BEIJING -- Premier Li Peng and a huge Chinese delegation departed Tuesday for the Rio Earth Summit after the embarrassing, last- minute scuttling of a stopover in Hawaii, where Chinese dissidents vowed to mount street protests.
The hard-line Marxist premier left Beijing aboard an Air China Boeing 747 following a ceremonial sendoff by Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin and other top leaders at the Great Hall of the People.
Li, leading scores of Chinese officials, arrives June 11 in Rio de Janeiro for six days at the U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit, clearly coveting a rare chance to meet Western and other world leaders.
Li hopes to put China at the forefront of a growing campaign by poor and developing countries to make rich countries pay at least $125 billion for Third World environmental cleanups.
U.S. and Chinese officials confirmed that Li would make overnight stops in Fiji and Tahiti instead of Hawaii, where Chinese dissidents had vowed to protest Li's presence with street demonstrations commemorating the June 1989 Beijing massacre.
Officials gingerly blamed 'technical reasons' for the 11th-hour cancellation of Li's reservations at Hawaii's Kahala Hilton Hotel.
China has endured economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation since Li led the communist government's crushing of pro-democracy nationwide demonstrations in June 1989, killing hundreds.
But through Beijing's deft use of its U.N. Security Council seat during the Gulf War and other crises, Li has been able gradually to restake an increasingly prominent role for China in world affairs.
The U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro affords Li his best chance to date to rub shoulders with U.S. President George Bush, British Prime Minister John Major and more than 100 other heads of state.
Li agreed to attend only after receiving Brazilian assurances that the Dalai Lama, Tibet's Buddhist god-king and leading advocate of Tibetan independence from China, would end his summit stay before Li's arrival.
China clearly sees rare opportunity for diplomatic advances on many fronts -- and not just through expected talks with other Security Council leaders.
For example, Li could advance warming Beijing-Seoul ties by meeting for the first time with his South Korean counterpart Chung Won Sik. Korean sources in Beijing said China had 'agreed in principle' to a meeting if Li's schedule permits.
Government propaganda has made clear that Li will try to use the Earth Summit to establish China as a spokesman for developing countries' defense of theirpoor environmental records.
In what Beijing bills as an 'extremely important speech' at Rio, Li will insist that development of China's economy is the only way to slow environmental degradation and demand that industrialized countries help pay for Third World cleanups.
To wit, Beijing has stepped up its campaign to build a huge, $15 billion dam on the Yangtze River -- the world's largest civil works project -- despite warnings of severe environmental and even climatic consequences. China maintains that the dam's economic advantages outweigh its ecological and social costs.
Li also will present a formula under which the United States and other rich, industrialized countries must provide at least $125 billion of the estimated $600 billion cost of environmental control in developing countries.
'Because most of the global environmental problems were caused by developed countries, they in turn should share at least 20 percent of the costs,' State Environment Administration director Qu Geping said last month in a preview of Li's speech.
'This ($125 billion) amounts to only 0.7 percent of the gross national product of developed countries,' Qu said.
Qu indicated that Li also would demand that developed countries transfer badly needed environmental-control technologies for free or at nominal cost.
'They should not attempt to profit from environmental disasters,' Qu said.
