Kremlin’s Coup Likely to Return ‘China Card’ to Diplomatic Play

The ouster of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev brings hard-line Chinese leaders a windfall both in domestic politics and international diplomacy. But it also carries potential risks.

The Soviet coup is likely to make it more difficult for the reformist wing of the Chinese Communist Party to launch any renewed push for political relaxation, foreign analysts and Chinese intellectuals in Beijing say. The Moscow events may also influence Western nations to treat China with renewed importance as a key geopolitical player on the world scene, leading to a lessening of international pressure on Beijing to improve its human rights record.

But should the coup falter and the Soviet Union slip further into instability, the political repercussions could be felt on China’s borders and in the capital itself.

“These developments will be used as proof that reform movements must be controlled,” Marshall Goldman, associate director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, said Tuesday.

“The China card is coming out of the deck again, and the U.S. is going to want to use that card because of uncertainties over the future role of the Soviet Union and relations between the two countries,” added Goldman, who is now visiting Beijing. “I think we’re going to want China’s support, and we can’t take them for granted any more. . . . The United States will be a little less assertive about what it thinks China should or should not do.”

When Chinese leaders ordered the army to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that engulfed Beijing in the summer of 1989, they defended their action on the grounds that the protests had threatened to plunge China into chaos.

Gorbachev took a different path, seeking to promote political reform before carrying out fundamental economic reform. China’s leaders have insisted for more than a decade that economic reform should come first, with the Communist Party retaining dictatorial powers.

“Beijing has to be feeling a sense of ‘We told you so. Chaos has to be stopped,’ ” Richard Baum, a UCLA professor of political science specializing in China, said in a telephone interview. “I think the Chinese must be getting some comfort out of what is going on.”

Beijing officially has remained neutral about the Soviet events. But unlike many Western nations, it quickly indicated full acceptance of the coup leaders as the new Soviet government.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry statement declared that “the changes that have occurred in the Soviet Union are its internal affairs.” It added: “Sino-Soviet relations based on the principles of peaceful coexistence, equality and mutual benefit and good-neighborliness and friendship will continue to enjoy unimpeded growth.”

While Western governments Tuesday offered moral support to democratic elements in the Soviet Union resisting the coup, Beijing welcomed Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Belonogov to China. A Soviet Embassy spokesman said the talks had been scheduled before the coup and that they would focus on the Middle East. Still, they gave Moscow and Beijing direct high-level contact only one day after the Moscow hard-liners made their move.

“If the coup holds . . . this will bring China and the Soviet Union closer into line again in their domestic policies, and should bode well for their diplomatic relations as well,” Baum said.

But Baum predicted that rather than giving China increased leverage in Washington, closer Sino-Soviet ties could “add new chill, new frost, to U.S.-China relations. I think the roots of ‘the China card’ lay in Sino-Soviet hostility,” Baum said. “If that hostility is eliminated, the worth of that card goes to zero. It goes from an ace to a deuce.”

Chinese nervousness over unpredictable repercussions from the Moscow coup seemed reflected by reports in Beijing on Tuesday, coming from diplomatic and Chinese sources, that all home leaves have been canceled for soldiers stationed in the capital.

Troops in Beijing, while largely kept out of sight, still play a key role in ensuring that there is no new outbreak of anti-government protests.

Some foreign diplomats in Beijing also noted that if the coup leaders fail in their attempt to reassert strong central control, instability in the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics could spill across the border into China.

Beijing faces chronic unrest among minority groups in some border regions, including Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang.