How the Sino-Russian Boundary
Conflict Was Finally Settled:
From Nerchinsk 1689
to Vladivostok 2005
via Zhenbao Island 1969
Neville MAXWELL

In Vladivostok in 2005, the exchange of ratification instruments of ahistoric but little-noticed agreement between Russia and China signed in
Beijing in October of 2004 brought to an end more than three and half
centuries of their struggle over territory and for dominance. Thisagreement, the last in a series that began with the 1689 Treaty of
Nerchinsk, covered only relatively tiny tracts of small river islands. But
the dispute over these islands had been intractable for decades, longblocking wider agreement, and to resolve it, both sides had to compromise
what they had until then regarded as an important principle. That they did
thus compromise appeared to express the shared sense that no potential
grounds for divisive quarrel should remain at a time in which they faced acommon potential threat—from the US.
The history of the territorial contest initially between two great land
empires and then between their residual modern incarnations is a saga of
expansion and retreat, follies and misunderstandings, trickery, atrocities,
battles and near-wars, and see-sawing rises and falls of state power, andthat it has had its recent happy ending must make it a tempting subject for
a new historian’s full treatment: here, what is attempted is a synoptic
account with sharpened focus on the twentieth-century phase and- 47 -NEVILLE MAXWELL

especially the turning point that can now be seen to have been passed in
the all-out battle on the ice of the Ussuri River between the armed forcesof the USSR and those of the PRC on March 15, 1969.
Understanding of the development, crisis, and denouement of the
Sino-Soviet conflict in the second half of the twentieth century of course
requires reference to the wider political background. But the argument
here is that the boundary issue was central to the dispute and that
Beijing’s policy towards settling it was consistent, even unwavering, so
the focus of this article remains close, limited to the boundary issue itself,
and within this area, mostly to the fluvial eastern sectors.

Beginnings
In the very beginning, there could be no conflict because there was nocontact; indeed, in the little medieval Muscovite state, there was noawareness that far beyond the threshold of the Urals lay a great empire,
another civilization. At the time of first contact in 1567, when two
Cossacks reached Peking and unsuccessfully sought an audience with theemperor, China had been flourishing for centuries. But by the middle ofthe next century, the Russians’ great thrust of expansion across the Urals
and along the Siberian rivers had brought them to the Pacific seaboard andthey had turned south. They penetrated the Amur Basin and worked down
the river to its estuary; they founded a fortified township named
Nerchinsk on the headwaters of the Amur, and built forts and set up
trading posts for furs on the rivers. By the middle of the century, the new
Manchu rulers had realized that the incursions into what they regarded as
their domain were not the raids of freebooters, but represented an imperial
challenge. In the 1670s and 1680s, there ensued a war of the marches,with Russian outposts and garrisons challenged and besieged. In 1685, theRussians proposed negotiations to delimit a boundary, and the two sides
met in August 1689 outside Nerchinsk.
Each side, it appears, approached the conference confident of therectitude of its position and expectant that it would have its way. The
Russians’ aim was a boundary that would at least legalize theirsettlements along the Amur and permit access to the river: the Chinese
were there, however, under their emperor’s orders to make sure ofbanishing intruders—“scoundrels who cross the frontier to hunt, plunder,- 48 -

HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

and kill,” as the preamble in the Chinese text described them. 1 The
Chinese delegation (which included two Jesuit translators without whom
communication was impossible) had brought an escort and retinue
numbering several thousands, with cannon-armed junks on the river insupport, heavily outnumbering the Russian side. The opening sessions
showed the incompatibility of the two approaches, and deadlock brought a
Chinese threat to destroy Nerchinsk, under which menace the Russians
returned to the table and, at length, acquiesced to most of the Chinese
claims.2
The Treaty of Nerchinsk laid down a frontier rather than a boundary,that is, a separation of sovereignties that was zonal rather than linear,using for delineation major geographical features such as mountain ranges
rather than the precisely defined lines on maps and on the ground thatmodern states require. It ran from the Saiany Mountains, west of Lake
Baikal, to the Sea of Okhotsk along the watershed of the Stanovoi
Mountains. The Chinese had at first demanded a frontier further north,along the Lena River, and by settling for the more southern alignment,
they can be said to have relinquished the claim to a tract of some 90,000
square miles: the chief Russian negotiator would certainly haveemphasized this concession as his achievement—indeed, on his return to
Moscow, he was ennobled. For their part, the Chinese, too, would havebeen well satisfied. The treaty provided for the destruction of the Russian
forts and settlements in the Amur Basin, and its overall effect was topreserve imperial China’s territory from Russian encroachment for a
century and a half.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese Empire was welladvanced into its time of troubles, weakened by defeat in the Opium Wars
and spent internally by the Taiping Rebellion, while the Russians had
renewed their colonization of the Amur Basin and established settlements
on what the Treaty of Nerchinsk had preserved as the Chinese coast of the
Sea of Okhotsk. By the 1850s, repeated expeditions down the Amur to thesea had in effect restored and extended Russian control of the river, the1Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia: A Record and a Study, 1558–1899 (London: Curzon
Press, 1973), 40.
2
These circumstances lend support to Soviet historians’ description of the treaty as“unequal.”- 49 -NEVILLE MAXWELL

absence of Chinese resistance encouraging the Russians to enlarge theirdemands on a China now prostrate.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk having in effect been torn up, the Russians
demanded a new boundary settlement. The outcome turned the tables. By
the Treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860), China was cut off fromthe sea north of Korea, and from the entire Amur River below its
confluence with the Ussuri. A new Sino-Russian boundary aligned on the
Amur and Ussuri annexed to Russia huge tracts of what the Treaty of
Nerchinsk had recognized as Chinese imperial territory. Furthermore, theRussians—or perhaps an individual Russian acting on his own initiative—
not satisfied with this new deal that gave them so much, tucked anotherace up their sleeve, so to speak. In 1861, Petr Kazakevich, chief Russian
boundary commissioner, persuaded or coerced his Chinese opposite toaccept and sign a small-scale map (less than 1:1,000,000) that hepresented as giving expression to the terms of the Treaty of Peking: it did
no such thing. Where that treaty had left the Amur and Ussuri as boundary
rivers and therefore as shared international waterways, Kazakevich’s map
made them exclusively Russian by marking the international boundary
along the Chinese banks. He went even further.
The text of the Treaty of Peking explicitly runs the boundary throughthe Amur/Ussuri confluence, but the line on Kazakevich’s map takes adifferent route at that point. The rivers draw together at an oblique angle,
creating a delta of land between them; but some thirty miles short of thepoint where their main currents merge, a minor channel connects therivers, cartographically making an island of the land between the rivers.
Kazakevich drew his boundary along this channel, thus making inland
waterways of the river stretches between the mouths of the channel andthe confluence Russian, and making the inter-connecting channel itself aboundary feature. Kazakevich’s grateful government named the channel
after him (the Chinese call it the Fuyuan Channel). The notional islandthus created what the Russians call Great Ussuri, the Chinese Heixiazi, theword signifying a bear, so henceforth, “Bear Island.” In due course, theRussians began depicting Kazakevich’s version of the boundary on theirmaps, and over the years, authoritative European cartographers came tofollow suit. From the early 1920s, Bear Island was occupied by Soviet
citizens, coming with time to be regarded as an offshore development of
Khabarovsk.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

