China's Territorial Disputes (20 page)

Figure 4.2
The Amur-Ussuri junction

Krai Party Committee authorized the building of a large farm and dachas on the island.
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The Chinese did not move from their prior position of demanding that both parties maintain the status quo and withdraw armed forces from disputed areas. Given that Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and the Trans-Siberian railway were all close to the Sino-Soviet border, Soviet strategic concerns seemed to argue against border concessions that would increase the vulnerability of Soviet cities, communications links and military installations.
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There was to be no new proposal or movement on the boundary question during the Brezhnev era, although the ritual of border talks in Beijing continued. However, even these were broken off after fifteen fruitless rounds in May 1978 by the Chinese,
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displeased at the Soviet-inspired coup in Afghanistan the month before, and the conclusion of a friendship and cooperation treaty between Vietnam and the Soviet Union that February, which effectively turned both countries into Communist client states of the USSR.

Annual negotiations between PRC and USSR officials on navigation on the boundary rivers had continued uninterrupted since 1951, except for 1975 and 1976, when the talks broke down because the Soviets had insisted that Chinese ships ask them for permission to use the river channel to the east of Heixiazi (Black Bear) Island, or adhere to the river channel to its west. The Chinese refusal to do so was based on their contention that the international boundary runs along the eastern channel, which they regarded to be an arm of the Ussuri, while the Soviets insisted that the western channel was an arm of the Amur, where the proper boundary should be (see Figure 4.2).
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However, the navigational negotiations that resumed in 1977 were soon to be completely overshadowed by Soviet support for the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam in December 1978, and exploratory talks by both sides to restore state relations were canceled when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Beijing then insisted that the Soviets fulfill three conditions: withdraw troops from Afghanistan, end support for Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, and drastically reduce forces along the Sino-Soviet border, before the Chinese would agree to resume normalization talks. Although Mao had died, and overtures for dialogue were made by Brezhnev’s successor as CPSU secretary-general Yuri Andropov, and Andropov’s successor Konstantin Chernenko, the Chinese held fast to their “three conditions” for normalization, and no progress was made until Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded to the leadership of the Soviet Union in March 1985.

The Sino-Soviet boundary dispute 1962-1986: a look back

Although it was not altogether clear at that time, the release on 10 March 1969 of a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry would have far-reaching implications for the ultimate resolution of the Amur-Ussuri border between China and the USSR. After reiterating China’s historical claims to the areas that it regarded to have been alienated to czarist Russia after the “unequal treaties” of 1858 and 1860, the Chinese statement went on to say:
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According to established principles of international law, in the case of navigable boundary rivers, the central line of the main channel forms the boundary line which determines the ownership of the islands. Chenpao Islands and the nearby Kapotzu and Chilichin Islands are all situated on the Chinese side of the central line of the main channel of the Ussuri River and have always been under Chinese jurisdiction. . During the Sino-Soviet boundary negotiations in 1964, the Soviet side itself could not but admit that these islands are Chinese territory.

It must be pointed out that the
thalweg
principle, or the fixing of riparian boundaries along the median of a navigable channel, is but one of several techniques sanctioned by international practice, although perhaps it is one that is most widely used because it is seen to be “equitable.” However, one must still be impressed by the fact that a Chinese socialist country saw fit to formulate a concrete and substantive case in international law, no doubt devised through the diplomatic practices of Western “bourgeois” countries, to support their contention in a territorial dispute. While China had earlier resorted in its arguments to moralistic, pseudo-juridical concepts such as “unequal treaties,” distinguished more by emotional appeal than by legal veracity, this was the first time that the Chinese government had made an effort to draw on international law to bolster its claim to a disputed piece of territory. Understandably, the Chinese felt cheated of valuable pieces of real estate by czarist and other imperial European powers in the nineteenth century. Indeed, there is some parallel between the “unequal treaties” argument of the Chinese and the notion of the invalidity of contracts signed under duress or not entered into willingly in Western capitalist countries. However, if the test of the validity of a treaty under international law is one whereby the threat or use of force is absent, then we will likely find that most treaties between states had been entered into under circumstances not usually considered “fair” or “equal.” By concentrating on the near-universal norm of international law, the Chinese posted an easy propaganda victory over the Russians, who then had to explain why their treatment of the border issue was even more discriminatory than the respective practices in the “bourgeois” camp.
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By appearing to champion the status quo position according to international law against the unjustified Soviet challenge, the Chinese largely succeeded in playing to the gallery of Western journalists, diplomats and statesmen. Relying on international law and using the “unequal treaties” position to formulate the border issue also had the effect for the Chinese of concretizing the boundary question and isolating it from the ideological quarrel which formed the background to the islands conflict, so that the aggravation of tension on one issue would not automatically precipitate a clash over the other. Even if the
thalweg
principle was used by the Chinese for the purpose of scoring propaganda points and nothing more, this was the first indication that the PRC intended to abide by the rhetoric, if not the substance, of international law in boundary negotiations. The Amur-Ussuri boundary question was eventually settled a dozen years later by dividing the rivers between China and Russia along the
thalweg
, after the Chinese publicly renounced all claims based on the supposed “unequal treaties.”

