Promises to Keep

It has been 30 years since the leaders of China and the Soviet Union last met face to face, 20 years since the armies of the two Communist giants skirmished along their far eastern frontier, a decade since China underscored the reorientation of its policies by establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States and nearly seven years since Moscow and Beijing first began to talk about resuming normal ties. With Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to China and the official exchange of cordial words that accompanied it this week, that long-gestating process has come to fruition.

There was a time, just after the success of the Communist revolution in China, when both countries were content to describe their relationship as one between “big brother and little brother.” Now they agree that they are equals, with neither claiming ideological authority over the other and both explicitly accepting that there can be diverse paths to the same political goals.

This is quite a change from the bitter, incendiary, often baffling and frequently ludicrous war of words that was waged for more than a decade, into the early 1970s, over the question of whether the Soviet or the Chinese Communist Party was the true custodian of the Marxist-Leninist heritage and the purest defender of the faith. Now the Soviet leader feels free to acknowledge in Beijing that Marx and Lenin didn’t have all the answers after all, that many modern problems unforeseen in communism’s sacred texts require new thinking and adaptation. Once, not so long ago, such words uttered in either capital would have been denounced in the other as heresy. Now, in both Moscow and Beijing, they are calmly accepted and endorsed as an example of pragmatic reformism.

The normalization of Sino-Soviet relations has been achieved for the simple reason that both countries concluded it is in their mutual interests to get along better politically, to broaden their trade and cultural contacts, to reduce the military confrontation along their 4,500-mile border. This does not mean that all disagreements have been resolved; there is still no common ground on the political future of Cambodia while a deep awareness remains of often bitter national rivalries going back 800 years. But detente has nonetheless been negotiated. The United States along with the nations of Asia have no reason not to welcome this non-threatening event.

What also can be welcomed--though its results remain very iffy--are the passionate student-led demonstrations that took place in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square on behalf of greater freedom and the rule of law and were aptly timed coincide with Gorbachev’s visit. Deeply embarrassing to the regime, the demonstrations have elicited somewhat vague promises of faster and more extensive political reforms, as well as the remarkable and even poignant comment from Premier Li Peng, in a conversation with Gorbachev, that “we don’t think that freedom, democracy and human rights are a monopoly of the capitalist countries,” that people living under socialism also are entitled to enjoy these blessings. Not so long ago those words too would have been regarded as heretical. Now they are acceptable. The real test is whether they will be acted upon soon.