(6 of 9)
He did not know how truly he had spoken. Although the four-day visit became a botch of hurriedly changed venues, the minuet of diplomacy went on within the whirlwind. Commented a frustrated Soviet embassy official at the welcoming banquet for Gorbachev on Monday: "Everything has gone smoothly today. The only thing lacking was information about the time and location of our meetings and whether they would take place on time or ever."
During a meeting on Tuesday with Zhao, Gorbachev remarked offhandedly, "We also have hotheads who would like to renovate socialism overnight." Well before leaving, though, he must have been informed of the gravity of the situation by his staff, since he was later more deferential to the students, carefully pointing out that a "reasonable balance" had to be struck between the enthusiasm of the young and the wisdom of the old.
The talks went well, if not spectacularly. For Gorbachev, the crucial tete- a-tete was with Deng, who had forced him to wait three years for the meeting, a ploy in a cunning strategy to further Chinese aims such as a reduction in Soviet armaments and a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Their lunch Tuesday was cordial and uneventful. The high point came when Deng upstaged his visitor, the great upstager, by beating him to the historic punch. Just as the press corps was about to file out of the room where the two had met, Deng proclaimed, "Because the journalists have not left us yet, we can publicly announce the normalization of relations between our two countries." Thus ended, at least officially, 30 years of antipathy, a period in which relations were icy at best and at times threatened war between the two Communist giants.
The declaration was a fait accompli long before Gorbachev's arrival in Beijing. Surprisingly, there were no further major achievements. While Gorbachev vainly tried to keep up his Asian charm offensive by spinning visions of joint industrial projects and border links, the Chinese were preoccupied with the ferment in Tiananmen. What had been billed as the 84- year-old Deng's swan song became, instead of a moment of glory, an ordeal of damage control. Hence, there was no breakthrough on Cambodia, where there is an urgent need for a power-sharing arrangement between the Soviet-backed Phnom Penh regime and the Chinese-supported opposition coalition led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
If the summit achieved less for Gorbachev than he had hoped, it did produce one fascinating intellectual exchange. In his Tuesday-afternoon meeting with Zhao, Gorbachev reflected at length on socialism and reform. The two seemed warmly disposed to each other and sympathetic on matters of theory. They agreed that democracy is compatible with a one-party system, provided it exists in a state ruled by law. And they concurred that thoroughgoing reform was the only answer to the disgruntlement of dissenters. Zhao, so long chary of the subject of political reform, ventured some fateful remarks on the topic. "Political structural reform and economic structural reform should basically be synchronized," said the Chinese leader. "It won't do if one outstrips the other or if one lags behind the other." The words, could they have heard them, might have made student demonstrators cheer.