Feebly, the Chinese attempted to delay and deny ratification of thetreaties, but the Russians treated the issue as closed: townships-to-becities replaced settlements, Blagoveshchensk on the Amur, Khabarovsk at
the confluence, Vladivostok on the sea—the “Ruler of the East,” indeed.
“The Soviet Union, by recreating the Russian Empire in the 1920s, also
reproduced the same tensions with China that had existed under theTsars.”3 In the Russian perception, there was still a manifest destiny to be
fulfilled, however. The Outer Mongolian territory of China appeared as ananomaly, as did even Manchuria: both would, in the view from Moscow,
naturally become Russian, and political geographers in Europe tended
towards the same expectations. Japan’s irruption onto the Asian mainland
in the 1930s, taking Manchuria for itself, blocked this ambition. The
Amur and Ussuri became Russo-Japanese boundaries, already marked byconstant friction breaking out in some sectors into major battles. China,
though having achieved its own regime change from empire to republic in
1912, had in effect ceased to have a boundary with Russia in its northeast.
For China, there was a false dawn soon after the Russian Revolution .
In 1919, the commissar for foreign affairs, Lev Karakhan, announced theSoviet government’s unilateral and unconditional renunciation of all theTsars’ territorial seizures in China, and Lenin himself added color andemphasis to this sacrificial pronouncement. Moscow’s proclaimed
magnanimity aroused intense gratitude and goodwill in nationalist circles
in China, enthusing many who were throwing in their lot with theCommunist Party, among them Mao and other leaders-to-be. But at thetime of the Karakhan declaration, it so happened that much of the area thatthe new-born USSR promised to relinquish was out of its control, held by
the counterrevolutionary White forces. As soon as this temporary
adversity was corrected, Moscow tacitly revoked the Karakhan
declaration and set about consolidating the tsarist empire, reincarnated as
the USSR. The gratitude political Chinese had felt turned to rancor andresolve that when their country at last threw off its oppressors, it would
regain, if necessary by force, the lost lands that the Russians themselves
had momentarily admitted to be the Tsars’ booty. “For the Chinese, theboundary became the physical incarnation of China’s failure to fend off
the predations of European civilization, while for the Russians, their
3

Sarah C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia and Their Disputed Frontier(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 11.

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expanded boundary enshrined their country’s great power status. Thus, theborder became a potent but antipodal symbol for both countries—for one,it represented failure, for the other, success.”4
By 1949 when, in the words of Mao Zedong, China “stood up” as thePeople’s Republic, the epilogue of World War II had finally fulfilled
Moscow’s long-held aspiration: the Russians’ swift defeat of the Japanesein “Manchukuo” had given them at last full control of Manchuria, Russia
regaining the railway that crossed it and Port Arthur and developing
extensive interests in Xinjiang, while Outer Mongolia had previously
seceded to become a Soviet puppet state, the Mongolian People’s
Republic. On the border rivers, the USSR exercised control and claimed
ownership up to the Chinese banks. But for the new government of the
PRC, facing enormous difficulties in establishing control of a vast country
war torn for decades while the old regime fought on and monopolized
much of the state machinery, the overriding priority was to nourish andstrengthen alliance with the USSR, the only potential source of theeconomic assistance and political alliance that China desperately needed.

Collision Course
That live territorial and boundary disputes with several neighboring states
were part of the PRC’s inheritance was immediately demonstrated by theraiding back from Burma, across a long-disputed boundary, of
Guomindang forces revived and rearmed by agencies of the US. Thatneighbors’ encroachments into Chinese territory were even now not at an
end was forcefully shown in February 1951 when India, although acting
as a friend and supporter of the PRC diplomatically, neverthelessdeployed armed force to annex the Tibetan monastery center of Tawang
and a significant swathe of territory around it. China, by then engaged in
the Korean War, ignored the provocation.5 But beyond these immediatechallenges lay a problem that affected all boundary sectors. Even where
4

Paine, Imperial Rivals, 9.
It is sometimes suggested that Beijing did not notice this annexation—its control of Tibet
was at that time far from complete. But the Lhasa authorities were immediately informedof the Indian action and hotly protested to New Delhi; there was a faction within the Potala
well disposed towards the Chinese, and it is unlikely that the latter were not informed ofthese important events. Furthermore, the PRC embassy in New Delhi would have reported
to the Indian press accounts of the seizure of Tawang.
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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

they had been delimited, the treaties or the surveys upon which they werebased were deficient by contemporary standards. And with several
neighbors, no formal boundary had ever been created.
The Central Committee of the CCP took up the task of establishingpolicy guidelines to be followed as China sought to consolidate andformalize its boundaries, and from a statement of Zhou Enlai at the 1955
Afro-Asian conference in Bandung as well as from Beijing’s actions overthe following half century, it is possible to infer its decisions.
With neighbors with whom there had been no boundary delimitation,
China would carefully observe the status quo and, when both parties wereready, open negotiations to seek a mutually satisfactory territorial
dispensation, based on the traditional and customary line or zone ofseparation. Burma was the outstanding instance: others were India, Nepal,
Pakistan, and Mongolia. The boundary with Afghanistan was a special
case: it had been delimited, but by Russia and Britain without China’s
participation.
Where there had been formal delimitation, China would observe theboundary thus legitimized, without regard to the historical circumstancesin which diplomatic settlement had been achieved or imposed. This
fundamental decision expressed recognition that the bequeathedirredentist commitment to regain “lost lands” would, if pursued, embroil
the PRC in intractable dispute and likely conflict with many of its
neighbors, the USSR first among them, while putting the new China at
odds with the international community. “Under modern international law,the validity of treaties signed prior to the Covenant of the League of
Nations is not affected by whether or not they were negotiated underduress.”6 Thus, the PRC determined to observe its treaty obligations,however “unequal” in origin they might be.
When differences arose over treaty interpretation or implementation,
again China would urge careful joint observance of the status quo pending
negotiation to reconcile the differences. If there was a danger of patrol
clashes that would envenom public attitudes, the parties should agree on
mutual withdrawal of armed forces for an agreed reciprocal distance: suchwithdrawals would not involve civil administration nor have any bearing
on the two sides’ claims. Here, however, there was a crucial caveat. The
6

