

Chinese specialists, however, trace the conflict back even further to relations between Czarist Russia and the Chinese empire in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries when, in Beijing’s view, large tracts of territory, hundreds of thousands of square miles in Siberia, Central Asia and the Soviet Far East, were taken from it and incorporated into what is now the Soviet Union.

The refusal of Soviet leaders to acknowledge what China regards as a theft of territory that might have been used for its huge population has meant, according to Chinese specialists, that Sino-Soviet relations were never on a firm basis, even during the 1950s when Moscow was providing billions of dollars worth of economic and military assistance to Beijing.

“They should recognize that Czarist Russia invaded China and imposed unequal treaties,” Zhao said, stressing that Beijing is not demanding the return of the territory but wants Moscow to admit the czarist sins. “This is history. It should be acknowledged.”

We are not seeking to make the present Soviet leaders take responsibility for this. The historical question should not be an obstacle to good relations.”

Although some progress has been made in recent negotiations on resolving disputed points along the border, Moscow remains unwilling to acknowledge that much of what today is the Soviet Union was stolen from China. “They say they don’t want it back today,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry official commented in Moscow. “But what about tomorrow? What will their sons or grandsons say, particularly as the need for land becomes more acute with their growing population?”

Subsurface Tensions

Relations appeared good during the 1950s, but there were still tensions beneath the surface, according to Zhao. The Soviet Union provided a vast amount of economic and technical assistance, building 250 major factories and other projects, at a time when China was isolated by an American-led Western boycott and Moscow itself was still engaged in postwar reconstruction. “We spoke of ‘elder brother and younger brother,’ ” Zhao recalled, “but actually it was father and son.”

Many Injustices

Delyusin, a former Soviet party official with 40 years’ experience in Sino-Soviet relations, said that Stalin “committed a lot of injustices in relations with China, and Khrushchev tried to rectify them,” but Mao and Khrushchev clashed so often and so angrily that “we could not resolve a single problem.”

China made two serious mistakes in its relations with the Soviet Union at that time, Zhao said, reflecting current thinking here. The first was allying itself too closely with Moscow in the Cold War struggle between communism and capitalism; the second was rejecting Khrushchev’s reformist approach and perpetuating the Stalinist errors in Maoist doctrine.

‘Leaning to One Side’

“Chinese leaders carried out a policy of leaning to one side,” Zhao said. “At the time, we felt we had no choice. But my own view is that this ‘lean-to-one-side’ policy had many weak points and caused China to lose opportunities with other parts of the world.”

Zhao, as do today’s Soviet leaders, sees Khrushchev as “a great reformer,” not the ideological and political opponent that Mao took him for. Had his famous “secret speech” to the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 denouncing Stalin been assessed properly, Zhao contended, China and the Soviet Union might have avoided the hostility of the past 30 years--and China might have been spared the upheaval of its 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Relations Became Worse

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Sino-Soviet relations became even worse, Zhao said, and for 20 years “we were in a state of total confrontation.”

However complex its origins, the Sino-Soviet conflict grew “to the point where we were on the edge of war,” Zhao said, recalling the military buildup along the long frontier and the increasingly fierce border clashes.

Leonid I. Brezhnev, from the time he assumed the Soviet leadership, was afraid of a war with China, according to Medvedev, who noted that the Chinese hostility, in addition to the West’s arms buildup, increased Soviet fears of isolation, containment and even “a two-front war.” “For him, China was the ‘yellow peril,’ ” Zhao said, “and he even told Nixon, ‘We white people need to unite against the Chinese.’ ”

China, for its part, engaged in small military actions along the border, including the bloody clash on Damansky Island on the Manchurian-Siberian border in 1969, that kept tensions high.

‘Totally Unpredictable’

“Under Mao in the 1960s and early 1970s, China was totally unpredictable,” recalled a senior Asian diplomat who alternated between Beijing and Moscow most of those years. “He would put millions and millions of people into the street, all of them in a screaming rage, and his lieutenants in the provinces would do the same. He was also building shelters and storing grain and making physical preparations for war. . . .

“Many times, there were hundreds of thousands, maybe even several million, Red Guards, all whipped into ideological fanaticism, very close to the (Soviet) border. And, seriously, what was Moscow supposed to do if they started to pour across? How do you contain 2 or 3 million people? That thought contributed a lot to the Soviet hysteria of the era.”

