Twenty years ago next March, China and the Soviet Union appeared to be on the brink of war after a series of skirmishes along their border. After nearly two decades of recurring tensions, trade has broken out across that 4,500-mile frontier -- a commercial boom that may be a prelude to a new rapprochement between the two Communist giants. The U.S. is following these developments with considerable interest. Ever since Richard Nixon made his historic opening to China in the wake of the 1969 border fighting, the American "strategic partnership" with China has been rooted largely in a shared antagonism toward the Soviet Union.
Last week seven American foreign policy specialists completed a rare visit along both sides of the still heavily fortified Sino-Soviet frontier. The two- week trip was organized by the New York City-based National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. The delegation was led by former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Arthur Hartman and former U.S. Army Chief of Staff General John Wickham. The only journalist in the group was TIME Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott, who filed this report:
Mudanjiang remains ready for war. The military airfield outside this northeastern Chinese industrial city of 600,000 lifts security restrictions just long enough for a twin-engine prop plane from Beijing to deposit its passengers. They are whisked past the barracks of a People's Liberation Army (P.L.A.) unit. It is shortly before sundown, and troops are playing soccer, basketball, Ping-Pong and open-air billiards on the edge of the runway, not far from a wing of 70 Chinese-built MiG-21 interceptors, each sheathed in canvas to guard against corrosion in the heavily polluted air.
The mayor of Mudanjiang, Wang Shubin, wants to talk not about the soldiers but about local merchants, who have their own interest these days in the Soviet Union. Beijing and Moscow have authorized the Chinese province of Heilongjiang and the Soviet Union's Maritime province to conduct direct cross- border trade. Chinese and Soviet officials travel back and forth, comparing wish lists, displaying wares and negotiating barter deals. Since both countries have nonconvertible currencies and neither wants to expend precious reserves of hard currency, no money changes hands. The Chinese supply vegetables, prefabricated plastic greenhouses and textiles; the Soviets send back cement, seafood, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and electrical machinery.
Almost all the traffic is by rail, along a line that Czarist Russia helped build in the late 19th century from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, to the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, more than 300 miles to the southeast. The principal border-crossing point for the region is Suifenhe, five hours by the daily milk train from Mudanjiang, near the Ussuri River, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in 1969. Here too there are plenty of reminders of potential trouble. Green military staff cars dart about the streets, their horns blowing at pedestrians and the occasional horse-drawn cart to make room for P.L.A. officers on their way to the regimental headquarters of the specially trained border troops garrisoned on the outskirts of town. On a nearby hilltop are a high-frequency radio tower for combat communications and an early-warning radar that would help alert the MiGs in Mudanjiang to scramble in the event of a Soviet attack.