Peking

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone arrived in Peking on Saturday on a two-day visit aimed at soothing Chinese resentment over a series of diplomatic gaffes by Tokyo. Nakasone, in Peking as a guest of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, took part in a cornerstone-laying ceremony for an $85-million youth center built largely with Japanese funds.

More than 4,000 people crowded into the newly restored Cathedral of Our Savior on Tuesday for a Christmas Eve midnight Mass, the first services at the church in 28 years. Many youthful worshipers heard the choir sing "Silent Night" in Chinese.

Last December, officials in the Huangpu district of Shanghai hit on a way to step up their anti-rat campaign. They decided to have a lottery. Any person working in the district could get a ticket in the lottery, the officials announced, simply by handing in a rat, dead or alive. The officials said there were 20,000 tickets, and that the two luckiest rat-catchers would be given electric blankets. The rat lottery was just one more effort to get on the China-wide lottery bandwagon.

Wang Yushang, a stooped, unshaven 80-year-old man in baggy proletarian clothing, was rummaging through a pile of books on a dirty table at Peking's No. 77 middle school when he suddenly came across a family photo album that had been seized by Red Guards from his house nearly two decades ago. Opening the book, Wang first trembled and then burst into laughter. "This is me!" he exclaimed, pointing to a picture of a barrel-chested man in his 30s, stylishly dressed in a double-breasted Western suit.

It was 1968 when he was first compelled to leave Peking and work in the Chinese countryside. China then was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and he was a teen-age high school student. Now, the man is in his 30s, married, with a 5-year-old son, working in a factory--and still trying after 17 years to persuade Chinese authorities to let him and his family move back to Peking where they grew up.

China and Nicaragua announced the establishment of diplomatic relations, with Peking vowing to support Managua's "just struggle to safeguard national independence." A joint communique issued in Peking said Nicaragua, which previously had diplomatic relations with Taiwan, now "recognizes that the government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government of China and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People's Republic of China."

Oleg A. Troyanovsky presented his credentials as Soviet ambassador to China to President Li Xiannian on Tuesday, the official New China News Agency reported. Troyanovsky arrived last week in Peking.

An estimated 15 million rats have been killed in an extermination campaign in Peking that began in November, the official New China News Agency said Friday.

Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone will travel to Peking this weekend in a bid to improve relations that have recently soured over economic issues and Japanese attitudes toward World War II.