AT A time of NATO expansion, when Russia is looking for strong new partners in the world, Beijing is stepping into the breach. China's leader, President Jiang Zemin, will visit Moscow this week and establish a "strategic partnership" for the 21st century with President Yeltsin.
At the centre of the new alliance is a border treaty to be signed in Moscow by China, Russia and three Central Asian states, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. This will mark a new era of friendly ties between the two military powers which dominate eastern Europe and Asia and bring to a conclusion work begun in the era of Mr Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce tensions along the former Soviet-Chinese border.
The treaty will withdraw offensive forces 100 km from the border on each side, according to diplomats in Beijing.
Work on the agreement has been delayed by problems such as the fact that Russian army units are equipped with helicopters and the Chinese are not, an eastern European diplomat said. Also, Chinese forces can pull back without serious logistical problems, whereas for much of the frontier zone the Russians have no road or rail infrastructure except close to the border itself.
President Jiang will arrive in Moscow tomorrow for a four-day state visit at the invitation of Mr Yeltsin. Exhausted after his visit to Germany last week, Mr Yeltsin will interrupt a holiday on the Black Sea for a day and a half to greet his Chinese guest and sign the historic border treaty.
Mr Jiang said at the weekend that he expected "positive results" from the visit. "It will be the first top-level meeting since our two countries established an equal, trusting partnership aimed at strategic co-operation in the 21st century," he said, referring to Mr Yeltsin's visit to Beijing last April.
The border agreement has a far-reaching significance for the strengthening of neighbourly relations and friendship and for building, peace and stability in the region of our 7,000 km-long border," he said.
While consolidating a new relationship, Russian diplomats emphasised that the two nations had not forged an alliance to counteract the growing strength of NATO, and that the work on normalising relations began before NATO expansion was an issue.
Moscow was refocusing on Asia to have room to manoeuvre, Russian observers said, and Beijing, according to Mr Jiang, was committed to advancing its economy in conditions of international stability.
Russia and China see each other as important political and economic partners. In Beijing last week, the Russian Defence Minister, Mr Igor Rodionov, said Moscow opposed western attempts to pressure China over human rights and other issues With western nations maintaining an arms embargo over human rights, Russia has become China's major arms supplier and has signed contracts with Beijing to provide 72 SU-27 fighter planes, two destroyers with missile launchers and the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system.
The two countries formed a strong alliance in the early 1950s but it degenerated into rivalry for leadership of the communist world, and there were border clashes covering some 350 sq km along the Ussuri river in the late 1960s.
Relations have been warming again since Mr Gorbachev visited Beijing in 1989. Visits to China by Mr Yeltsin in December 1992 and in April last year continued the improvement in ties. Three major obstacles to normal relations have now been removed: the massive concentration of military forces along the border, disputes over border demarcation and rivalry over Vietnam and Cambodia.
Mr Jiang dismissed as "nonsense" Western claims that China posed a threat to other countries and said Beijing's top priority was economic growth. "The assertions of some western scholars that China, building up its muscles, will create a threat for other countries is nonsense," he told the Russian ltar-Tass news agency. "China is concentrating its efforts on the development of its economy, on the long-term improvement of its people's standard of living."
The two leaders are also expected to sign a political document setting out their countries' shared views on global issues.