ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Beijing may well be moving toward a policy of genuine equidistance between the superpowers in order to obtain wider Soviet support for the Four Modernizations. Beijing thus began downplaying the antihegemony themes that had dominated Chinese propaganda over the previous decade and instead began stressing the "independence" of Chinese foreign policy. There is a near consensus among analysts of Chinese foreign policy that the most shift in Beijing's "triangular" policy came in 1982, when Beijing moved away from a stress on containing Soviet hegemonism in cooperation with the United States and toward a more balanced relation with the two superpowers. The acquisition of Western technology is less imperative since the technological gap between the People's Liberation Army and Soviet forces has narrowed. Creating jobs for its expanding population has been one of Beijing's perennial headaches and has exerted a major influence on Chinese domestic and foreign policies.
