President Yeltsin of Russia brought his bear-hug diplomacy to Beijing yesterday, wrapping two arms around the Chinese head of state, President Jiang Zemin, to symbolise a new warmth between the two powers and the end of a centuries-old border dispute.
Last week the Russian leader gave the same treatment to the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto, when they met in Siberia. Moscow has rarely in its long history enjoyed good relations with its two Asian rivals at the same time.
In both cases the bear-hug diplomacy is driven by the pragmatic goal of minimising ideological differences and ancient disputes in order to promote trade and economic development. This suits China too.
Mr Yeltsin and Mr Jiang yesterday called their new relationship a "constructive partnership". The Chinese president forged a "strategic partnership" with President Clinton in Washington last week.
In Beijing's Great Hall of the People the two leaders signed a declaration which resolves disputes over practical implementation of a 1991 accord that maps out their 4,300-km (2,800-mile) frontier.
Historic tensions on the border erupted most recently in 1969 as Moscow and Beijing vied for supremacy in the communist world. Soviet soldiers fought skirmishes with Chinese People's Liberation Army troops on ice floes along frozen border rivers.
Officials have been haggling over how far back to withdraw troops, how many helicopters each country could deploy and where to put frontier posts on the longest section of the border running from Mongolia to the Sea of Japan. Both made minor territorial concessions. The declaration hailed the frontier agreement as "a good example of a fair and rational solution of issues inherited from the past". President Jiang told reporters it would "create good guarantees for peace, stability and calm on the Russian-Chinese border and will serve to strengthen good neighbourly relations between Russia and China as well as regional stability". Accompanying Mr Yeltsin on his China trip is former Soviet prime minister deputy, Mr Nikolai Ryzhkov, now a Russian deputy. His inclusion is meant to underline the president's reconciliation with political foes, diplomats said.
Relations between Russia and Beijing have been warming up rapidly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the new anti-communist leaders in Moscow initially toyed with the idea of switching diplomatic relations from China to Taiwan. Mr Yeltsin decided quickly not to antagonise China by recognising Taiwan.
Since then Mr Jiang has visited Russia twice and this is Mr Yeltsin's third visit to Beijing. The border between the two countries has become much more open. Today the Russian President will see evidence of this when he visits the northern Chinese city of Harbin where Russian traders come to buy clothing, coffee, cosmetics and other Chinese-made consumer goods.
In Beijing the Russian trading presence has been growing steadily since the early 1990s. There is now a Russian-language trading quarter lined with shops and clothing stalls where signs are in the Cyrillic alphabet. (The latest addition, opened last week, is the brightly-lit Moscow Disco Restaurant not far from the US embassy.) Yesterday dealers from Russia and former Soviet republics were busy in the alleyways buying fur coats in bulk for the winter. But the level of serious commerce between the two countries remains low. China's predicted volume of trade with Russia this year is $7 billion compared to $60 billion with Japan and $43 billion with the United States. However, at yesterday's ceremony the Chinese Vice Premier, Mr Li Lanqing, and the Russian First Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Boris Nemtsov, signed three documents aimed at changing this. The most important was a framework agreement on a $12 billion project to build a pipeline to bring 20 billion cubic metres of natural gas from Siberia to China's Pacific Coast, half of which will be piped on to Japan and South Korea.
Russian diplomats in Beijing were hopeful that China would agree a deal for $2 billion-worth of Russian-made nuclear power equipment. Today the Chinese Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng, travels to Tokyo for a meeting with Mr Hashimoto, continuing a series of regional exchanges which would have been unimaginable during the Cold War. Diplomats in Beijing say China has concluded that maximising its regional influence will be better served by calmer relations with its neighbours.