China's Territorial Disputes (19 page)

Resumption of border negotiations:11 September 1969-14 December 1969

When Kosygin and Zhou finally met at Beijing airport for four hours in the afternoon on 11 September 1969, Zhou had with him vice-premiers Li

Xiannian and Xie Fuzhi.
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While Li was a key moderate in the CCP Politburo, Xie was a political ally of Mao’s leftist radical wife Jiang Qing, and Zhou must have brought him along as an insurance against possible future accusations of having sold the Chinese position short if the Chinese were to reopen negotiations. In a conversation described as “frank” by both sides,
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Kosygin proposed leaving aside ideological differences and proceeding with the resumption of border talks at deputy ministerial level, reestablishment of ambassadorial relations, by then suspended for three years, and restoration of trade and economic ties.
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Proposals of such importance could not of course be accepted or rejected on the spot by Zhou, but it seemed quite likely that the ensuing deliberations within the Chinese leadership found the Maoist faction at the very least rather reluctant to accommodate the Moscow “revisionists.” The slogans for the 1 October celebrations made public on 16 September struck an uncompromising tone: one exhorted the Chinese populace to prepare for a war with both (American) “imperialism” and (Soviet) “social-imperialism.”
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That the absence of any conciliatory response from Beijing to Kosygin’s proposals deeply annoyed Moscow was suggested by the fact that on the day the slogans came out, the London
Evening News
published an article by Victor Louis, a Soviet journalist known to have close official contacts in the Kremlin.
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Louis warned China of the Soviet Union’s capability to apply a “surgical strike” or mount an invasion, clearly implying that that such options had been or were still being considered.

Perhaps the tactics of applying external pressure adopted by the Soviet leadership, culminating in Louis’ explicit warnings, finally convinced Beijing that the situation was becoming too risky and it should soften its stand toward Moscow. Perhaps the moderates in the CCP leadership eventually managed to persuade Mao to drop his principled opposition to the resumption of concrete border talks with “revisionists.” The Chinese leadership might have concluded that they had succeeded in proving to themselves and the world that the Chinese people had the guts of the revolutionary in challenging both superpowers at the same time. In any event, the Chinese government on 18 September reiterated its constant demands for a cease-fire and mutual disengagement of military forces to
status quo ante
positions, a proposal it repeated in an official letter to the Soviet authorities on 6 October.
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Having contacted the Soviets, the Chinese announced the following day that both sides had compromised and decided that the boundary negotiations would commence on 19 October in Beijing - a victory for the Chinese position - and that talks would be at the level of vice-foreign minister -a victory for the Soviet position.
⁴⁸

After China’s willingness to begin talks was made known to the Chinese populace, its government had to explain the sudden change from its longstanding policy of first securing Soviet recognition of the “unequal treaties” before border negotiations could commence. To this end, articles by PLA soldiers soon appeared exhorting the general public to guard against “the enemy’s dual tactics of negotiating on one hand, while vigorously attacking on the other,” and pointing out that “imperialism, social imperialism, and all reactionaries often use peaceful negotiations as a cover to launch surprise and large-scale aggressive war ... we must face this with high vigilance.”
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We can thus see from this that, even for a country like China, not usually identified as a representative democracy with institutional checks and balances, the governing elite still has to mold domestic opinion in order to legitimize its foreign undertakings, especially if there is a drastic change from established policy.

Why were the Soviets so insistent on bringing the Chinese to the negotiating table to resume boundary talks that had already been stalled for five years? Of course there was always the chance that the intermittent clashes occurring along their common border could turn into a full-scale war of uncontrollable passion and devastating magnitude between the armed forces and nuclear arsenals of both sides, the prospect of which no sane person would want to entertain. Many in the international Communist movement were plainly dismayed by the spectacle of two major socialist states engaging in armed conflict and were calling on both sides to settle their differences.
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The North Vietnamese, then at the height of their war against the Americans in South Vietnam, certainly had no wish to see their logistics and material supplies from the Soviet Union, which were transported by rail through China, interrupted. Coming so soon after the widely criticized invasion of Czechoslovakia, Moscow was not having any success in using the border conflict with China to rally Warsaw Pact allies around its defense posture, and the Chinese did not seem to have been cowed by Soviet threats of nuclear annihilation.

These are all important reasons why Moscow was so impatient for the Chinese to take their seats at the negotiation table; but perhaps the most important reason was its concern that continued Soviet posturing might impel Mao to seek a rapprochement with the Americans, which was what ultimately transpired. In December 1969, Beijing proposed reopening two sessions of Sino-American ambassadorial talks, which were accordingly held on 20 January and 20 February 1970.
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The Nixon administration seemed also to be reaching out to China with a limited relaxation of trade and travel restrictions to China by US citizens, and strong hints of a phased American military withdrawal from Vietnam and the Far East with the announcement of the “Guam Doctrine.”
⁵²

Like the Chinese, Moscow was not above playing a little international politics of its own. To convince Beijing that Moscow was contemplating the question of whether mainland China or Taiwan or both should henceforth represent China in the United Nations, the Soviet leadership dispatched Victor Louis on an “unofficial” visit to Taiwan in October 1968. Unfortunately for the Soviets, but fortunately for the Chinese, Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek was adamantly opposed to having anything to do with Communists in general, and Chinese Communists in particular. Chiang would rather resign his Republic of China seat at the UN, which he eventually did, than to have his delegation sit there with those whom he had always considered to be Chinese Communist “rebels.” And China knew that the Soviet Union could not fail to support Beijing for the China seat if and when a vote should come up, as the Soviets had always done so. Illustrating the point that an incredible threat or implausible blandishment is never a good bargaining tool, Moscow’s use of the United Nations vote to put political and psychological pressure on Beijing failed.

