FOR THE FIRST TIME in decades, former Chairman Mao Zedong's 'East wind' seems to have a chance of countering the 'West wind'. President Jiang Zemin deserves recognition for helping fashion the 'Shanghai Five' group of nations - and the Sino-Russian quasi-alliance - that has gone some way to frustrating what Beijing views as Washington's efforts to build a unipolar, or US-dominated, world order.
As diplomatic observers see it, Beijing will for the foreseeable future play a two-pronged game vis-a-vis the United States. The Communist Party leadership will try to upgrade exchanges and co-operation in the economic and technological fields. And in the area of ideology, geopolitics, and military affairs, however, Beijing will continue to combat the 'anti-China containment policy' supposedly perpetrated by Washington.
And while Sino-US ties are bogged down by issues such as human rights, Taiwan and 'China bashing' by labour and right-wing elements in the US, relations with Russia and other countries west of China have become more intimate by the day. Some editors of the forthcoming Selected Works of Jiang Zemin are thinking they should give top billing not to the President's efforts to promote links with the US but to his role as a founder of the Shanghai Five.
Particularly from the Chinese perspective, the four-year old Shanghai Five, which takes in China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, can serve several important functions. Despite beginning gingerly, the Shanghai Five has taken on the characteristics of a regional bloc that could act as a counterpoise to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and, in particular, the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). A diplomatic source said many officials and experts in the five countries favoured the formation of a more close-knit - and larger - organisation tentatively called the Shanghai Forum. This may eventually incorporate other countries in the region including Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and even Mongolia and other members of the former Soviet Union.
So far this year, the heads of state, foreign and defence ministers as well as public security chiefs of the five have met in special summits. The frequency of these conclaves is more than that of many formal regional blocs and alliances. There is also talk of setting up a fully-fledged Shanghai Five Secretariat.
The pivot of the embryonic Shanghai Forum is the rapidly growing Sino-Russian 'all-directional strategic partnership', which was cemented at the presidential summit in Beijing last week. Both countries have committed themselves to a quasi-alliance in the fields of economics, technology, culture, foreign affairs and, particularly, defence. Mr Jiang and Mr Putin, who have already met three times this year, are due to meet at least twice more before the winter: at the United Nations in September and at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum soon afterwards. By contrast, while Mr Jiang and US counterpart Bill Clinton also announced the goal of a Sino-US 'constructive, strategic partnership' at the presidential summits of 1997 and 1998, these three words have gone out of the vocabulary of Chinese and American diplomats.
As Hong Kong's pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po paper put it: 'In the diplomatic history of China, this kind of highly institutionalised and all-directional co-operation [with Russia] is rare.' The Shanghai Five has an obvious anti-US agenda, of which opposition to Washington's development of the National Missile Defence system is but one item. Mr Jiang and Mr Putin in particular see a strong Shanghai Five as a check against the eastward expansion of Nato and related efforts to spread US norms under the guise of globalisation.