CHEUNG EK, Cambodia — Outside this stark, but pastoral monument to the victims of Cambodia's gory Khmer Rouge years southwest of Phnom Penh, a group of young men played cards recently and listened to Chinese pop music.

Music from China seemed a bit incongruous, given that China, along with the United States and the Soviet Union, helped create Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing, indeed, was the group's chief patron when it held power from 1975 through 1978 and killed more than 1.7 million people, a quarter of Cambodia's population, in its quest to create an agrarian Maoist utopia.
But China's role in this nation's grim experience now lies in the past - deep and more or less undisturbed, which is how both Beijing and many Cambodians prefer it.
"The Chinese are O.K.; they are our friends now," said Var Sareth, 21. "We can learn from them; we can work with them."
Var Sareth and his companions work as guides at the Cheung Ek monument, which is on the site of a Khmer Rouge labor camp 15 kilometers, or 9 miles from the capital, and is filled with the skulls of 8,000 people who perished there.
Though they diligently tell tourists about the shrine and how tall its dome is, they refrain, even when pressed, from talking about China's role in the events that led to Cambodia's killing fields.


Pan Samnang, 24, who sells postcards and other memorabilia to tourists, said that he could not dislike China because "all the businesses started by people in my family" recently have been bankrolled by Chinese money.
Indeed, China has emerged as a major supporter of Cambodia, after an ambitious $2.8 billion UN peacekeeping operation meant to help Cambodia get back on its feet ended in November 1993. Beijing has pumped nearly $300 million in aid into Cambodia since then, and last year, Chinese businesses invested $217 million in Cambodian industries like timber, textiles, and food processing, making China the largest foreign investor in Cambodia, according to the Center for the Development of Cambodia, in Phnom Penh.
That would have been "unbelievable" a decade ago, said Var Sareth. Back then, emotions over China's support of the Khmer Rouge were still raw.
China saw the Khmer Rouge "as a zealous national movement toppling a regime propped up by the U.S. and gave it very close support," said Sophie Richardson, who recently completed a dissertation at the University of Virginia, on Chinese-Cambodian relations.
Beijing, which did not want the Soviet Union expanding into its backyard, supplied the Khmer Rouge with arms, food, material, training, technicians and, most important, international political support.
"Without China, the Khmer Rouge might never have become what it did," Richardson said.
When Pol Pot seized Phnom Penh in 1975, the city was emptied of people. Theywere sent to work in what became Cambodia's killing fields.
"My husband died in fields, and my two boys were poisoned while working in a children's work team," said Mam Sophon, 58, a midwife at Angkor Chey Referral Hospital in Kampot province, about 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, southwest of Phnom Penh.
"My daughter was forced to carry rice all day and finally collapsed. They said blood came out from her mouth, and buttocks from overwork."
Richardson said, "The Chinese knew a lot, if not all, of what was going on, but they were not joking when they said 'domestic affairs are domestic affairs.' No matter how awful the Khmer Rouge regime got, the Chinese said they did not think it was their place to intervene."
China's non-interference policy largely continues to this day. China opposed UN economic sanctions against Sudan, where it has oil interests.
"Business is business," Zhou Wenzhong said last year when he was China's deputy foreign minister. "The situation in the Sudan is an internal affair."
The implications of China's position on the Khmer Rouge are set aside by many young Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge years, who compose about half the country's population.
"To repair my life I need this," said Var Sareth, holding up the two crumpled U.S. dollar bills his previous client had handed him after a 30-minute tour."China is China. We are small. To go forward we must look forward, not keep looking back."
Yet in families scarred by Cambodia's brutal civil war, which intensified when the United States began covertly bombing the country as part of its Vietnam campaign, the promise of money can be an inadequate balm.
"No one has paid for my loss," said Mam Sophon, as tears welled at the
memory. "We will remember these bad things forever" if there is no public
explanation of how and why all this happened.
Like many people in Cambodia, Mam Sophon is careful to clarify that her Buddhist beliefs direct her to seek only truth, not vengeance, from those who directly and indirectly tormented her life and nation. While this exchange of absolution for honesty has been partly satisfied by disclosures about Washington's role in supporting the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia's own impending trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders before a tribunal backed by the United Nations, China has remained mostly silent about its role in the violence that ravaged this idyllic country.
"China does not have to take responsibility for the Khmer Rouge's domestic policy and has no responsibility to explain what China did at that time," said Professor Zhang Xi Zhen of the Asian Studies Department at Peking University, in Beijing."Our leaders, from Zhou Enlai to advisers in Phnom Penh, tried to persuade them to change these kind of policies. They just didn't listen."
China, as well as the United States, Britain, Singapore,and Thailand, continued supporting the Khmer Rouge even after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and put an end to the devastation Pol Pot's regime had unleashed.
"To help the Khmer Rouge, China even launched the border war against Vietnam" in 1979, Zhang said. "It might seem hard to understand today, but don't forget that at that time Vietnam was very close to the Soviet Union and together they wanted to control South-East Asia. That would have been a grave threat to China."
Zhang said the combination of China's own revolutionary zeal and its ambitions to become a great power might have blinded it in Cambodia.
While China did not commit the Khmer Rouge crimes, its reluctance to discuss its support may seem to run counter to the recent admonishing of Japan by Premier Wen Jiabao of China, who said nations must "face up to history" if they want to be full and normal members of the global community. But despite the inconsistency, Beijing is not likely to budge, said Jin Linbo, director of Asia Pacific Studies at the China Institute of Foreign Studies in Beijing.
"I don't think Chinese leaders are ready to reflect fully on China's actions and history," Jin said.