It was time for negotiations to begin. The Soviet delegation to the Beijing talks was headed by deputy foreign minister and former ambassador to Beijing, V. V. Kuznetsov, while the Chinese delegation was led by its deputy foreign minister Chiao Kuan-hua.
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The negotiations were carried out in great secrecy, but before long press reports indicated that the talks were stalled over Beijing’s insistence that the Soviets agree to mutual troop withdrawals from the disputed islands,
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a demand the Soviet side was understandably reluctant to concede, for their main bargaining advantage was force concentration in close proximity to the Chinese mainland. Later reports showed that Kuznetsov seemed prepared to offer Damansky/Zhenbao and several hundred islands on the boundary rivers to the Chinese in a plan for border readjustment, but no headway was made because the Chinese insisted that the Soviet Union first acknowledge that it was in possession of vast tracts of land acquired by the czars through “unequal treaties” imposed upon China, which the Soviets refused.
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As such, there was no sign of progress on the border talks when Kuznetsov and his deputy returned to Moscow on 14 December to report to his political bosses on the talks and receive fresh instructions.

Border negotiations stalled: 1970-1986

Kuznetsov returned to Beijing on 2 January 1970,
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and the talks resumed shortly thereafter. The Russians again offered Beijing several hundred islands, including Damansky/Zhenbao, on condition that the Chinese abandon their claim to other parts of Soviet territory, but the Chinese response was to insist that Moscow acknowledge the illegality of all past treaties. Moscow obviously could not agree to this condition without prejudicing Soviet sovereignty over the disputed areas for the future. Since neither side would move from their own position, the talks could achieve no result, and Kuznetsov returned to Moscow “for health reasons” on 10 June 1970. By the time the new Soviet chief negotiator, deputy foreign minister L. F. Ilichev, arrived in Beijing on 15 August, it was clear to both sides that he was there only to keep open a channel of communication, for even if the negotiators could agree on anything at all, the Level II win-sets on either side for ratifying whatever Level I bargains that were arrived at were next to non-existent. In the meantime, in July 1970, Kosygin again tried to put out peace feelers to the Chinese by sending a letter to Zhou containing a proposal to agree on the demarcation of the Soviet-Chinese border from Mongolia to North Korea, and an invitation to the Chinese premier to meet him in the Soviet Union.
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For his efforts, Kosygin received no reply. When the Soviet government proposed an agreement on “no first use” of nuclear weapons and the termination of war propaganda, the Chinese again did not respond.
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By the end of August, even Kosygin and Brezhnev had to admit that the talks were stalemated.
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Furthermore, given Ilichev’s background in ideological training and Chiao Kuan-hua’s leftist leanings, little could be expected from the talks’ continuation.

Meanwhile, all was not quiet at the front line of the Sino-Soviet territorial dispute. Soviet military expenditure had increased by 33 percent between 1964 and 1969,
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most of it spent on equipping its forces in the Far East. From March

1969 to the summer of 1970, Soviet forces near the frontier were increased from fifteen to thirty-five divisions,
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peaking at a height of forty-three divisions in 1975.
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In addition to long-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, the Soviets deployed hundreds of tactical nuclear missiles and bombers along the entire length of the border.
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As for China, following the launch of the “War Preparedness Campaign,” an elaborate program of defensive military construction had been underway in the border regions in the summer of 1969, and the intake of conscripts to the armed forces was increased substantially.
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By 1970, China had committed sixty-seven divisions to the defense of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia.
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Extensive civil defense measures such as the digging of air raid shelters and evacuation drills were initiated in many parts of China, especially in urban areas, and many defense and related industries were decentralized and transferred to remote locations in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and other parts of China’s southwest, far from the Soviet border.
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If the campaign had been conducted for the purpose of “regularizing” the hitherto chaotic atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution by directing the country’s attention and energy to the external threat posed by the “revisionist” Soviet Union, then it had largely succeeded. However, if Lin Biao had used the campaign to boost his own influence as heir-apparent to Mao, then their falling out during the second plenary session of the Ninth Party Congress at Lushan from 23 August to 6 September 1970, could only have had the effect of tempering the war hysteria and war preparedness campaign. By October 1970, the attention of Mao and Zhou had turned to United States’ maneuvering over Chinese representation in the United Nations, American journalist Edgar Snow’s much touted visit to Beijing, and the removal of more trade barriers and travel restrictions between America and China, some of which had been first relaxed in July 1969. When ambassadorial relations between China and the Soviet Union were resumed after four years at the end of 1970, Sino-Soviet ties were still icy, but they were no longer on the brink of war.

In January 1971, to break the impasse over the border talks, the Soviet delegation proposed that the two countries sign a “non-aggression treaty” renouncing the threat or use of force against each other. The Chinese rejected this as unnecessary, for they considered the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Alliance as still being in force.
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The Soviet negotiators were also willing to concede that the disputed Amur and Ussuri river boundaries should run along the
thalweg
, except for Bolshoi/Heixiazi, an island of 128 square miles lying at the confluence of the two rivers, which the Soviets regarded as of strategic value for the defense of Khabarovsk, the city literally a stone’s throw away from the island (see Figure 4.2).
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Indeed, to bolster Khabarovsk’s claim to Bolshoi, the Khabarovskii