ASIA : Trade Lures Chinese, Vietnamese : Business is booming along border. Reopening rail link could fuel the trend.

Shi Yanjun moved his business from Guangzhou to this primitive border trading post on the rugged southern frontier to make his fortune selling clocks, watches and satellite television dishes to Vietnamese.

His stall, full of sophisticated electronics and television monitors, is flanked by other stores selling sacks of garlic, bicycle parts, bootleg Vietnamese music cassettes and veterinary hog syringes.

Like many other Chinese merchants on the border, reopened in 1992 after the two neighboring Communist countries “normalized” relations, Shi has thrived in business here. Since arriving in January, he said, he has sold 100 Chinese-made satellite dishes and receivers at an average price of $3,000 a set--this even though private ownership of the dishes is banned in both China and Vietnam.

“We don’t know anything about the laws in Vietnam,” he said with a perfect, deadpan expression over tea on a recent rainy afternoon here. “We just sell what the customers want to buy. Of course, we don’t sell to Chinese.”

To demonstrate his products, he installed two eight-foot dishes on the roof of his adjacent apartment; one is aimed at the Chinese satellite and the other at the Australian satellite that beams the Vietnamese television.

In just two years, trade between China and Vietnam has grown dramatically, doubling from $200 million in 1992 to $400 million in 1993.

In the Chinese border district surrounding the nearby city of Pingxiang, trade last year topped $80 million, reviving the moribund local economy; it last thrived when the area was an important rail depot for Soviet weapons being shipped to North Vietnamese forces fighting American and South Vietnamese forces in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The railroad link was cut in 1979 after Chinese forces invaded North Vietnam--the most recent such incursions in centuries of conflicts between the two ancient foes of Asia. Passing through the nearby Friendship Pass, invading Chinese forces reached as far as Lang Son before withdrawing under heavy fire from the Vietnamese.

In hopes that the international rail line will be reconnected as relations improve between the two countries, Chinese and overseas investors have spent millions of dollars in Pingxiang building hotels and office buildings ready to cash in on a border trade boom.

Earlier this month, Pingxiang hosted a border trade fair, attended by high-ranking Vietnamese Communist officials, aimed at boosting commerce.

But so far, most of the hotels and office buildings remain empty. On a recent weekend, only seven rooms in a new 140-room hotel were occupied.

Officials in Hanoi, still harboring deep suspicions of Chinese intentions, say they are uncertain if the rail link will be reconnected anytime soon.

Reflecting the prevailing attitude, a senior Vietnamese Communist official in Lang Son referred to the railroad in a conversation as the “railroad to Russia.” Many officials in Vietnam still think of it as a link with their former Soviet allies, not with China.

“The railroad is the key,” said Cai Ke, a municipal official in Pingxiang. “When it reopens depends on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Naturally, we wish they would hurry up.”

If trade between China and Vietnam is ever to take off, the two countries must overcome historic differences. Until then, Shi and the other merchants along the 690-mile border find themselves subject to the vicissitudes and uncertainties that have characterized Sino-Vietnamese relations for centuries.

In June, for example, when Chinese and Vietnamese officials in Beijing and Hanoi exchanged heated comments over a territorial dispute in the South China Sea--which is more than 1,000 miles from his shop--Shi said sales declined noticeably as customs officials on both sides of the border clamped down on traffic.

“Because Vietnam has the same tradition of industrialization as China, we can anticipate the growth of its market,” said Shi, an engineer who until recently was manager of a small clock factory in Guangzhou. “We know the market will be there if there are no more tensions between the two countries.”