China's Territorial Disputes (17 page)

141    
Straits Times
(Singapore), “Disputed Islands: Japan Repels Chinese Activists’ Boat,”

24 June 2003.

142    “Politician Joins Activists in Landing on Senkaku Islands,”
Japan Times,
6 May 1997.

143    Russell Skelton, ‘Japanese Patrol Boats Keep Protest Ships at Bay,”
Sydney Morning Herald
, 27 May 1997.

144    IBRU,
Boundary and Security Bulletin,
Autumn 1999, 38.

145    Xiao Gongqin, “A New Nationalism to Concentrate Willpower (Ninju xiangxinli de xin minzu zhuyi),”
Mingpao Monthly
(Hong Kong), March 1996, 18-20.

146    
Shijie luntan junshi luntan
(World Forum Military Forum), “Beijing gai zhengce:

Baodiao bian aiguo xingwei,” [Beijing changes policy: Protecting Diaoyudao becomes patriotic behaviour].
http://www.wforum.com/wmf
(accessed 20 January 1999).    ^

147    I am drawing on Allen S. Whiting’s description of nationalism types. Aside from

assertive and aggressive nationalism, Whiting also referred to a third type of “affirmative nationalism,” namely patriotism. See Allen S. Whiting, “Chinese Nationalism and Foreign Policy after Deng,”
China Quarterly
, June 1995, vol. 142, 295-316.    
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148    Bruce Stronach,
Beyond the Rising Sun: Nationalism in Contemporary Japan
(Westport CT: Praeger, 1995), xvii-xxi. Stronach characterizes Japanese nationalism in the 1990s as not “state-oriented” or expansionistic, but “socio-cultural,” which involves identifying with a group and its desire to protect itself and raise its international image. I am in agreement with Stronach on the innocuous nature of its current manifestation in Japan, but will not preclude the resurgence of a less benign type of nationalism. A prolonged economic crisis, a reduction in living standards, or a reduction in government largess might lead to decreased support for democratic values and make it easier for nationalistic elements in the elite to convince the public that a return to the authoritarian, patriotic, militaristic and disciplined society of pre-World War II Japan is both desirable and necessary.

149    Extrapolated from data provided by
China Daily,
“Bilateral Trade to Hit US$ 100 b,”

30 September 2002; and JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization), ‘Japan’s International Trade in Goods (2002/9).”
http://www.jetro.gp.jp/ec/e/stat/
jpn_trade/200209.html (accessed 20 January 1999).

150    For readers interested in this “Energy Silk Road” project, please read Keun Wook Paik, “Pipeline Politics: Turkmenistan vs. Russian Far East Gas Development,”
Geopolitics of Energy,
1 September 1994, 1-8. Total Japanese energy loans to China from 1979 to 1993 reached $9.4 billion, of which $5.9 billion was for oil development, accounting for around 26 percent of China’s total investment in oil development during that same period. Japan has also provided a loan worth 700 billion Yen (approximately $7 billion in 1994 dollars) from 1996 to 1999. See Paik.
Gas and Oil in Northeast Asia,
173-174.

151    
The Japan Forum on International Relations,
“The Policy Recommendations on the Future of China in the Context of Asian Security,” Tokyo, January 1995.

152    For a history of non-governmental and governmental agreements on fishery

between China and Japan, see Jeanette Greenfield “Fishery Conservation and the Freedom of Seas,” in
China’s Practice in the Law of the Sea
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 93-105.    
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4 The Zhenbao/Chenpao/ Damansky Islands dispute

Introduction

In May 1991, after four years of intensive but secret negotiations, a boundary agreement was signed between official representatives from China and the Soviet Union. Ratified by the national legislatures of both China and Russia, the primary successor state to the Soviet Union, in February 1992, this boundary agreement would demarcate the 3,700 kilometers of border separating both states which runs along the
thalweg,
or middle of the main channels, of the Amur/Heilongjiang and the Ussuri/Wusuli.
¹
The border agreement also transferred to China some 600 tiny islets and rocks, uninhabited except for itinerant fisherman, which fall on the Chinese side of the mid-channel of the two rivers. These include the island of Damansky/Zhenbao, the site of two short but bloody clashes between Chinese and Soviet soldiers in 1969.

