China, Russia Settle Final Land Border Dispute

China and Russia settled the last remaining dispute over their 2,725-mile land border Saturday and pledged they would no longer aim nuclear missiles or use force against each other.

Presidents Jiang Zemin and Boris N. Yeltsin signed the agreements during the first visit here by a Chinese leader since Mao Tse-tung in 1957, before the Sino-Soviet alliance gave way to bitter struggle for supremacy in the Communist world.

The ceremony marked a further warming in relations that were normalized in 1989 at the initiative of then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and have been marked since by booming two-way trade. Jiang was accorded the rare privilege of staying in the Kremlin.

By delineating a 34-mile fragment of their western border, in the Altai Mountains, Russia and China buried a quarrel that led to armed clashes in 1969. They also agreed to further talks to cut “to a minimum level” the number of troops stationed on each side of the entire frontier.

Although Russia and China still dispute three small islands in rivers along their eastern border, Yeltsin called the agreements “an achievement of historic dimensions. . . . For the first time, practically the entire border is legally defined.”

Easing conflict with China is important for Russia as it redefines its security interests. The shrinking army inherited from the Soviet Union ended a massive retreat from Eastern Europe on Saturday when the last several thousand troops came home from Germany and the Baltics and marched in Moscow in a festive parade.

Peace with China, Russia’s most powerful neighbor, will enable the retreating army to redeploy largely to the south, to keep ethnic warfare now simmering in former Soviet republics of the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia from spilling into Russia.

The declaration signed by Yeltsin and Jiang pledged never to allow ideology to obstruct Russian-Chinese relations and to stay out of any alliance that would endanger the security of the other.

Their agreement on de-targeting missiles is similar to ones Russia signed earlier this year with the United States and Britain.

“Autumn is the season of harvest, and in Moscow we have reaped a good crop,” said Jiang, who is spending four days in Moscow.

Yeltsin, who went to Beijing for a previous Russia-China summit in December, 1992, added: “Our views coincided on all the issues touched upon in our talks.”

The two presidents agreed to boost bilateral trade, which almost doubled in the past three years to a record $7.7 billion in 1993. China is now Russia’s second-biggest trading partner after Germany.

They brushed aside sharp differences over internal economic reform and closed ranks against critics in the West.

China’s leaders not long ago denounced Yeltsin and Gorbachev as traitors to communism and Russia’s post-Soviet political reforms as mistaken. Russia’s democratic politicians have acknowledged the successes of China’s slower-paced economic reforms while criticizing Beijing’s rule as repressive.

“We pay much attention to studying the experience of economic reforms in China, which launched them earlier than we did,” Yeltsin said.

Chinese spokesman Wu Jianmin said the two presidents agreed that “the international community should acknowledge that there is no single pattern for the development of all countries.”

Despite appeals from reformist Russian lawmakers to join the West in condemning China’s harsh treatment of dissidents, there was no mention of human rights in the presidents’ declaration. “These problems were not discussed at the summit,” Wu said.