Constraining Unipolarity } 535
Underlining China’s Importance and Cooperativeness: Cambodia
and Korea
Cambodia and Korea emerged as centers of US foreign policy attention in the
early 1990s as difficult problems requiring China’s cooperation. Stabilizing
PRC-US ties by demonstrating to Washington America’s need for China’s co-
operation and China’s willingness to provide such cooperation given an ap-
propriate US attitude was not the only and perhaps not even the main factor
governing China’s policy toward Cambodia and Korea at this juncture. Both
of those countries were China’s neighbors, and stability in both was impor-
tant to maintaining a positive climate for China’s development drive. But
given the tense and precarious state of Sino-American ties, this stabiliza-
tion, underlining China’s substantial influence in these areas, helped remind
the Americans that they occasionally needed China’s cooperation—and that
China was willing to cooperate with the United States on issues of conver-
gent interests if Washington approached Beijing as a coequal great power. As
Qian Qichen wrote in his memoir, the July 1989 foreign ministers’ conference
in Paris on Cambodia offered a good opportunity to “break the deadlock”
China found itself in after 6-4. Only weeks earlier, Western nations had pro-
claimed their refusal to meet with high-ranking Chinese officials. Yet at the
Paris conference, it was clear they would need China’s cooperation and would
have to meet with Foreign Minister Qian to obtain it. During the conference,
Qian met with eleven foreign ministers, including those of the United States,
the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Canada. In Qian’s view, China was
simply too important not to be included in deliberations over Cambodia.^19
One key to the solution of the Cambodian problem lay, in fact, in China’s
diplomacy with Moscow and Hanoi. As noted in an earlier chapter, through-
out the 1980s China had maintained unrelenting pressure on Vietnam to
abandon its quest for hegemony over Laos and Cambodia, and on Moscow
to drop support for Hanoi’s occupation of Cambodia, and these demands
constituted the highest-ranking of the “three obstacles” in Sino-Soviet rela-
tions stipulated by Deng Xiaoping in 1982. As Gorbachev maneuvered toward
normalization of Soviet-Chinese ties, he became willing to accede to this
demand. In December 1988, Deng had sent Qian to Moscow with three pro-
posals regarding Cambodia: 1) China and the Soviet Union should agree to
urge Vietnam to withdraw its forces; 2) after Vietnam’s withdrawal, all foreign
powers would cease military aid to all Cambodian parties and would not sup-
port any party engaged in a civil war; and 3) China and Russia would support
a coalition government including all four Cambodian parties and headed by
Norodom Sihanouk. Deng’s instructions basically brought China’s policy into
line with ASEAN’s, and that congruence would eventually provide the basis
for the Cambodian settlement. During the December 1988 Moscow talks, the
Soviet Union also agreed to urge Hanoi to withdraw from Cambodia within