Plan for High-Level Meetings Emphasizes Russia-China Thaw

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin expects Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit Moscow in April for a summit that will set the seal on a new level of relations between the two giant states, the Kremlin said Friday.

The visit was agreed upon during a 50-minute meeting between Yeltsin and Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng. It was the Russian leader’s first conference with a foreign official since returning to work this week after a heart bypass operation Nov. 5.

“I am very pleased with the course of events,” a thinner but apparently healthier Yeltsin told officials in brief remarks on Russian television.

Li later met with Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin; the two plan to meet twice a year to monitor progress on building up trade and diplomatic relations.

Yeltsin and Li signed a number of deals Friday, ranging from plans to build a nuclear power station in China with help from a Russian loan to an agreement between the countries’ central banks. Russian Defense Industry Minister Zinovy Pak said one of the accords was for the supply of Russian Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighters to China. He gave no details.

Moscow and Beijing, once rivals for leadership of the Communist world, have been building steadily warmer and closer ties since Soviet communism began to unravel a decade ago.

Democracy in Russia has been accompanied by poverty, and Moscow sees China as a huge market for its struggling industry.

The government meetings will put Sino-Russian relations on the same level as those Moscow has with the United States and France.

Kremlin press secretary Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky told a news briefing that Yeltsin and Jiang, together with presidents of the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, would sign an accord in April reducing forces on their borders.

China and the former Soviet Union clashed along their border in the 1960s when the two nuclear powers were at odds. Disputes over border demarcation were for the most part resolved in 1991, and Yastrzhembsky said Yeltsin, who visited China in April, had promised to finalize the issue next year.