The Hindu : Russia, China pledge friendship

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 03, 2002

International

International

Russia, China pledge friendship

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Dec. 2. ``China and Russia will be good neighbours, friends, and partners forever''. This evocative pledge by the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, summed up the spirit of his latest meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Beijing today.

Mr. Jiang's post-summit observation of such an effusive magnitude, quite rare by the standards of China's pragmatic diplomacy in the present phase of the post-Cold War era, was in some measure echoed by Mr. Putin, who underlined that their bilateral relationship had by now "reached a quite high level''. The emphatic theme of their summit was the evolution of a special strategic equation between the two countries.

While the timing of the summit compelled the two leaders to bring North Korea under a laser-beam scrutiny in the context of Pyongyang's declarations about its right to possess an arsenal of nuclear weapons and other more potent devices, the overall tone and tenor of the Mr. Jiang-Mr. Putin meeting were determined by the expanding strategic contours of the Sino-Russian landscape. Until nightfall, several hours after the summit took place, no authoritative version of the Joint Statement, which the two leaders signed, was released by the Chinese authorities in Beijing.

While there was not a hint of any dissonance at the summit itself, the sensitive North Korean question required much fine-tuning of the semantics to match the substance of the Sino-Russian accord on this issue. According to unofficial accounts, apparently based on a Russian version of the Joint Statement, the two sides said that they "consider it important for the destiny of the world and security in North East Asia to preserve the non-nuclear status of the Korean peninsula and (sustain) the regime of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction''.

Also underlined was the ``extreme importance'' of the need for a normalisation of ties between North Korea and the United States on the `basis' of the accords that they had reached in the past including the one known as the Framework Agreement of 1994. Formulations of this kind, not formally authenticated by an official release from the Chinese side until nightfall, are entirely consistent with the categorical stand that Beijing has often adopted. China stands for a nuclear-weapons-free Korean peninsula that would, by definition, include South Korea and not just its northern neighbour.

For Russia, still a nuclear superpower, non-proliferation under the relevant international law, which Pyongyang is a signatory to, is an article of political faith and strategic maxim in the present post-Cold War era. China and Russia have also looked at North Korea through the prism of the global strategic realities. Both Beijing and post-Soviet Moscow are at present proactively engaged in "influencing'' the U.S. foreign policy through their independent overtures of friendship towards Washington.

The current anti-terror agenda with all its ramifications on the world stage as also the compulsions of the new knowledge-based economy set the stage for today's summit in Beijing. Mr. Jiang not only described his talks with Mr. Putin as an exercise that was "rich in content'' but also disclosed that the latest "strategic partnership of cooperation'' was reached as a result of the sequential decisions by both sides to treat each other as "friends'' first and "constructive partners'' later. Mr. Putin broadly concurred with this view even as the two leaders drew attention to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as their joint strategic gift to their extended neighbourhood. Mr. Putin held talks with the new General Secretary of the governing Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao, too, underscoring a futurist approach that would not entail a "conditional engagement with China'', an idea popularised at one stage under the auspices of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

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