Why did the Soviets consistently refuse to recognize the treaties related to the Sino-Soviet boundary as unequal, even though the Chinese were prepared to use these treaties as the basis for settling the boundary question? In the words of the sinologist George Ginsburgs,

the Soviets apparently felt they were being asked to gamble for too high a stake - first concede the “illegitimacy” of the conventions creating the present frontiers and thereafter trust that the Chinese would consent to preserve the frontier’s former contours. ... [T]he prospect for forfeiting a key down payment did not appeal to the men in the Kremlin, if, having collected this much, the Chinese then reneged on the balance of the contract. By this time, the Soviets would have done irreparable damage to their claim of possession of legal title to the disputed land by admitting that it rested on documents whose validity was suspect and would have found themselves with nothing worthwhile to show in return.
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Ginsburgs added that, “even assuming all went well, public opinion would undoubtedly credit the successful outcome to the moderation and generosity of the Chinese team.”
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In such a situation of “heads you win, tails I lose,” it is hard to blame the Soviets for not wanting to be cast to the mercy of their adversaries at the negotiating table. No country would wish to compromise its national pride, prestige and security by putting itself in the demeaning position of having to obtain charity from another country, least of all a great power like the Soviet Union.

The incidents surrounding Damansky/Zhenbao and several islands on the Ussuri and the Amur ostensibly arose as a result of a dispute over whether China or the Soviet Union had ownership of the islands. Recalling the fact that Soviet negotiators to the border talks had on four separate occasions in 1964, 1969,

1970 and 1971 explicitly offered the Chinese the islands which they had claimed, one cannot but be puzzled by the insistence on the part of the Chinese that the Soviets first recognize that the “unequal treaties” signed between czarist Russia and Manchu China were invalid. In fact, Zhou Enlai, in his meeting with Kosygin, said that the Chinese side did not demand that the border treaties be annuled, although he considered them unfair, and that China“recognizes the border which exists in accord with these treaties.”
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However, once Zhou submitted this proposed settlement to Mao, nothing further was heard from it. Why did the Chinese miss four opportunities to recover and establish undisputed claim over a string of islands which they had always insisted were theirs, even on account of the supposed “unequal treaties?”

The intense mutual hostility between Mao and Khrushchev; Mao’s feelings that he rather than Krushchev was the logical successor of Stalin to the leadership of the world Communist movement; Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s cult of personality and his advocacy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West; Mao’s belief in perpetual world revolution and his castigation of the “partial nuclear test-ban treaty” as a “dirty fraud” designed to preserve superpower “nuclear monopoly”;
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and Khrushchev’s failure to support Mao on his prospective Taiwan adventure in 1958 or supply China with a nuclear device as promised -these were all contributory factors to the Sino-Soviet schism and border crisis. However, the most direct explanation of why the Chinese leadership under Mao consistently refused accept the Soviet offer of the disputed islands was simply that, after Mao had tendered the bill for a million square kilometers of land to Khrushchev in 1963, national pride and pretensions to leadership of the Communist camp left Mao little choice but to refuse the small change of several hundred tiny dots of earth in the boundary rivers adding up to no more than a thousand square kilometers. As such, Mao could do no worse than attach conditions to the resolution of the border crisis, conditions that he knew the Soviets would have to reject. We learn the lesson here that strong leadership in the absence of a will to compromise cannot resolve disputes, and may even exacerbate them.

Unable to accept the existence of a world order dominated by two “status quo” superpowers, but lacking the “imperialist” capability of overturning it, China under Mao adopted a foreign policy stance of “prestige-maximization.”
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In the sense used by Hans Morgenthau, “prestige-maximization” involved technical assistance to developing countries, arms supplies and moral support to third-world revolutionaries, and arguments on doctrinal purity
vis-a-vis
the Soviet Union. Accepting from Soviet “revisionists” territory that China already considered its own would be worse than receiving handouts from one’s enemy, a notion entirely unacceptable to official or public opinion in China. In fact, unbeknownst to Mao, the Soviets had relinquished control of Damansky/Zhenbao as early as May 1969, before the Zhou-Kosygin talks. Knowing that the Soviets would never admit to the invalidity of the treaties under which the czars acquired the Far Eastern territories, the Chinese demand that they do so could be interpreted as a desire to demonstrate to one and all that the nature of Russian imperialism had not altered but was simply carried forward to the present as Soviet “social-imperialism,” and that China had been a victim of the aggression of both czars and commissars. Mao apparently figured that the postponement of a border settlement could do no harm as long as retaliation by the Soviets was not of such a scale that the Chinese could not handle alone, or with their new-found American ally. The Sino-Soviet boundary negotiations in the 1960s and 1970s thus constitute a good illustration of the fact that the strategies of Level I negotiators, especially those on the Chinese side, may not necessarily be to win over their opponents, but rather to stall. In this case, Mao had calculated that the benefit of achieving a border agreement with the Soviet Union was far exceeded by the cost to his own political standing and his country’s reputation. The outcome of the 1969 incident was thus a non-cooperative stalemate, based on physical intimidation through military build-up and deliberate avoidance of confrontation, in the sense that the distribution of gains (or losses) took place in a situation where neither war nor peace prevailed.

Given that the contested islands were little more than mud flats with no intrinsic value or permanent inhabitants to speak of, no material advantage would accrue from triggering a crisis over who should own them. The total obscurity from which after many years the territorial issue had only then emerged confirmed the general impression that it never represented an independent factor in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The purely localized nature of the incidents demonstrated the desire of both Chinese and Soviet authorities to confine the outbursts of violence, if they should occur, to an acceptable minimum. To retain optimal control over the situation,