Jiang Steps Deliberately in Dance With Russia

He may have done the hula in Hawaii on his recent visit to the United States, but Chinese President Jiang Zemin crooned “Moscow Nights” for Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and danced with Yeltsin’s daughter into the early morning hours Tuesday in a deliberate diplomatic display: He showed the world how China aims to balance its strategic partners without stepping on anyone’s toes.

The timing of Yeltsin’s three-day visit, fresh on the heels of Jiang’s summit with President Clinton in Washington, thus is no accident.

But for Yeltsin and Jiang, who declared that their deepening partnership is not intended to renew a Cold War-era alliance against the United States, the three-day summit that ended Tuesday mainly served to bolster their own mutual interests in East Asia--and highlight their differences.

For Russia, a friendly China means bigger markets, peaceful borders at a time when both countries want to reduce the size of their armed forces and a counterweight against U.S. influence in the region. China needs Russia’s oil and gas and advanced military technology at cut-rate prices to remain a regional power.

At a late-night celebration of eight accords, including the settlement of the border between China and Russia, protection for wild tigers and plans for a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to both China and South Korea, Jiang also sang a popular Stalin-era song called “Faraway,” a favorite from his year as a worker at a Soviet automobile factory in 1955.

Despite the bearhugs and busses Jiang bestowed on Yeltsin, in contrast with the reserved encounter Jiang had with Clinton two weeks ago, their calculated camaraderie also highlighted the diverging paths of two giants once united in communism.

Now, as both countries hurtle from Marx to free markets, Russia is watching closely to see how China handles the challenges of corruption, social dislocation and political infighting--problems that have slowed its own economic transition.

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“I think, in our own time, we will follow China’s path,” said Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, the Communist Party deputy and a former prime minister, who made clear he admires the Chinese Communist Party’s greater control of political freedoms and gradual opening of the economy.

“Every Chinese supports the reforms because every person has gained something from them,” he said Tuesday. “What we have now in Russia is only the very rich and the very poor.”

Nowhere are the contrasts between the two countries’ development more apparent than Harbin, the capital of China’s northeastern province bordering Russia. The city was founded in the 1890s as the headquarters for the Russian railway running through China, and it later became a refuge for White Russians fleeing communism during and after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Modern Harbin--still dotted with onion-topped cathedrals, signs in Cyrillic and Russian monuments--is a stark contrast to its struggling Russian counterparts just across the border. Nearly $1 billion of the $7 billion in trade between the two countries crosses the border of Heilongjiang, Harbin’s province--and China tends to drive a hard bargain in everything from arms trade to textiles.

One of the agreements signed this week aims at achieving an ambitious $20 billion in trade by 2000, expanding cross-border free-trade zones and evening out trade regulations.

While Yeltsin met with Harbin officials and border trade firms, Ryzhkov lamented that, by any measure, Russia has a long way to go to match China’s economic prowess. “Shanghai alone attracted more foreign investment last year than all of Russia,” Ryzhkov said.

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Many of the hundreds of Russian traders and students in Harbin plan to stay here long-term. “We have a lot to learn from China about economic development,” said Ilya Chen, 17, a Russian student whose Chinese father encouraged her to leave Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East for Harbin. “I have a future here.”

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Anthony Kuhn in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.