Louis Henkin et al., International Law Cases and Materials, 640, cited by Paine,
Imperial Rivals, 99, note 19.

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negotiation, taking as its basis the relevant treaty, could not be piecemeal
but must be comprehensive, covering the entire stretch of the boundary
concerned; it should also issue a new treaty, not a revision of the old one.
At Bandung, Zhou Enlai concluded his summary of his government’s
approach to boundary settlement with a pledge and a warning: “We shalluse only peaceful means and we shall not permit any other kind of
method.” But the policy he had declared was primarily conflict averse andconservative. It was as if the new Chinese leadership had followed theadvice of the nineteenth-century English statesman who enjoined officers
on the Indian frontier to “bear in mind that it is not a strip of more or lessbarren or even productive territory that we want, but a clear and welldefined boundary.”
An American scholar’s illuminating categorization of the strategies
governments may adopt for dealing with territorial disputes gives three:• A delaying strategy involves doing nothing except maintaining astate’s claims through official maps and public declarations.
• An escalation strategy involves the threat or use of force overdisputed territory.
• A cooperation strategy excludes the threat or use of force andinvolves instead an offer to compromise by dividing control of thecontested land or dropping outstanding claims.7
China’s practice and record over half a century indicates that, at the
beginning, out of a rational assessment of national self-interest, Beijingchose to follow the “cooperation strategy” and thereafter applied it
consistently, lapsing into the “escalation strategy” only in the case of the
dispute with Vietnam.8 Its two largest neighbors, however, for their own
reasons, adopted the “escalation strategy” to resolve their territorial
disputes with China, both thus imposing conflict on the PRC, India in theearly 1960s and on the USSR in the latter 1960s. In both cases, China was
victorious militarily but a loser in the contest for international
understanding.
7

M. Taylor Fravel, “Regime Insecurity and International Cooperation,” International
Security 30, no. 2 (fall 2005): 52.
8
In this instance, territory was not the real issue: China attacked to assert hegemony overVietnam.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

Until the late 1950s, both Beijing and Moscow let the boundary issuelie. In the honeymoon period after the establishment of the People’s
Republic, Moscow appears to have made no attempt to enforce a claim topossession of the full breadth of the border rivers; indeed, there is anindication that the Soviets may at one stage have been minded to waive it.9
Moscow had recently been seized with this issue of the precise
boundary alignment within a boundary river. An Anglo-Russian treaty of1873 had made the Oxus River/Amu Darya a boundary between Russian
imperial territory and Afghanistan: the text did not stipulate theboundary’s exact alignment within the river, and thus implied that it
would follow the center of the main stream, but over succeeding decades,
first the Russians and then the Soviets succeeded in imposing theirpossession and rule over the entirety of the river, denying Afghans accessto and use of its waters unless permission was sought and granted. Afghan
protests over this situation were ignored or rebuffed until a renewed
appeal from Kabul soon after the Second World War: renegotiation of theoriginal treaty in 1946 made Afghanistan’s equal rights on the river
explicit. Moscow did not at that time, however, choose to apply thisprecedent to the river borders with China.
Soon after the formalizing of the navigation agreement, still in theearly 1950s, Beijing requested and received from Moscow a set of maps
covering the northeast border areas, and these maps marked theinternational boundary along the Chinese bank—and along the
Kazakevichevo/Fuyuan Channel (henceforward K/F). This then was thefirst occasion on which Moscow played the Kazakevich card to the PRC,
and it may have been the first intimation of the claim that the new Chinese
leadership received. It seems unlikely that the exact alignment of what
was then a de facto Sino-Japanese boundary would have caught theattention of the Chinese Communist leadership during their peripatetic
years battling through insurgency to victory in civil war. Whether when
the Chinese received Moscow’s maps they were even aware of9

A Sino-Soviet agreement on river navigation signed in January 1951 took it as given thatthe boundary line lay within the main stream. The agreement specified that citizens of eachcountry were to enjoy rights of navigation and fishing on the boundary rivers “within [theircountry’s] waters up to the state border line.” If the boundary were taken to run where thewater lapped the Chinese bank, then Chinese citizens would have no “waters” at all fornavigation or fishing, nor access to any river island. The wording of the agreement
therefore implies a boundary line within the main stream.

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Kazakevich’s cartographic amendment to the Treaty of Peking also seems
uncertain. It was decades since Peking/Peiping had been the capital, and
the GMT government had taken with it on its retreats all the archival
material it could handle, Therefore, that the newly established leadershipof China could have readily found the vexed map relating to the Treaty ofPeking in the remaining imperial archives must, again, be uncertain, evenunlikely.
Since the request for the Soviet maps had gone from the PRC’s
bureau of survey and mapping to the equivalent department in Moscow,
the central Chinese government could feign unawareness of the ominous
territorial implications the maps conveyed, and did so. Wholly dependent
still on Soviet goodwill, with the Korean War exacerbating all theirproblems, the last thing the Chinese leadership could risk was a disputewith Moscow over a matter as invidious as territory, so Beijing did notchallenge the boundary alignment depicted on the Soviet maps. The
PRC’s own maps, when it began to issue them, showed the boundary as
running through the rivers’ confluence, however,10 and an early verbal
statement of China’s opposing view of the boundary alignment on therivers was made indirectly in the text of the 1961 Sino-Burmese boundary
treaty: here, it is stated that wherever a boundary is aligned on a navigableriver, it will follow the central line of the midstream. If the Soviet
ambassador in Rangoon had been alert, he would have signaled Moscowthat its boundary claim on the rivers was likely to be disputed.
Meanwhile, the rational efficacy of the cautious “cooperation
strategy” for dealing with boundary problems that the Central Committee
had decided on and Beijing’s commitment to pursuing it were
demonstrated in a series of mutually satisfactory settlements beginningwith Burma in 1961 and following on in the next three years with Nepal,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia.11 But that Beijing had by no means
10
Beijing dropped a claim that the GMT’s maps had always shown, however, to an area
known as the “Sixty-four Villages Tract” on the Russian side of the Amur. The Treaty of
Aigun had left that to China, but during the Boxer Rebellion, the local Russian authorities
had “ethnically cleansed” it by driving most of the Chinese inhabitants into the river. At
that time, Beijing did not publish any maps of a scale that would show just where on therivers the boundary lay. In July 2005, however, it released on the Internet about four
hundred detailed maps depicting the “politically correct” alignments of China’s boundaries,
lands, and waters.
11
These settlements were followed by others, with North Korea, Vietnam (though in this- 56 -

HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

found a panacea for its border problems was sharply shown in the case ofIndia: here, the Indians refused to negotiate, and China had to fight a short,fierce border war in 1962 to preserve the status quo against India’s
attempt to change it in its own favor by force of arms.12
Through the 1950s, the Sino-Soviet borders, thinly populated andlittle guarded, were for the most part peaceful, even tranquil. But theideological divergence that began with Khrushchev’s obituary repudiationof Stalin in 1956 quickly grew into a schism and played back with toxic
effect into state-to-state relations, the most drastic early consequence
being Khrushchev’s treaty-breaking termination of development aid to
China, with abrupt withdrawal of Soviet experts in 1960. As the 1960s
began, the minor, even trivial disturbances that in the 1950s had
irregularly occurred along the border rivers multiplied and changed innature. Misunderstandings or disputes among local inhabitants overfishing or agricultural use of islands that had previously been pacified, asa rule, by local authorities, now began to number in the annual thousands
and became matters for central government attention and reciprocal
accusation and blame. Opting for what is defined above as an “escalation
strategy” based on the threat or use of force, Moscow began physically tocase, only after a trivial dispute had been used by Beijing as an excuse for aggression), andLaos, the three ex-Soviet central Asian states. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first
century, the PRC had settled all its boundaries except those with India and the latter’sclient state, Bhutan.
12
The writer analyzed this dispute at length in Neville Maxwell, India’s China War,
(London: Cape, 1970) and has updated the analysis often elsewhere since then, so here
follows only a bald summary. The Indian government decided that it should define theboundary with China unilaterally on an alignment chosen in New Delhi, declaring that theboundary of its choice had been settled by historical process and was indisputable andconsequently nonnegotiable. For over three years, it refused Beijing’s calls for negotiation.
From 1960, the Indians began describing Chinese occupation of Indian-claimed territory as
aggression, thus convincing its political public that military action was needed to “repel
the aggressors.” First, New Delhi attempted a “forward policy” of military infiltration andencirclement to force the stronger and tactically advantaged Chinese positions out of
Indian-claimed territory. When this failed, it mustered forces to mount a frontal assault:
Prime Minister Nehru publicly proclaimed the intention to drive Chinese forces out of
Indian-claimed territory, thus legitimizing an attack in anticipatory self-defense by China.
Swift and overwhelming victory in this punitive foray was clinched by China’s preplannedceasefire and withdrawal. And although New Delhi’s refusal to negotiate a settlement
was—and remains—adamant, the de facto Sino-Indian border has remained more or lessundisturbed since the border war.

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assert what it perceived as its legal right to a China-bank boundary, andconsequently to treat any Chinese use of the rivers as incursions unlesspermission had been sought and granted. And while up to that time,
Beijing had been urging restraint on its border inhabitants who wished toassert traditional navigational and economic usages, it now appears that it
gave them a green light in this regard. So from Moscow’s point of view,
what had been occasional civilian border infringements had now become acoordinated state challenge to its boundary on the rivers.
In 1967, Soviet gunboats intercepted the first Chinese vessel heading
down the Amur after the spring thaw to pass through the confluence into
the Ussuri, boarded it and turned it back. From then on, this Soviet
blockade left Chinese vessels with the K/F Channel as the only connection
between the rivers, a passage too narrow at the best of times for thebiggest river boats and at times of low water, non-navigable.
The profound dispute over the lie of the boundary within the rivers,latent for generations, had now become open, critical, and explosive.
Moscow’s claim to a China-bank boundary and consequent“exclusive right of possession and sovereign jurisdiction” over the entiretyof the border rivers rested solely on Kazakevich’s cartographic
amendment to the Treaty of Peking. On its side, Beijing dismissed thismap as having no legitimacy, suggesting that it had been drawn up by
Russia prior to the signing of the Treaty of Peking and foisted onto theChinese imperial boundary commissioners by trickery. 13 The Chineserested their legal case on the wording of the Treaty of Peking and argued
from the long-established principle of international law that they had
articulated in the treaty with Burma: that, in the absence of any alternative
specification in the treaty, when a navigable river comprises aninternational boundary, the division of sovereignty will lie on the thalweg,
an imaginary line along the deepest part of the main channel. Under the
thalweg principle, the two parties become in effect co-owners of the rivers,
enjoying equal rights to their use and sovereign authority over the waters
and islands lying on their own side of the thalweg. That the text of thetreaty placed the boundary through the rivers’ confluence meant that the
K/F Channel and Bear Island lay wholly within Chinese territory, and in
13

The Chinese would have felt they had met with this kind of thing before. The
independent Indian government’s northeast boundary claim rested on a map drawn by an
English Kazakevich, so to speak, Sir Henry McMahon. See Maxwell, India’s China War.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

Beijing’s reading, created the “inalienable right for Chinese boats tonavigate the main channel through the confluence,” which is to say on thewaters offshore of Khabarovsk.
By this stage, the opposed policies adopted by the USSR and the
PRC had already locked them onto a collision course. Moscow was bent
on imposing on China its own reading of the boundary treaties and refused
to enter into the comprehensive negotiations that Beijing sought. Beijing
was determined to exercise what it considered to be its existing legal
rights along and on the rivers. If these policies were not modified by one
side or the other, they would ineluctably lead to armed conflict on theborders.14 While Moscow remained determined to deny that China had alegitimate right to river access and use and was prepared to exert force toprevent China’s exercise of its claimed rights, Beijing would have tochoose between acquiescence, in fact surrender, and resistance—which
would ultimately have to be by force of arms. Since China had “stood up,”there could be no course for the Chinese leadership other than resistance.

