A Diplomatic Offensive

Whereby enemies become friends (and vice versa)

As the People's National Airline jet set down at Kingston's airport last week, Jamaica's top government officials were on hand to greet Chinese Vice Premier Keng Piao and his 27-member entourage. The visitor declared that "China and Jamaica both belong to the Third World." Later, at a luncheon given by Democratic Socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley, the handsome, white-haired Chinese leader delivered a now familiar blast at the Americans and the Russians: "The superpowers are racking their brains to divide and sabotage the Third World movement by despicable means, but the nonaligned countries are uniting to frustrate their schemes." By week's end Keng had completed similar whirlwind propaganda visits to Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, where local leaders received him with the bemused formality that reflected continuing policy differences with China.

Keng's Caribbean junket was only the latest example of China's new activist, pragmatic diplomacy. After 12 years of xenophobic isolationism, China is increasingly behaving like a global superpower, exchanging state visits, forging agreements, cajoling, arguing, and sometimes berating other nations around the world. Last week alone, while Keng was flying around the Caribbean, Vice Foreign Minister Han Nien-lung was resuming long-stalled talks with Japanese officials about a peace treaty. Meanwhile Peking dispatched delegations of electrical engineers to the U.S., canoeists to Yugoslavia, educators to Sri Lanka, economists to Zambia, parachutists to Canada, physicians to the Central African Empire. In addition, a team of crack Chinese players left for France to participate in the 22nd European congress of the ancient Chinese game known as Go, a military board game whose objects are territorial conquest and the capture of the opponent's pieces by encirclement.

These tactics are all part of a new diplomatic offensive aimed at isolating the U.S.S.R., wooing the Third World and cementing economic ties with Western industrialized nations that can supply vital technology. Abandoning Mao's doctrine of national self-reliance, Peking's leaders this year have concluded an unprecedented trade deal with the European Community and a $20 billion pact with

Japan. In May the Carter Administration agreed to sell China infrared scanning devices for oil exploration. To pay for its expensive purchases of Western technology, China's economics czar, Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien, told a group of visiting British parliamentarians this month that Peking is considering the once heretical action of borrowing from foreign banks.

Peking's leaders have also reinforced their oft-expressed warnings of Soviet imperialist ambitions in the Third World with some dramatic diplomatic gestures. Following the French and Belgian military intervention in Zaire last May, Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua flew into Kinshasa. Touring Shaba region with Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko, Huang declared that the Katangese invaders had been "Soviet-Cuban mercenaries." Since then Keng Piao has carried China's admonitory message to Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as to the Caribbean. The indefatigable Vice Premier has scheduled visits for next autumn to Guinea and Ghana.

China's more pragmatic approach to foreign policy has led to a slight downplaying of its avowed intention of "liberating" Taiwan by force if necessary --the main obstacle to normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations. Returning from a ten-day visit to China two weeks ago, New York Democratic Congressman Lester Wolff reported that China's top foreign policymaker, Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, had told him that Peking was willing to negotiate its differences on Taiwan with the Nationalist Chinese government. Said Wolff: "There was none of the rhetoric we had heard before about the 'murderers on Taiwan.' Taiwan was mentioned in a much more conciliatory framework."

In the midst of this new era of internationalism, China has indulged in some unpredictable outbursts of belligerence that have surprised analysts. Peking has angrily cut off all aid to Albania, which until recently was China's sole ideological ally in Europe. Two weeks ago, the last of 513 Chinese military advisers and technicians departed from Albania, leaving behind 51 uncompleted aid projects, a deserted Chinese restaurant and the shambles of Chinese-Albanian friendship, which Chairman Mao described only two years ago as "inexhaustible and truly invincible." The origins of the quarrel lie in Albania's hostility to China's policy of rapprochement with the U.S. and the Third World and to Peking's warming relations with Albania's longtime enemy, Yugoslavia. Instead of attempting to patch up the quarrel, Peking apparently decided it was time to end the Albanian drain on China's resources--more than $4 billion since 1954. According to the official Chinese news agency, Peking had been showering grain, steel, tractors and trucks on the ungrateful Albanians when China could not spare them. "The Chinese people scrimped on food and clothing and tried their best to aid Albania in the spirit of proletarian internationalism," the agency complained.

The Peking leadership's low threshold of irritability has also caused China's once close relations with Viet Nam to deteriorate into what one analyst called "China's worst foreign policy disaster since the Cultural Revolution cut the country off from the rest of the world." Ostensibly, the quarrel focuses on two issues: China's support for Viet Nam's inimical neighbor, Cambodia, and the fate of 1.2 million ethnic Chinese in Viet Nam. Peking accuses Hanoi of subjecting them to "persecution and ostracism." While Hanoi denies the charge, 159,000 refugees have crossed the border into southern China, fleeing harsh new economic measures in Viet Nam. Peking has withdrawn its estimated $300-million-a-year aid to Hanoi, and last week expelled all Vietnamese students from Chinese universities. At the same time, the Chinese news agency charged that Hanoi leaders had sent "spies and other bad elements" into China in the guise of refugees in order to "create disturbances."

The real reason for the strife is China's suspicion that Hanoi has decisively come under Moscow's influence. Although Viet Nam has, in fact, attempted to maintain a balance between the two great powers, China paranoiacally fears a strong Soviet-backed state on its southern border. As a result, Vietnamese attempts at negotiation and reconciliation with China have foundered, and Hanoi may soon be obliged to turn increasingly to Moscow for both aid and moral support.

Sinologists are divided on whether China's self-defeating policy toward Viet Nam is caused by inexperience in the conduct of foreign policy, by the notoriously prickly personality of Teng Hsiao-p'ing, or by some obscure power struggle in Peking. Whatever the reason, China's new activism is not only turning old enemies into new friends, but old friends into new enemies. sb

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