ABSTRACT
China’s opening to the developed world and relations with the West are paramount. Its principled and strategic opposition to ‘hegemonism’ and foreign interventionism, particularly on the part of the United States, has to be reconciled with the mutual interest, shared with the west, and even with the hegemonists, of eliminating non-western acts of aggression and damaging disputes and clashes in the Gulf, Cambodia and elsewhere in the Third World. The Chinese were more suspicious and critical of the continued intervention in Iraq. Their interest was in repairing the damages of the war, and rehabilitating Kuwait, rather than in the efforts to discipline Iraq and control her production of arms, conventional or otherwise, this being the policy of the western countries. The general climate of opinion in the foreign press corps was further influenced by Chinese positions in the Security Council debates on measures to protect Kurdish and Shia minorities in Iraq against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s angry and vengeful troops.