Collision
Sino-Soviet diplomatic exchanges about developments on the borderrivers in the early 1960s revealed that their differences over the meaningof the Treaty of Peking were going to be compounded and exacerbated bydifferences over how understanding might be reached. The Chinese, by
now with experience in successful boundary negotiations, argued that if
the two sides sought agreement in a spirit of “mutual understanding andmutual accommodation,” differences that appeared intractable could be
negotiated to mutual satisfaction. But they insisted that negotiations musttake the Treaty of Peking as the starting point and basis—and here, from
Moscow’s point of view, was the rub. To accept Beijing’s suggestion ofnegotiation on the basis of the Chinese reading of the Treaty text would beto relinquish the China-bank claim in advance. Moscow argued that theboundary line was already clearly established as running along the
Chinese bank and through the K/F Channel by the Treaty of Peking when
14

Moscow’s maps and China’s diverged much more markedly in the western sector of
their borders, creating very large disputed areas over which, unless differences werepeacefully negotiated, there would again inevitably be conflict. This article will leave thatarea of dispute aside, concentrating on the border rivers.

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read with its “related documents” (i.e., Kazakevich’s map), and that there
was therefore no need for further negotiation. The Sino-Soviet boundary
was already settled, and “in reality, there is no territorial question between
the Soviet Union and China.” 15 Moscow would consent only to
discussions aimed at ironing out differences that might remain on
particular sections of the borders—and it would specify just which
sections would be open to discussion. Thus, China’s offer to negotiate theboundary as a whole was refused, Moscow in effect arrogating to itself theright to unilaterally define China’s boundaries, just as New Delhi had
done a few years before.
By this time, Cold War developments, feeding into the Sino-Soviet
confrontation, had introduced a new element into the border dispute—one
that was extraneous in essence and largely rhetorical but that neverthelesscomplicated it. Beijing accused Khrushchev of “adventurism” and“capitulationism” in the 1962 Cuba missile crisis: Khrushchev retorted byaccusing China of craven acquiescence in Britain’s retention of HongKong. In Beijing’s perception, it was behaving regarding Hong Kong asshould any responsible member of the international community; rather
than simply taking over Hong Kong, as it could easily have done in 1950,
it had scrupulously observed its treaty obligations and allowed theimperialists to stay on.16 So Beijing snapped back at Moscow in words tothis effect: “You taunt us that we should have broken a treaty and used
force to seize back Hong Kong, but how would you like us to break theTreaty of Peking and seize back the lands the Tsars stole?” Moscow
took—or pretended to take—this rhetorical rejoinder as revealing that a
serious threat of irredentist aggression lay beneath Beijing’s description of
the Treaty of Peking as “unequal.” So while in fact the Chinese position
and approach were unaltered, its consistency became obscured by the
hotly debated side issue of “unequal treaties.”
In Beijing’s account, China began urging negotiations in 1960, and in
1963, put forward a detailed proposal for freezing the situation on theborders and separating armed forces so that local conflicts could be
avoided, pending a negotiated settlement. But the first parley on the15

Soviet statement of June 13, 1969. See, Pravda, June 14, 1969.
In this case, patience was certain to be rewarded because the treaty in question was alease, the termination of which would necessarily result in Britain’s retroceding the islandcolony—as it did in 1997.
16- 60 -

HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

growing conflict over the rivers, when it opened in Beijing in 1964, wasschizophrenic in nature, the Chinese regarding the occasion as the openingof boundary negotiations and the Russians insisting that they had comeonly for “consultation” over some local problems on the rivers. By then,furthermore, real enmity had developed between the once fraternal allies,
and the meeting achieved nothing and was not followed up. A faint gleamof light can now be seen to have shone, however, in the intimation by theSoviet side that Moscow might show magnanimity by allowing thethalweg principle to be applied to the rivers—but only downstream as far
as the K/F Channel. Whether the Chinese appreciated it at the time or not,this showed that what fundamentally mattered to Moscow, the ultimately
nonnegotiable nub of the dispute, was its permanently continued
possession of Bear Island, the island formed at the confluence, offshore of
the now great city of Khabarovsk. To the Chinese in 1964, however, thehint that decades later was to develop into the great compromise that
finally closed the whole dispute, passed unnoticed, or was anyway ignored.
As Beijing saw it, the Soviet side could not “concede” what by law
already existed, a thalweg boundary, so its offer was meaningless.
The fruitless 1964 meeting left the border rivers as the stage for acontinuing struggle, unequal at first. All along the rivers, Chinese civilians,
their numbers much increased since the early 1950s and their morale
enlivened to audacity by the Cultural Revolution, sought to exercise rightsof access to and use of the islands and waters on their side of the mainstream, and they were no doubt now encouraged to do so by theirgovernment. And all along the rivers, Soviet border guards, military units
under ultimate KGB control, moved to thwart them. Fishing nets andboats were seized, wooden craft were rammed by Soviet gunboats, highpressure hoses were played on their crews. On the winter ice, troops inarmored personnel carriers harried Chinese civilians on the islands,
sometimes running them down, sometimes abducting them.
This one-sided struggle, passive civilian resistance to nonlethal
military force, was regularly filmed by official Chinese cameramen, to beprinted in a propaganda booklet, “Down with the New Tsars” and shownin a film of the same name. But, it often appeared to the confusion andanger of the victims of Soviet strong-arm methods that the Chinese statestood by, making no effort to intervene to protect its citizens. By the late1960s, the Soviet border guards had largely carried out their orders tokeep what Moscow held to be their national territory inviolate against- 61 -NEVILLE MAXWELL

