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CYL school. There, Qian was selected by the CCP organization in charge of
Chinese students in Moscow to handle student affairs at the embassy. Qian
became fluent in Russian and after completing his studies was assigned to
the Chinese embassy in Moscow, where he served from 1955 to 1964. In 1972,
after a stint at a May 7th Cadre School during the Cultural Revolution, Qian
returned to China’s Moscow embassy as a councilor, a position he held for an-
other ten years. When Beijing began exploring rapprochement with Moscow
in 1982, Qian was appointed “special emissary” to Moscow, and several years
later headed the Chinese delegation to conduct border negotiations with the
Soviet Union. When Qian took over as minister of foreign affairs and simul-
taneously as secretary of the CCP Committee in the MFA in 1988, he had
little experience dealing with the United States or Western countries gener-
ally. His one posting beyond China or the USSR was several years as ambas-
sador to Guinea in West Africa. Yet the negotiating skills he had learned in
dealing with Russian representatives for twenty years proved transferable and
served Qian, and China, well. In 1995, Qian added to his portfolio control of
Hong Kong’s reversion as chair of the Hong Kong Preparatory Committee.
There too his efforts served China well by arranging the smooth and stable
return of that rich entity to China. The diplomatic accomplishments of Qian’s
decade-long tutelage of China’s foreign affairs are impressive.
Qian’s key backer among top CCP leaders was Li Peng. Li had been head
of the Chinese Student Association in the Soviet Union during his 1948–1955
study at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. During the last year of that
stay, Qian began study at the Moscow CYL school, and Li Peng got to know
him then. Qian had been assigned responsibility for handling embassy mat-
ters related to Chinese students studying in the Soviet Union, and would have
taken good care of the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, Li Peng.^7 Although Qian
and Li were born the same year, 1928, Li’s administrative superiority, and
more importantly the support for him (as Zhou’s adopted son) by elders Deng
Xiaoping, Deng Yingchao (Zhou Enlai’s wife), Chen Yun, and Peng Zhen,
made him Qian’s clear superior.
Once back in China, former Soviet-study students periodically got together
and formed an informal network of mutual help, and this too brought Li and
Qian together. Li Peng was on a fast track to the top. Entering the Central
Committee in 1982, he joined the Politburo only three years later, and in 1987
joined the Politburo Standing Committee. Li became premier in April 1988
when Zhao Ziyang was promoted to replace Hu Yaobang as general secre-
tary, and was appointed head of the Foreign Affairs Small Group after Zhao’s
purge in 1989, making him Qian’s boss.^8 Qian repaid Li Peng’s assistance over
the years by refurbishing his mentor’s international reputation after 6-4. In
1990, Qian arranged a flurry of international activity by Li Peng intended to
obliterate any idea that Li was some sort of pariah. Qian was very different
from Li Peng in terms of personality. Whereas Li tended to be awkward and