China's Territorial Disputes (22 page)

Demarcations of the border were to be completed in 1997, but operations in the Maritime Territory had been blocked by its governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko, who had gained an ally in this matter in the deputy speaker of the Council of Federation, Anatoly Dolgolaptev.
¹⁰⁹
When Dogolaptev complained that the border settlement was “unfair” and Nazdratenko threatened to denounce the entire border agreement before the state Duma, Russia’s foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev firmly dissuaded the governor from his actions by reiterating that the border agreement would be implemented “no matter what.”
¹¹⁰
China, in the meantime, went about demarcating its own side of the border and did not express any official opinion on the argument between the Russian Foreign Ministry and Governor Nazdratenko and his allies both in the Far East and in the Duma. Since Far Eastern Russians obviously have trouble viewing their Chinese neighbor as a friend, the Chinese side must have recognized that pressure from them would only endanger the implementation of the agreement, and so wisely kept quiet. In contrast with the troubled eastern sector, the demarcation at the Altai border in the west proved mostly to be a technical problem, which was quickly settled with the initialing of an agreement at a summit meeting in Moscow between Jiang and Yeltsin in September 1994.
¹¹¹

Since the opening of the Sino-Russian border in 1988, trade and personal contacts between the two countries have increased tremendously. Large numbers of Chinese went to the Russian Far East (RFE) in search of jobs and opportunities to buy and sell. The numbers of Chinese workers in the RFE are not well known because no systematic efforts have been made to compile such information by Beijing, Moscow or the regional authorities. In 1993, according to estimates made by the Association of Siberian and Far East Russian Territories, about one million Chinese were living along the Chinese-Russian border and in Siberian cities, and more than 200,000 were living in the RFE alone.
¹¹²
The Russian government estimated that there were 150,000 Chinese in the RFE at that time.
¹¹³
A senior researcher at the Economic Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Khabarovsk documented 30,000 foreign workers living in the three territories of Amur, Khabarovsk and Primorye, and employed mainly in jobs requiring unskilled or semi-skilled manual labor such as timber-cutting, farming, construction and light manufacturing, but these foreign workers include both Chinese and North Koreans.
¹¹⁴

Even though most Chinese entered the country legally, their visible presence caused many Russian Far Easterners to fear being numerically overwhelmed through sheer demographic pressure. In the mid-1990s, Russia’s population east of Lake Baikal was under 7 million, while China’s three northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning contained 94 million people.
¹¹⁵
The Russians’ atavistic fear that a “yellow peril” could overwhelm them just as the Mongols had done in the thirteenth century often manifested itself as outright racism. Russians in the Far East have criticized itinerant Chinese merchants for selling them adulterated alcohol, poisoned meat and shoddy manufactures, and accused Chinese visitors of everything “from common, petty thievery to murders, rapes and violent robberies.”
¹¹⁶
To control and monitor the influx of Chinese immigration, Russia in January 1994 introduced new travel restrictions by replacing the regular passport issued by the Chinese for travel in Russia with a Russian visa, which required an invitation from a Russian source not easily

arranged.
¹¹⁷

Despite the lack of hard currency on the Russian side, and complaints about the quality of imports from the Chinese, the border trade accounted for $350 million in 1988, one year after the border trade was officially resumed, $700 million in 1989, and almost $1.7 billion in 1990.
¹¹⁸
Bilateral trade between Russia and China reached $4 billion in 1991,$5 billion in 1992, $7.7 billion in 1993, and $10 billion in 1994, of which border trade constituted $2.95 billion, $6.16 billion and $9 billion in 1992, 1993 and 1994 respectively.
¹¹⁹
Although in 1993 China became Russia’s second largest trading partner after Germany, with the new visa system in place, a marked decline in overall Russian-Chinese trade was registered. Comparing the first quarter of 1994 over the same period of the previous year, Heilongjiang’s trade dropped by almost 45 percent,
¹²⁰
while at the same time, the trade volume between Amur Oblast and China fell by almost 80 percent.
¹²¹
Still, Russian-Chinese trade went from $5.46 billion in 1995 to $6.84 billion in 1996.
¹²²
Russia had always maintained a healthy balance of trade against China, through its exports of computer equipment, electronics, and especially weaponry, in the form of fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, and interceptors.
¹²³
President Yeltsin had enthusiastically commented at the April 1996 Beijing summit on the desirability of bilateral trade reaching $20 billion in the year 2000.
¹²⁴
Although trade between Russia and China eventually came to less than $12 billion in 2000,
¹²⁵
it was likely the expectation of economic gains, more than any other, which made Moscow so keen to overrule the Russian Far Eastern authorities in their efforts to obstruct border demarcation efforts.

