DIPLOMACY / ASIAN DETENTE : Warming Up at Beijing Games : Using the athletic event as a pretext, China and Vietnam are talking about normalizing ties.

Just as a Ping-Pong match two decades ago provided the diplomatic pretext for improved relations between the United States and China, the Asian Games in Beijing appear to have set the seal on improved ties between China and Vietnam.

Vietnam sent its aging hero of two wars against the French and Americans, Deputy Premier Vo Nguyen Giap, to attend the games, which end Sunday. He was the first Vietnamese leader to make an official visit to China in more than a decade. A Vietnamese spokeswoman said it was hoped his visit would contribute to “early normalization of relations between the two countries.”

Equally important, China opened the so-called Friendship Gate at the border between the two countries to receive Giap and Vietnam’s athletes. The gate had been closed except for prisoner exchanges since the two countries fought a brief war in 1979 after Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.

At a banquet in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Gu Mu, vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, told Giap last week, “We want to see that Sino-Vietnamese relations will be gradually improved until they are normalized. This is the wish of the Chinese people.”

The groundwork for Giap’s visit was laid by an unannounced summit meeting between Vietnamese and Chinese Communist party and state leaders, held Sept. 3 at Nanning, China. At a press conference in Hanoi, the government spokeswoman indirectly confirmed that the meeting took place when she said the talks were being kept secret at the request of China.

The ostensible purpose of the private meeting was to resolve the longstanding differences between China and Vietnam over Cambodia, a dispute in which Hanoi supports the regime in Phnom Penh and Beijing supports the Khmer Rouge rebels.

It was only after the secret meeting, for example, that the participants in the Cambodia civil war were coerced into meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, where they agreed on the composition of a Supreme National Council to help guide the country to a peace settlement.

Apart from the Cambodia issue, China and Vietnam have compelling reasons to improve relations. For one, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has left Vietnam and China among only a handful of nations with Communist parties struggling to maintain a monoply on power.

The changes in the Soviet Union confront Vietnam with a financial catastrophe because of reduced assistance, now estimated at $2 billion a year, as well as the ideological difficulty of seeing Moscow, long Vietnam’s political inspiration, tossing Marxism on the rubbish heap. China has been seeking friends in Asia ever since the Tian An Men Square crackdown in June last year led to widespread condemnation of Beijing.

Last August, Chinese Premier Li Peng also indicated for the first time that China is willing to consider the joint development with Vietnam of the Spratly Islands, which both countries have claimed and fought over. (The islands also are claimed by Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines.)

As Radio Vietnam noted in a commentary last week, “There are new developments never seen in the two countries’ relations over the past 10 years.”