Following the collapse of more than a decade of friendship between the ruling Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Chinese leader Mao Zedong presented the Soviet leadership with a territorial claim on one million square kilometers of the Russian Far East, which, he said, was fraudulently acquired by the czarist Russian predecessor of the Soviet Union in two “unequal” treaties imposed on imperial China. Since then, there had been two series of boundary talks between the two states, a short one in 1964, and a long drawn-out affair that lasted from 1969 to 1978. Both failed to achieve any results, because the Soviet side preferred to interpret the treaties as demarcating the boundary along the Chinese bank of the rivers, instead of the
thalweg
, which was the Chinese position. And so it was to remain, until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1986 speech in Vladivostok, in which he proposed that the border should run along the main navigation channel, and suggested a fresh round of boundary negotiations. His offer was taken up by the Chinese, and two rounds of preliminary talks at the level of vice-minister the following year established the principle of deciding the border on the basis of existing treaties and the mid-channel division. A working group of diplomatic and military experts from both sides was established in 1988 to demarcate the border, and the border was re-opened. Except for a small island adjacent to the Russian city of Khabarovsk, the sovereignty over which has been shelved because of its sensitive location, the May 1991 agreement demarcated 98 percent of the boundary between China and Russia. This enabled border troops on both sides to be drastically reduced and bilateral trade to be greatly expanded.

Before we proceed to investigate what made it possible for Russia to forgo territory which only a few years before it was prepared to go to war over to retain, and for China to accept territorial concessions over which it was prepared to go to war to refuse, it will be useful to describe the geography and the historical background of the site, and the focal point of the most confrontational episode of the Sino-Soviet split
一
the island of Damansky/Zhenbao.

The geography of Damansky/Zhenbao Island
²

Damansky/Zhenbao is a half-kilometer by one-kilometer-long island on the Ussuri River, which forms the boundary between China’s Heilongjiang Province and the Primorye Krai or Maritime Province of the Soviet Union, now Russia (see Figure 4.1).

Zhenbao Island is located to the Chinese side of the mid-channel of the Ussuri. The Ussuri is a north-flowing river that originates from Lake Xinkai/Khanka and meets the easterly-flowing Amur River before the latter takes on a northeasterly course that ends on the shores of the Okhotsk Sea. The river typically freezes over for four to five months in winter, making overland travel to the island possible from both Chinese and Russian banks. Otherwise, the island can be reached by river craft. The Ussuri is a major fish-producing river, yielding some sixty different types of fish, the most abundant of which are cod and salmon. As a result, most inhabitants on both banks of the river derive their livelihood from catching fish. However, except for itinerant fishermen cutting holes in the ice to fish in early spring, Damansky/Zhenbao Island and the other islands on the Ussuri and Amur rivers have no permanent inhabitants.

The historical background of the Damansky/Zhenbao Island dispute
³

Prior to 1858, both the Ussuri and the Amur were internal waterways of China. This is because according to the Treaty of Nerchinsk signed in 1689 between czarist Russia and Qing China, the Sino-Russian boundary ran along the crest of the Outer Xing’an/Stanovoy mountain range north of the Amur. However, since the early seventeenth century, Russia’s exploratory expeditions and military movements toward southern Siberia and the Far East had been accompanied by the colonization and settlement of these territories and the development of towns and commerce which reflected both the national and state interests of Russia. On 28 May 1858, czarist Russia took advantage of a siege by British and French forces of the Chinese capital of Beijing, then called Peking, and pressured the Qing court into signing the Treaty of Aigun. This treaty ceded to Russia some 600,000 square kilometers of land north of the Amur, and established a Sino-Russian condominium over some 400,000 square kilometers of