Opposition to transferring any land to China had become a mark of nationalism in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, and a test of credibility for local politicians. Governor Ishaev of Khabarovsk Krai even went so far as to speak against navigation rights already granted to Chinese ships to sail past Khabarovsk from the Ussuri into the Amur, charging that so doing “creates border incidents.”
¹²⁶
To advance the border demarcation work, President Yeltsin had to dispatch a letter to the residents of Primorski Krai to assure them that “by completing this work, we will fulfill the international responsibilities of our country, in this fully taking into account both all-Russian interests and the interests of the residents of the region.”
¹²⁷

The boisterous Yevgeniy Nazdratenko was appointed governor of Primorski Krai by President Yeltsin in May 1993, at a time when Yeltsin was attempting to gain support from the local politicians in his struggle with the Russian parliament. Up till 1993, Yeltsin had attempted to balance the need to implement his privatization policy at the local level with efforts to gain the backing of regional leaders against the Communist opposition within the Congress of People’s Deputies at the national level. At the same time, local leaders used this dependence in their attempts to extract more autonomy in their political and economic decision-making at the local level. The local authorities in the Far East wanted to increase the pace of privatization and decentralization for the purpose of gaining control over foreign trade, customs revenue, and joint ventures involving foreign firms, a move hotly disputed by the center.
¹²⁸
However, the center was expected to subsidize energy costs, which were kept low by the local governor to win popularity.
¹²⁹
The economies of the territories and provinces bordering China are weak, primarily based on fish and lumber. The region was, in fact, subsidized by the rest of the USSR up until its last years, and consumed 50 percent more output than it produced.
¹³⁰
Insufficient subsidies meant energy outages, electrical suppliers in debt, wage payment delays for coal miners, strikes and unemployment. As such, the huge drop in federal financial allocations to the regions with the collapse of the Soviet Union created fertile ground for the rise of localism. Articulating the loudest about Far Eastern grievances, Nazdratenko then decided that the best way to strengthen his position against his local rivals and the center would be to play the role of a strong leader in the Moscow-Vladivostok contest by opposing furiously the transfer of border areas to China.
¹³¹
The other regional barons were not slow in following his logic.

In March 1995, the governors of Primorye, Khabarovsk, Amur and Sakhalin indicated that they would not respect the terms of the agreement to transfer borderlands to China, and threatened to call a referendum to decide the territorial issue.
¹³²
Although this proposed referendum did not take place, it should be recalled that every deputy to the regional Maritime Krai Duma (legislature) voted against the 1991 agreement to transfer land to the Chinese.
¹³³
Responding to newspaper reports of illegal border crossings and smuggling from the Chinese side into Amur province and the territories of Khabarovsk and Primorye, where “hordes of Chinese rushed to develop virgin or long-fallow land,” Russian defense minister Pavel Grachev urged the Russian Federation’s Federal Border Service to be vigilant, expressing the common fear of Far Easterners that “persons of Chinese nationality are trying to conquer the Far East by peaceful means.”
¹³⁴
The deputy chief of the Federal Border Service also complained of border violations, illegal fishing on the Russian bank of the boundary rivers, and Chinese tourists overstaying their visa in Russia.
¹³⁵
The ownership status of Heixiazi/Bolshoi Island had yet to be resolved, and nine posts around the Sino-Russian border with North Korea were then yet to be demarcated. On 17 October 1995, Russian and Chinese negotiators acknowledged their failure to resolve the dispute over Heixiazi/Bolshoi, and decided to leave to “future generations” the final disposition of this island.
¹³⁶
Leaving boundary discussions for “future generations” was, of course, the original formula proposed by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 as a “no-solution” solution to the Diaoyudao/Senkaku dispute.

