China, Soviets OK Troop Cuts Along Border

China and the Soviet Union signed a broad accord Tuesday that will greatly reduce the nearly 1 million troops stationed along their 4,500-mile frontier across Asia and gradually lead to its demilitarization.

Other agreements signed on the second day of a four-day visit to Moscow by Chinese Premier Li Peng provide for the substantial expansion of trade and economic cooperation between the two neighbors over the next decade, including the supply of Chinese consumer goods to the Soviet Union in exchange for high technology used in nuclear power and space exploration.

Together, the pacts are intended to become the foundation for a new relationship between China and the Soviet Union, once partners in “building socialism,” then bitter ideological rivals and eventually direct foes in bloody border skirmishes.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Li, meeting in the Kremlin, acknowledged that their countries still differ significantly on a number of issues, including their present political and economic reforms, but agreed that this will not be a barrier to better relations and closer cooperation.

“Certain differences remaining between the sides in their approaches to resolving specific questions are not at all an obstacle for the further development of mutually useful dialogue and cooperation,” the official Soviet news agency Tass said, summing up the talks.

This understanding, in itself, underlies the emerging relationship between Beijing and Moscow, both of which are finding in cooperation the security and opportunities for trade that three decades of hostility had denied them.

Gorbachev and Li agreed that “there do not exist any models and patterns, obligatory to everyone, of how to implement socialist ideas and principles,” Tass said. “Each country has its own history, its own specific features and its initial level of development, and it is impossible not to take this into consideration.”

Gorbachev had advanced normalization of relations with China when he visited Beijing last May during the pro-democracy demonstrations there.

Qian Qichen and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Chinese and Soviet foreign ministers, signed the agreement on troop reductions and confidence-building measures along the frontier, as well as a protocol on regular consultations between their two foreign ministries.

Although no timetables were laid out publicly for the military cutbacks, both Chinese and Soviet diplomats said the two countries want to hasten the withdrawals along most of the frontier.

Moscow, however, is still in the process of withdrawing the 200,000 troops who Gorbachev promised during his Beijing visit would be pulled out unilaterally last year and this. Western diplomats say this will cut Soviet strength by more than a third in the region. Most Soviet troops have also been withdrawn from Mongolia, which lies between the two countries.

Beijing’s reductions are keeping pace, these diplomats said, although it had more troops deployed closer to the border.

The border area had been a flash point when hostility between the two nations was at its height. As ideological differences grew sharper during China’s Cultural Revolution, tensions along the border rose, and Chinese and Soviet troops clashed in heavy hand-to-hand fighting in 1969 in the Far East and in Central Asia. Sporadic but serious incidents continued well into the 1970s.

The new economic agreement seeks to move the two countries well beyond trade, which grew about 20% to $4 billion last year, and it provides extensive cooperation in nuclear energy, power generation, metallurgy, electronics, transport, communications, agriculture, forestry and environmental protection.

In two of the first deals, the Soviet Union will provide China with credits to build a nuclear power station. In return, China will provide the Soviet Union with credits to finance the import of a wide range of consumer goods to ease chronic shortages here. Although Tass provided no details of either deal, the nuclear plant is probably a long-planned project to provide power needed by the industrial centers in northeast China.

Although Li’s visit was the first by a Chinese premier in 25 years, it has remained curiously low-key, attracting little of the international or even domestic attention accorded Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing last May.

One reason is Moscow’s preoccupation with its own internal problems. But another stems from the shock and disappointment here when Chinese authorities used force last June to suppress the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing not long after Gorbachev’s visit and the ouster of Zhao Ziyang, a pragmatic reformer with whom Gorbachev got on very well, as the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary.

Li, who was educated as an engineer in Moscow, has added to this tension, according to well-placed Soviet observers. They cite his criticisms, sometimes quite pointed and public, of Soviet reforms and of Gorbachev’s leadership, accusing the Soviet president of betraying Marxism.

“We want a stable and mature relationship, and we have had to keep cool heads in assessing developments in China and focus on the long term,” a prominent Soviet specialist on Asian affairs said. “We have kept our feelings largely to ourselves, and our conservatives have even developed some sympathy for the Chinese leadership as problems have arisen here.”