02.05.1996

Old friends meet - but are they socialist?

Russia and China

President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, paid a visit to the People’s Republic of China between April 24 and 26. The visit was significant, because relations have not always been so warm.

In the 1960s the Soviet Union and China fell out, a process that went as far as border clashes, and China even cultivated the friendship of the capitalist USA as a counterweight to the “new tsars” in Moscow. Relations with the USSR improved under Gorbachev, but this was aborted when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Chinese leadership was in fact hostile to Yeltsin when he started out as Russian president.

However, there was no sign of hostility towards Yeltsin on this occasion. Chinese president Jiang Zemin called Yeltsin an “old friend”. A total of 14 agreements were signed between the two countries, covering a wide range of trade and political issues. China also reached agreements with the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Kirghizia and Kazakhstan.

What accounts for this display of chumminess? Russian foreign policy has changed over the past few years. For the two or three years just after the Soviet Union’s collapse, it hardly deviated from western and US foreign policy. More recently Russian policy has started to distance itself from the west. Russian leaders object to the fact that Nato is being expanded to take in countries like Poland. A Russian defence expert recently hinted that if the Baltic republic of Estonia joined Nato, Russia would invade it. Yeltsin is cultivating the friendship of the Chinese as a counterweight to Nato.

It should be stressed that Yeltsin is in the middle of an election campaign and he cannot be seen to be selling Russia out to the west. He has recently been trying to compete with his opponents in the field of nationalist rhetoric. He will not lose votes in Russia by stressing his independence from the west. He may well gain some.

For their part, the Chinese have good reason to move closer to the Russian Federation. They feel the USA is pressurising them in an attempt to contain their economic and military growth. If Yeltsin is playing the China card, China is playing the Russia card.

Judging from reports in the Russian media there is a new ideological meeting point between the two states. The Russian news agency, Itar-Tass, on April 26 reported some remarks by Yeltsin in Shanghai. He said that, like China, Russia was “not copying capitalism. It is creating a market economy with a specific Russian character.”

Of course, the Chinese leadership has long claimed to be building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Putting the statement by Yeltsin together with the Chinese claim, it would appear that Yeltsin must be building some form of socialism with Russian characteristics. This has led to unemployment and capitalist exploitation in Russia. Since the same thing has been happening in China, perhaps Yeltsin is indeed some kind of ‘socialist’ in the sense that the term is understood over in Beijing.

But communists can decide on the nature of Chinese socialism, if Yeltsin can praise it so much.

John Craig