One possible scenario for the resolution of the dispute over Heixiazi would be for China to agree to demilitarize the island before administrative control is handed over from the Russians to the Chinese. Alternatively, the island can be divided along a narrow stream which runs the entire breadth of the island north-south in the middle, with China claiming possession over the western half and Russia taking control of the eastern half, which lies adjacent to Khabarovsk. Another solution may be for China to recognize Russian ownership over the entire island in exchange for the right to dredge the Tumen and control the right of navigation on the river all the way to the sea. However, the last option may be the hardest to achieve, for even if an accord could be reached to that effect, it would be difficult for both Russian and Chinese central governments to implement it, for the regional Khabarovsk and Primorye authorities run Heixiazi and Tumen respectively, and there are good reasons to expect them to form a common front against what they would see as careless attention to, if not outright betrayal of, the economic and military security of the Russian Far Eastern territories by Moscow.

Even the prospect of transferring just 1,600 hectares of land near the mouth of the Tumen river became controversial, as Russians prepared for their presidential election in June 1996, in which incumbent president Boris Yeltsin, the main driving force behind the border agreement, faced a serious challenge from nationalist forces led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the resurgent Communists headed by Gennady Zyuganov, neither of whom were sympathetic to territorial concessions. In a television interview in late 1993, Zhirinovsky mentioned the territorial transfer in the Russian Far East as part of a list of territorial demands by countries who had wanted to divided up and “humiliate” Russia.
¹³⁷
Earlier, the Russian nationalist had claimed that China was “occupying” the Russian Far East “through immigration and is preparing for a military invasion.”
¹³⁸
Zhirinovsky might have lost the election to Yeltsin, but he succeeded in capturing a majority of the Far Eastern vote. Even a Yeltsin supporter like Sergei Belyayev, leader of the “Russia is Our Home” faction in the Duma, hoped to make political capital out of the territorial issue by declaring that he considered the border agreement solely to the advantage of China and therefore “unacceptable.”
¹³⁹
In response to Yeltsin’s reiteration of his government’s intention to observe the 1991 border agreement “strictly and to the letter,” a member of the demarcation committee, Major General Voktor Rozov, resigned from the committee, saying he could not supervise measures that would damage Russian security by giving China strategic access to the sea.
¹⁴⁰

The United Nations Development Program began promoting the idea of a Tumen River Economic Development Area with the participation of China, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea in 1991, and China launched the Hunchun Border Economic Cooperation Zone in 1992.
¹⁴¹
Since then, local inhabitants of the Russian Far East have shared Rozov’s fears that China would develop a free economic zone with a large port, which means that it would stop using Russian seaports like Vladivostok or Nakodha for transit. I. P. Lebedinets, chairman of the Maritime Krai Duma, expressed his worry that the Chinese would follow up their construction of a port at the mouth of the Tumen with a naval base.
¹⁴²
A September 1993 article in a Russian magazine warned that the “handover of Russian land to China” occurring as part of the demarcation process “is merely the first step on the path of China’s further territorial claims against Russia.”
¹⁴³
Some Russian Far Easterners also consider it nothing short of sacrilege to abandon land containing the remains of hundreds of soldiers who fought for Russia against a Japanese detachment that probed the border around Lake Khasan in 1938 (see Figure 4.1).
¹⁴⁴
To prevent the placing of the last nine posts, the chief of the Ussurisk Cossacks, Vitali Poluyanov, vowed to send a team of his warriors to the Chinese border, to chain themselves to the border posts if necessary to stop demarcation efforts by both Russian and Chinese sides.
¹⁴⁵
Aside from such dramatics, the Cossacks had decided to set up a joint-stock company known as the “Cossack Khasan” to encourage settlers to build settlements, farm the land, and protect the state borders from violators, that is, the Chinese.
¹⁴⁶
Cossacks had been the first Russians to settle in the Far East, so their sentiments were perhaps understandable.