incursions by Chinese civilians. While there could always be an
occasional furtive but successful foray to fish or forage for hay, whereguards were absent or looking the other way, by and large, Chinese
civilian access to the rivers had been cut off. The cost of the dispute to theSoviet Union had, however, already become very high, and promised tocontinue indefinitely. Moscow apparently had by now come to believethat Beijing’s approach, its insistence on negotiation, was cover for anulterior irredentist intention, and had therefore greatly increased its
concentration of military forces in the Soviet Far East and Mongolia.
Clearly, it was becoming urgently necessary for Moscow to bring theissue to a showdown, which is to say to demonstrate that China’s attempt
to gainsay the Soviet reading of the legal situation was useless. Only when
Beijing acceded could the onerous burden of the Soviet Army’s fareastern deployment be eased.
By the winter of 1968/9, the crux of the dispute had shifted. Chinese
civilian use of the rivers having been effectively terminated, what
continued as a provocation to Moscow was the persistence of the Chinese
frontier guards in maintaining regular patrols as if the river surfaces andislands up to midstream belonged to China. While this continued, thematter could not be considered closed, the dispute frozen, enabling troop
concentrations to be thinned out. So the methods of coercive but nonlethal
deterrence the Soviet frontier guards had successfully used against
Chinese civilians were now turned against their opposite numbers on the
Chinese side. And although the Chinese frontier guards (PLA, though notof the main force) were no match in their equipment for the Soviet borderforce, they were armed as light infantry, trained, and of high morale.
The orders given to the two sides must have mirrored each other:
Moscow to its border guard units, “Use all necessary force short ofgunfire to keep the PLA off the rivers”; Beijing to its force, “Avoid
confrontation, but at all costs maintain your patrolling; fire only if fired
upon.” In this contradiction, the issue came to its climax—irresistible
force meeting immovable object, each side perceiving its policy as
defensive of an inalienable national interest. The winter months of 1968/9
saw the troops on the two sides doing their best to carry out their mutually
exclusive orders. The Soviet force would use its far greater mobility
through helicopters, trucks, and armored personnel carriers on the ice toconfront PLA patrols with superior forces: if the Chinese did not respondto orders and threats to get back to their bank, they would be physically- 62 -

HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

driven back. When Chinese patrols were cornered, they would be beaten
up to discourage return. So it went on, with the contest of wills showing
no sign of ending. The Chinese border guards persisted in patrolling, andBeijing began military preparations for a conflict it recognized as
unavoidable.
So on March 2, 1969, near a little island that hugs the Chinese bankof the Ussuri known to the Russians as Damanskii and to the Chinese as
Zhenbao, the inevitable clash between the border guards of the two sides
duly occurred. Confronting each other at close quarters on the ice, bothsides opened fire, each inflicting fatal casualties on the other.
As would be expected, the two sides’ accounts of how the skirmish
began contradict each other. The question of who fired first has minimal
historical significance: if the clash had not occurred on that day and at thatplace and in that precise manner it would certainly have occurredsomewhere else on the rivers, somehow, before the winter ended.
Nevertheless, academic argument about it has continued to the present.
Here, it is necessary only to summarize the two opposing accounts.
The Soviet version tells of their small force, armed of course but not
expecting combat, intercepting an intruding Chinese patrol on the ice near
Zhenbao/Damanskii to exhort or force them to return to their own territory.
When the Soviet troops were close to the Chinese, the latter opened fire
without warning, instantly killing several of the Soviet troops. The Sovietsbegan to shoot back but found themselves enfiladed by a previously
unseen secondary PLA force lying under cover on the island itself. Taken
by surprise and outnumbered, suffering more casualties, the Soviet troops
nevertheless successfully fought back, receiving some reinforcements byarmored troop carriers. The fighting ended with their having driven theirenemy back and taken control of Zhenbao Island [since it is now formallyrecognized as Chinese, this name will henceforth be used here].
In the PLA participants’ account,17 the troops in one of their patrols
had been given a brutal beating a few weeks before when outnumbering
Soviet troops who had cornered them on Zhenbao Island, and had been
warned that if they tried to return, they would be fired upon. To safeguard
his men, the local commander began covering the patrols on the ice by
preplacing a force on the island. True to their previous threats, when the17

Given at length to the writer by participants, at the site of the battle, in 1973 andreported in China Quarterly, no. 56 (October/December 1973).

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Soviet troops disembarked from their vehicles on the day of the clash,they came with weapons loaded and at the ready and wearing steel
helmets—and quickly opened fire on the PLA patrol on the ice, killing
several. The immediate intervention of the covering troops on the island
meant that the Soviet force was outnumbered, and at the end of theskirmish, the PLA was left in control of the island.
Two observations may be made:First: That the Soviet government, its patience exhausted, hadchanged its orders to its border forces so as to free them to use lethal fire
if nothing else would end Chinese provocations is by no means
improbable; indeed, exactly such an “escalation” was inherent, evenmandatory, in Moscow’s approach to the dispute.18 Beijing later claimed
to have received intelligence confirming that Moscow had thus changed
the rules of engagement set for its border guards.
Second: Since the PRC leadership was determined not to acquiesce toSoviet use of force, it would have accepted that ultimately, pressure would
have to be resisted by force of arms. Thus, for the Chinese, it was crucial
that when the inevitable conflict broke out, it was on grounds and incircumstances favorable to a decisive Chinese victory. The terrain around
Zhenbao Island exactly suited this essential requirement, and since it canhardly have been coincidence that the fighting broke out there, it is most
likely that it happened through Chinese planning and maneuver. The
firefight may have begun either when the Soviet troops, having fallen intoa trap, sprung it by opening fire, or when the Chinese side, having lured
the Soviets into the trap, sprung it themselves by opening fire. So thequestion of “who fired first?” must remain open, but it is of little
importance.
The essence of the matter is that for several years, the USSR had
been on the strategic offensive, using overwhelming local superiority inthe attempt to force upon the PRC a boundary claim profoundly inimical
to China’s interests, and one that had weak, even spurious, legal
justification. At Zhenbao, the Chinese stood their ground and fought an
18

