China's Balkan Strategy

China's Balkan Strategy David A. Andelman C h i n a has chosen one of the worlds historical flashpoints for its debut on the European diplomatic stage. This is compounding a desperately complex pirouette of Balkan jealousies and hostilities with a growing major power involvement in this strategic corner of Europe. The result since early summer 1978 has been an escalating round of tensions involving the nations of the region. This has included: the sudden split between Albania and China, curious allies for nearly two decades; a new and bitter round of polemics between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia; warnings to Rumania and Yugoslavia from the SovietUnion; and, on the heels of the long-heralded August 1978 visit of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hua Guofeng, a growing concern of the major powers with the future of each of the Balkan states, even Greece and Turkey. Underlying all these tensions is the apparent facility with which China, for the first time, is developing a coherent Balkan strategy. It is putting increasing pressure on both the Soviets and the United States to adapt their traditionally reactive Balkan policies to new power realities. Since the end of World War 11, neither superpower has made any serious attempt to determine the needs of any of these governments and how they could complement American or Soviet priorities throughout the region. Just what a Balkan strategy means to each of the actors-China, the Soviet Union and the different Balkan states themselves-is crucial to an understanding of the events of the past two years and to the development of an appropriate American response as well. For the new, post-Mao leadership, the Balkans have become an important element in a broad diplomatic offensive . It is a positive, as opposed to a reactive strategy. It has been designed by developing ever tighter economic, political, and especially personal bonds with these countries and their leaders. The Chinese purpose is to obtain entr6 into both the second and third worlds, to provide an opportunity to surround and isolate the Soviet Union, and to open comprehensive relations with nations that could provide valuable aid and comfort for the new Chinese society being developed by Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping. Since the ouster of the Gang of Four nearly four years ago, Hua and his politburo leadership have been moving toward a new relationship with the outside world. Their top priorities became at once the Four Modernizations (of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology) and David A . Andelman was the East European correspondent for the New York Times, based in Belgrade. Previously, he served as the paper's correspondent in Southeast Asia. 60 China’s Balkan Strategy I 62 the Three Worlds Doctrine (development of relations with the first world, the two superpowers, particularly the United States; the second world, and other major industrialized nations, particularly Japan and Western Europe; and the third world of the developing countries). To satisfy the first priority, Hua and his group announced their intention to move China into the front ranks of industrialized nations by the turn of the century.’ To do this, new relations would have to be developed with advanced countries that could help China-countries with technologies, raw materials, and economic systems that could easily be imported and put to work in Chinese society. At the same time, though less directly, the new Chinese leadership also let it be known (most recently in Hua’s talks with Rumania’s Nicolae Ceaugescu and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito) that while China was developing economically, it would try in every way possible to isolateand contain the politicaland military threat posed by the SovietUnion until China finds itself a position of rough military and industrial parity with its principal enemy. The development of a coherent and positive Balkan strategy was for China an important first step in two key directions. At once it enhanced China’s visibility. It also placed Peking into a relationship with rapidly developing countries such as Yugoslavia and Rumania which had confronted and begun to solve many of the same socialand economic problems facing an emerging China. Such countries were on the verge of entry into the second world...