14-JUL-1993 16:35
JAMES LEE
0494536249
P.18
TRANSCRIPT B
COMMITTEE
MR. ALASTAIR GOODLAD
14 JULY 1993
FOREIGN AFFAIRS SELECT
17
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MR. ROBERT WAREING:
I am thinking of all the disputes that did exist in the past over
the
River and one can go back into the 19th century where there have been rival claims for territory and I just wonder whether problems inside China itself might be used as an excuse to distract attention from those problems inside China to maybe some
aggression outside the territory.
SIR ROBERT MCLAREN:
If I might comment, Mr. Wareing, I would say that whilst that kind of development can't totally be excluded at some point in the remote future, for the time being the Chinese are paying considerable and rather successful attention to their
relationships with the various republics of the former Soviet Union. At the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union, they had more or less settled their northern borders, those with Russia they had not entirely settled those with what are now the Central Asian Republic which border Chinese territory.
There is at the moment no great priority being given to those latter border talks. What the priorities are at the moment is in developing trade and that is being done in imaginative ways. Most of the Central Asian countries haven't got any money so forms of counter-trade have had to be developed but it is happening and it is happening very quickly and as I say, the Chinese have paid a lot of attention to it and so far with some success.