How an “escalation strategy” can entrap governments that adopt it is illustrated by the
Indian experience. The original Indian intention was to use force peacefully, as it were,aiming to extrude the Chinese from Indian-claimed territory without driving them out withgunfire. But the logic of this approach meant that when it failed, India had no other resort
but to prepare an all-out frontal assault.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

action that in their view was wholly analogous to the “counterattack in
self-defense” that they had launched against India in October 1962.
Accounts reflecting later interviews with high-ranking PLA officers
contradict parts of what the writer was told by low-ranking participants in
1973. General Chen Xilian, area commander in 1969, told an interviewerthat the PLA had been preparing for a decisive clash for months, and as
the Soviets increased their pressure in the Zhenbao area, had deployedcrack, combat-tested troops to confront them there. Directcommunications were set up to Beijing from what would become thebattlefield so as to give the national leadership ultimate control. “Whenthe Soviet troops attempted their provocation on March 2,” General Chen
recalled, “they actually were hopelessly outnumbered by us. We won aclear victory on the battlefield”—a victory that was to be confirmed on
March 15.19 This outcome taught Moscow the lesson Beijing intended:that if China was to be forced into bowing to Soviet territorial claims, it
could only be through all-out war—a prospect at which, the Chinese
believed (rightly as it turned out), Moscow would ultimately baulk.
The Chinese claim that they won that first skirmish, never losing
control of the island, is apparently confirmed in the Soviet reaction. If theSoviet troops had beaten the Chinese back off the river and the island, as
Moscow claimed, then they might have decided that their opponents had
been taught the necessary lesson and been content to continue their watch
for another intrusion. But in the event, the Soviet side immediately began
a rapid and heavy build-up of forces, reaching far beyond the usual lightarmament of the border units. It included strong infantry units of theregular army in at least brigade strength, a detachment of T62 tanks,
recoilless rifles, and artillery, including multiple rocket launchers: thepurpose of this concentration could not have been other than to launch apunitive and decisive attack that, by regaining Zhenbao, would teach the
Chinese that winning a skirmish by surprise attack was one thing but
facing the resolute might of the Soviet Army in prepared battle, quite
another.
It was impossible to hide this military concentration from the
Chinese—their eyes and ears were sufficient to keep them informed andanticipatory of what was to come. They concentrated local border guard
19

YANG Kuisong, “The Sino-Soviet Border Clash of 1969: from Zhenbao Island to SinoAmerican Rapprochement,” Cold War History 1, no. 1 (August 2000).

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units but also called up regular PLA units with artillery and especially
recoilless rifles and other anti-tank weapons, and could await the day of
attack with confidence. This was because, for the original confrontation,
the local PLA commander had well remembered the fundamental military
injunctions of Mao Zedong: “Choose the battlefield”; “Fight only when
you are sure of victory.” The topographical situation of Zhenbao isunusual, perhaps unique on the Ussuri at least, in that the ground on the
Chinese bank beside the island rises immediately and steeply into a long,
low ridge. Troops and light artillery emplaced on that ridge can dominate
the island, which is only about a hundred meters from the Chinese bank,as well as the approaches to it from the Russian bank four hundred meters
distant, and from up- and downstream. Military cadets presented withsuch a tactical problem at a sand table exercise would instantly grasp theanswer: for a force attacking from the Russian bank to seize the island, it
is necessary first to occupy the high ground beyond it.
But the unfortunate local Soviet commander and his troops had toignore this tactical imperative and fight at a decisive disadvantage.
Moscow’s very insistence on a China-bank boundary tied the hands oftheir military in this local action. It meant that to land troops on the
Chinese bank admittedly entailed invading China—an act of war theconsequences of which, Beijing had warned, would be all-out conflict on
every front. Since the USSR was not then ready to go to war with China,
the outcome of the battle on March 15, 1969 was a foregone conclusion:for the Soviet forces, it was unwinnable.
The telling tactical advantage enjoyed by the Chinese seems to havebeen compounded by ineptitude of the local Soviet commander. Rather
than being concentrated for the assault, the strong Soviet forces weredissipated in three successive attacks, each stronger than the previous one.
In the final attack, the commander of the Soviet troops lost control of thebattle—and his life—by joining the crew of a tank. The long day’sfighting ended with the situation just as it had been since the night ofMarch 2: Zhenbao Island remained under PLA occupation and control.
In its historical context, this Chinese victory was momentous,
marking the closure of the era begun in the mid-nineteenth century during
which Russia could exert military superiority to expand its borders over
China’s resistance.
For Moscow to admit that it had accepted defeat in the second
Zhenbao battle was unthinkable. “The events on Damanskii had the effect- 66 -

HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

of an electric shock in Moscow. The Politburo was terrified that the
Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into Soviet territory . . .”20
The intensity of the shock caused to the Soviet public by news of theoutbreak of fighting against China can be gauged by a reading of
Evtushenko’s elegiac call to battle against the barbarian Asiatic hordes,“On the Red Ussuri Snow.”21 So every effort was made to convince theSoviet people—and the international community as well—that the battle
ended in a crushing Soviet victory, won over “human wave” attacks thatcost the Chinese thousands of casualties. (There are fifty-one graves in
China’s memorial cemetery for those killed in the two days of fighting.)
These efforts were largely successful, and their delusory effect lingers tothis day, expressed in histories and sustained in academic papers in theWest as well as in Russia. For its part, Beijing did not rub in its victory byboasting of it, this restraint being taken of course as admission of defeat.
There was an international predisposition to accept the Soviet versionof events. As a contemporary observer put it, “so solidly built into ourconsciousness is the concept that China is conducting a rapacious andbelligerent foreign policy that whenever a dispute arises in which China is
involved, she is instantly assumed to have provoked it.” 22 Thisconditioned response had served the Indian government well at the
beginning of the 1960s, enabling it to spread the belief that it was Beijing
rather than India that was refusing to negotiate a settlement, and even topresent China’s final punitive response to India’s sustained militarypressure as “unprovoked aggression.” Thus, in the general international
perception in 1969 and long afterwards, the Chinese had tried out on the
Russians in the first Zhenbao clash the bullying methods they had used
20

Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985),
164 quoted by Christian Ostermann, “New Evidence on the Sino-Soviet Border Dispute,1969–71,” Bulletin: Cold War International History Project 6/7 (Winter 1995/1996).
21
The text in translation is on 211–213 in Studies in Comparative Communism: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 2 no. 3/4, (July/October 1969). There is a full and most valuable
collection of documents concerning the diplomatic and political repercussions of theZhenbao clashes in this double issue.
22
Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 223. No one
reading American publications on China even now would confidently conclude that
Greene’s observation is no longer true. Even on the Zhenbao incidents, there is a steadytrickle of American academic papers that, by removing the issue from the context of theboundary dispute, which alone makes it comprehensible, try to prove that the PRC was
guilty of an aggressive and unprovoked deed of violence at Zhenbao.

