CONFIDENTIAL
Brief No 10
PRIME MINISTER'S VISIT TO CHINA AND HONG KONG, 18-21 DECEMBER 1984
CHINESE FOREIGN POLICY:
BACKGROUND NOTE
1. Chinese foreign policy is founded on the requirements of national security and China's modernisation programme. The latter has led to more pragmatic and outgoing policies than hitherto. China no longer welcomes contention between the super-powers as a factor encouraging world revolution. She now acknowledges world peace as a primary objective, especially to provide the necessary environment for Chinese modernisation.
2.
China's principal concern is its relationship with the super-powers, from whom it professes independence. In practice, China's relations with the United States are currently much
closer and more substantive than with the Soviet Union. However,
the Chinese have shown determination not to be dictated to by either power and especially to avoid being manipulated by one as a means of scoring points off the other. They have consequently backed away from intimations following normalisation with the United States of willingness to participate in an informal alliance to oppose Soviet ambitions.
3. The Soviet Union provides the main physical threat to China. The three Chinese preconditions for normalising relations with
the Soviet Union (Soviet troop withdrawals from Afghanistan,
from Mongolia and the Sino-Soviet frontier, and ending support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia) partly reflect this. Nonetheless, both sides are prepared to work towards a limited improvement in other practical respects. (See Brief No 8a).
4. China's modernisation programme depends in part on the acquisition of Western technology. This has inspired the current
'open door' policy, which the Chinese have presented as permanent rather than a temporary expedient. There has been a rapid increase in the volume of China's international commerce in the last few years
The lion's share has gone to the United States and Japan, but the
CONFIDENTIAL
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