Gorbachev in China : U.S. Sees Benefit in New Communist Detente

Brushing aside the superpower politics of the last 17 years, during which the United States and China built a peculiar friendship on the foundation of mutual hostility for the Soviet Union, the Bush Administration says it welcomes Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing because it promises to ease tensions in Asia and the Pacific.

Washington’s relaxed attitude toward the first full-scale Sino-Soviet summit in almost 30 years is based on a new assessment that antagonism between the Soviet Union and China does more harm than good to U.S. interests, according to a consensus of Administration policy-makers, former U.S. officials and non-government specialists.

Besides, these experts say, the American ability to exploit the Sino-Soviet rivalry has eroded over the years. Even if it wanted to, there is not much the Administration could do to influence the meeting between Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

Force Behind Relationship

“The U.S.-China relationship started on the basis that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ ” a State Department official said. “That was certainly the force behind the relationship in the 1970s and much of the 1980s.”

But now, China and the United States have more common interests than a common enemy, this official said. This is so despite the sharp differences between the two nations on matters such as Chinese suppression of human rights, freedom of expression and individual liberty.

“China does things for us in Asia and will continue to do things for us in Asia,” said the official, who asked not to be named. As examples, he said, China “tacitly supports” U.S. bases in Japan and the Philippines, helps to buttress the security of Thailand and has supplied money and arms to the U.S.-backed moujahedeen guerrillas in Afghanistan.

From its side, China looks to Washington and the West for the technology it needs for its economic modernization program.

Moreover, the official said, China and the Soviet Union are not expected to end their mutual mistrust as the result of a single summit. No one expects a reprise of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s.

“China still perceives that the Soviet Union is the chief long-range threat to its security,” the official said. “That assessment has not changed. One can’t accuse the Chinese of moving with wholesale haste to improve their relations with the Soviet Union at the expense of their American friends. China has been moving slowly because they did not want to frighten the Americans.”

U.S. officials admit that there may be an element of wishful thinking in their assessment, an attempt to put the best possible face on something they cannot change anyway. Only Vice President Dan Quayle has sounded a word of caution, and even his assessment was weighted to emphasize the positive.

“We believe that a lessening of Sino-Soviet tensions is a logical course for both nations to pursue and have no objections to that,” Quayle said in a recent speech, “provided that any new relationship harms neither our own interests nor those of our friends, and that it directly addresses our common security needs.”

Result of U.S. Policy

Michel Oksenberg, a University of Michigan professor who was the White House National Security Council’s chief China expert when the Jimmy Carter Administration established normal diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, said the Sino-Soviet rapprochement resulted from the success of U.S. policy.

Gorbachev’s overture to China, he said, represented a sharp change in Soviet policy “due in no small measure to Sino-American cooperation over the past 10 years.”

Other experts say that Washington’s ability to shape the three-cornered U.S.-Chinese-Soviet relationship will certainly decline as a result of the Gorbachev-Deng summit.

“Obviously, restoration of normal relations between the Soviet Union and China is going to erode the favored U.S. position in the triangle,” a senior Administration official said. “However, it will make it more difficult for any side of the triangle to manipulate the others. Frankly, that’s not a situation that we are uncomfortable with. I think we can live with it.”

Jonathan Pollack, head of the political science department at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, added: “We harbored a lot of illusions about our ability to manipulate relations between the Russians and the Chinese even during the time of Deng Xiaoping’s most violent anti-Soviet rhetoric in the 1970s.

“The Chinese clearly sing a very different song today than they did a few years ago,” Pollack said. “This is because they find Mr. Gorbachev a different breed of cat” from former Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Some experts see Gorbachev’s trip to Beijing as part of a global “charm offensive” by the Soviet leader, which may ultimately challenge Washington’s position around the world.

“Gorbachev thinks in classical 19th-Century balance-of-power terms,” said George Carver, a former deputy director of the CIA. “I think his long-term plan is to isolate us by achieving bilateral ties with all of the people we used to use as a counterweight to Soviet expansion.”

Carver, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, complained that the Bush Administration has failed to devise a long-term strategy to deal with the change in style at the top of the Kremlin.

“The thing that messes us up is a continuing concentration on the short term,” Carver said. “We are sprinters competing with marathon runners in a marathon.”

For Carver and many other experts, both in and out of government, the most significant long-term consequences center on Soviet relations with Japan, not China. But there is no agreement among the specialists over whether Washington should be reassured or alarmed by this prospect.

“The bigger issue is whether Gorbachev’s opening to China gives him any leverage with Japan because Japan is the one major global player that stands apart from the love-in for Gorbachev,” Pollack said. “A Gorbachev overture to Japan might be a cause for concern.”

Oksenberg agreed: “The most important trip Gorbachev will take is still ahead of us. The route to Tokyo is through Beijing.”

But Oksenberg added that a Soviet-Japanese rapprochement might ultimately advance American interests by giving Washington an opening to resume relations with Vietnam.

Focus on Cambodia

“The Russians and the Chinese are dealing with each other over Indochina, and we are peripheral actors,” he said. “I think it is important for us to become more engaged in that equation, but to do that, we would have to spend more money for the reconstruction of Indochina. We don’t have the money for that, so it will have to be done by Japan.”

U.S. officials believe that a major topic of the Gorbachev-Deng meeting will be the situation in Cambodia. Moscow has supported the Vietnamese invasion, while Beijing backs a three-sided rebel coalition--two non-Communist factions supported by the United States plus the murderous Khmer Rouge, blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians when it was in power in the 1970s.

“Cambodia has been an important obstacle to Sino-Soviet relations because they were backing different horses,” one U.S. official said. “It now appears that the Chinese and the Soviets will sit down and agree on a solution for Cambodia.”