Figure 4.1
The Amur-Ussuri boundary between China and the USSR

territories east of the Ussuri. In 1860, following the occupation of Beijing by Anglo-French forces, Russia entered into the Treaty of Peking (Beijing) with China and established sole ownership over the territories to the east of the Ussuri, thereby denying to China access to the Sea of Japan. While Chinese scholars depict the two treaties of Aigun and Peking as a manifestation of “czarist Russian aggression” resulting in the “annexation of Chinese lands,” Russian scholars on the whole argue that neither those lands nor their population had ever been fully incorporated within the traditional domains or regular administrations of the Chinese empire. Whatever the case, the Amur and the Ussuri became the international boundaries in the Far East between Russia and China. However, the fate of some 700 islands on the Ussuri and an island at the confluence of the Amur and the Ussuri was left undetermined by what subsequent Chinese administrations would term the two “unequal treaties” of Aigun and Beijing. Rather, each country simply assumed that it and not the other had ownership over the islands.

Prelude to the Sino-Soviet border conflict: 8 March 1963-1 March 1969

The immediate background to the border conflict between China and the Soviet Union in the spring of 1969 was China’s rejection of the Soviet Union’s claim to lead the world Communist movement, and its bid to become leader of the developing world against both American “capitalist-imperialism” and Soviet “social-imperialism.” However, the territorial issues that divided the two countries had been long brewing. As relations between them deteriorated from the late 1950s onward, what had started out as a dispute over ideology and doctrine, such as the desirability of Stalinist personality cults, the feasibility of Chinese “Great Leap”-style collectivization, and the wisdom of pursuing “peaceful coexistence” with the West, took on the impetus of assertive nationalism on both sides.

In December 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, enraged by Chinese criticism of the weak Soviet response to the American blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis, publicly denounced Beijing and taunted the Chinese for bullying India over the Sino-Indian border dispute in October-November 1962 while allowing “strong imperialist powers” to remain in control of Hong Kong.
⁴
Not to be outdone, Beijing indicated in a statement published on 8 March 1963, that the “unequal treaties” imposed on China by “imperialism,” including those signed with czarist Russia, might have to be reexamined and renegotiated.
⁵

There was no doubt then that the Sino-Soviet border issue required formal attention by the two parties. In “consultative” talks at deputy foreign ministerial level in Beijing in February 1964, both USSR and PRC delegations agreed that minor boundary adjustments should be made, especially over riparian islands, and that a new boundary treaty could be considered.
⁶
Beijing was then on the ideological and polemical offensive against Khrushchev, and insisted that the new treaty should include the Chinese contentions that the old treaties were invalid because of their “unequal” character, and that the border rivers of the Amur and the Ussuri should follow the main channel or
thalweg
, as it is known under international maritime law.
⁷
However, the Chinese side expressed its willingness to use the “unequal treaties” as a basis for negotiating a new boundary between China and the USSR.
⁸
The Soviet side refused to admit to the unequal character of the old treaties, let alone agree to their revision, and rejected the main channel as the basis for the riparian boundary.
⁹
The Soviet delegation favored instead the Manchurian bank, which it claimed was demarcated as such on an old, small-scale map appended in 1861 to the text of the Treaty of Beijing, which would give ownership to the Soviet Union of some 600 of the 700 or so islands on the Ussuri, totaling 1,000 square kilometers.
¹⁰
The Beijing round of talks ended inconclusively, but mutual agreement was reached to continue these consultations in Moscow on 14 October 1964. However, these talks were not resumed, ostensibly due to Khrushchev’s fall from power, but perhaps also because the Soviet leadership was upset over an interview given by Mao Zedong that July to a visiting Japanese delegation, in which he voiced support for Japan’s claim to the four Kurile islands occupied by the USSR since the end of the Second World War.
¹¹