In his famous “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” dissident Russian novelist Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was exiled in 1974, warned that a war with China would last 10 to 15 years, that it would cost the Soviet Union at least 60 million dead and that afterward the Soviet people would virtually cease to exist as a nation.

Preemptive Strike Studied

In the late 1960s, the Soviet general staff drew up plans, although more as a feasibility study than a proposal, according to accounts of both former government officials still in Moscow and some defectors now in the West, for a preemptive nuclear strike against China’s own nuclear forces, missile bases, weapons facilities, laboratories and test ranges.

Soviet diplomats in Washington sounded out the Nixon Administration in 1969, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger recalls in his memoirs, and they were told emphatically of U.S. opposition to such an action.

“A preemptive strike was a military option, and apparently it was discussed,” Medvedev said. “Even aside from political morality, it was a bad option. This was not the ultimate solution to the so-called ‘Chinese threat,’ for it would not have defeated China. The Chinese would simply have gone underground. War with China was too dangerous because of its colossal size.”

The Soviet Union, seeking a way out of this “two-front” confrontation, made its first rapprochement overtures to China in the late 1970s, following Mao’s death, and renewed them more strongly after Brezhnev’s death in 1982.

“We always thought, through the darkest days, that China would have to correct the Maoist line and normalize relations,” China expert Myasnikov said. “By the end of 1978, when China adopted its modernization program under Deng Xiaoping, it was clear that they could not think about China becoming a modern economic power while remaining on a war footing. . . .

“About five years later, the Chinese leadership acknowledged as incorrect the concept of the ‘inevitability of war.’ . . . That was the basis for the progress we now see in Sino-Soviet relations.”

Until then, they held to the position that war with the Soviet Union, or ‘social imperialism,’ as they referred to us, was inevitable and had to be fought and won.”

When Gorbachev assumed the Soviet leadership four years ago, he made the improvement of relations with China a foreign policy priority, and Deng responded with an encouraging letter that he sent to Gorbachev with Romanian President Nicolae Ceaucescu. Progress had been slow, Deng told Ceaucescu in October, “but it is happening.”

China had set tough conditions for the “normalization” of relations, including the restoration of party-to-party ties. Moscow had to reduce the military forces deployed along their border and in Mongolia, a Soviet ally between the two countries; it had to end its support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, and it had to withdraw its own troops from Afghanistan, which also borders on China.

Beijing’s conditions have largely been met during the prolonged negotiations that led to the summit.

Withdrew From Afghanistan

Soviet troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan in February. Of the unilateral 10%, 500,000-member reduction in the Soviet armed forces that Gorbachev announced in December, 200,000 are being cut from the deployments along the Chinese border, and on Monday, the first units of Soviet troops based in Mongolia will leave as part of troop withdrawal there.

Cambodia remains the most difficult question, both sides acknowledge, but Vietnam has now promised to pull its remaining 50,000 troops out of the country by the end of September. China and the Cambodian resistance, however, have expressed skepticism whether Vietnam will really fulfill this pledge.

“We are pushing hard for a fair resolution of the issue,” a senior Soviet diplomat remarked in Moscow, asking not to be quoted by name, “but as the Chinese should know better than us, the Vietnamese can be very, very difficult people, particularly when they do not see themselves gaining much from the deal. . . . But this problem, too, will be resolved.”

For both Beijing and Moscow, the negotiations themselves have been an important part of the healing process.

“They started with the ‘three obstacles,’ but gradually they became the ‘three difficulties,’ then the ‘three conditions,’ and now they are the ‘three questions,’ ” China scholar Delyusin said. “And all the time that we talked about and around these, we have proceeded with expanding trade, resuming exchanges and contacts of all sorts and engaging in the broadest range of political dialogue . . .

“We had a lot of stupid things in our propaganda that blinded us,” he continued. “We started from the basis that hostility was inevitable and eternal, and we were even concerned about the possibility of a Chinese military attack. There was some matching stupidity in China, as well, and although the negotiations were long and often quite difficult, it was good to move carefully and not rush ahead or paper over differences.”

Parks reported from Moscow and Holley from Beijing.