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against India, and the “defeat” they suffered in the Soviet counterattack
was well deserved.
The battles on the Ussuri ice enflamed the whole length of the SinoSoviet borders, with artillery fire and counter-fire in several sectors but nofurther infantry battles. In the western sector, Moscow took its revengewith annihilation attacks on isolated Chinese border force patrols, lethal
little actions with no military or political significance: around Zhenbao
itself, Soviet batteries continued fire for weeks, barrages extending deep
into Chinese territory and only gradually becoming desultory. But the
Chinese leadership, having in their view successfully taught Moscow a“bitter lesson,” was content to let that sink in, and saw no necessity to takefurther military action.

Settlement
Moscow immediately began to seek talks. Prime Minister Andrei Kosygin
put through a telephone call to Beijing on March 21 asking to speak toeither Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai. Beijing declined to engage in “hotline”
exchanges, advising the Soviets to “calm down” and communicate
through normal diplomatic channels.
It was only after six months that Beijing agreed to Soviet calls for asummit meeting, and Kosygin went to meet Zhou Enlai at Beijing Airport,a journey to Canossa if ever there was one. While Beijing saw thisSeptember meeting as itself marking a “great victory” for China, its soleachievement seems to have been a joint “no war” understanding, which,however, Moscow did not confirm. Zhou took the opportunity to restate
the consistent Chinese approach in border disputes, quickly confirming hisoral persuasions in a letter to Kosygin: strictly maintain the status quo;
avoid further armed conflict by withdrawing armed forces for an agreed,
reciprocal distance (this was understood to be without implication forsovereignty); and resume negotiations to resolve all disputes.23 There isevidence of a “hawks v. doves” division within the Soviet leadership at
this time. For example, the Chinese noted that Kosygin was given ademonstratively low-grade airport reception on his arrival back in
Moscow from his visit to Beijing. At all events, the Zhou/Kosygin
23

Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 223.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

meeting by no means produced the breakthrough that, his letter suggests,
Zhou hoped had been achieved. Moscow did not accept the proposals
Zhou had put to Kosygin, and although negotiations were resumed in
Beijing in October, no progress was made. The borders, the disputeunresolved, only gradually relaxed into an uneasy and protracted
stalemate. A turning point in a slow and wary return towards normality
may be seen in the lifting of the Soviet blockade at Bear Island in 1976.24
During this period, however, Moscow greatly increased its militaryconcentrations along the borders and in Mongolia, and encouraged thebelief that it was ready to launch war with China that could begin with anuclear strike.
A breakthrough did come at long last, however, in 1986 when
Moscow gave up the aggressive “escalation strategy” and opted insteadfor cooperation. It accepted the basic Chinese argument: that negotiations
must be based on the Treaty of Peking, with its implied provision that thethalweg principle be applied to the border rivers, and should becomprehensive, covering all boundary sectors. The new Kremlin
leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev, seeking to ease the exhaustingburden of the huge military concentrations in the Far East as well as thewar in Afghanistan, appears to have accepted that the claim to “exclusive
right of possession and sovereign jurisdiction” over the border rivers was
unsustainable, if not unreasonable (Perhaps the 1946 renegotiation of the
Oxus boundary was recalled). Furthermore, it may have been appreciatedin the Kremlin that the China-bank boundary claim was not the essence of
the issue from Moscow’s point of view: as far as the river sector wasconcerned, it was retention of Bear Island that was critical, indeed
nonnegotiable.25 While there were thus pressing considerations in favor ofa radical reconsideration of policy on the boundary issue, Moscow,
perhaps Gorbachev personally, should be given full credit for a notable actof statesmanship—such a reversal of policy, with its implied admission ofprevious error, is historically rare.26
24

See the writer’s article “Why the Russians Lifted the Blockade at Bear Island” Foreign
Affairs 57, no. 1 (fall 1978).
25
Why this has throughout been an absolute sticking point for Moscow seems explicable
only by Russians’ historical experience with “threats from the east.” When a river serves as
an international boundary, it is natural that river-side cities will have a neighbor—and
potential enemy—on the opposite bank. Blagoveshchensk is such an example.
26
India still awaits its “Gorbachev,” a politician with the wisdom and courage to repudiate- 69 -NEVILLE MAXWELL

Gorbachev announced Moscow’s reversal in a much-heralded speechdelivered in Vladivostok in July 1986. First expressing Soviet“understanding and respect” for the “great Chinese people” in their drivefor modernization, he went on to declare that the Amur frontier should not
be a barrier but “a means of uniting the Chinese and Soviet people.” And
then came the crucial sentence: “The official border could pass along themain stream.” Small keys can unlock massive doors.
Beijing responded promptly and positively, and boundary
negotiations proper began in a few months. Now that both sides sought
agreement, from the common ground of the thalweg principle and the textof the treaty, progress could be made—but it was never easy. Settlement
meant that Moscow was waiving its claim to all the hundreds of riverislands (except Bear Island) that lay on China’s side of the main current,
an act of territorial relinquishment that naturally aroused angry resentment
in local populations and governments. That the new approach meant
giving up the claim to Zhenbao was especially bitter, rendering thesacrifice of Soviet troops’ lives there futile. Boundaries have been called
the cell walls of national identity, and their successful negotiation
demands patience, cool heads, and consistent observance of the principleof “mutual understanding and mutual accommodation”: it appears thatboth sides in these protracted negotiations observed this principle.
Although this was not made publicly explicit, it appears that Beijing
at this stage introduced a critical modification to its basic rubric forboundary settlement where, when an intractable issue about a particulararea arose and all attempts to resolve it failed, it should be put aside, notallowed to halt or sour the negotiations on other sectors. “A wiser
generation” might in the future find a solution at present unthinkable. Justsuch an intractable issue lay in ownership of Bear Island: that, the Soviet
side made clear, was still nonnegotiable.27 The Chinese position was thatthe division of territory must be in accordance with the text of the treaty,
and by stipulating that the boundary ran through the confluence, thewording indisputably assigned Bear Island to China. Therefore, Beijing
Nehru’s folly and agree to negotiate a boundary settlement with China. New Delhi stillrefuses to adopt the “cooperative strategy,” holding to the “delaying strategy”—andretaining the option to return to the “escalation strategy.”
27
There was one other such sticking point, concerning an island in the Argun River: thescale of this article allows it to be “set aside” for treatment by a more inclusive writer.

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HOW THE SINO-RUSSIAN BOUNDARY CONFLICT WAS FINALLY SETTLED

maintained that the Soviet Union must return it to China—“in principle.”
This expansive phrase of course allowed for circumstances in which
China’s “understanding” of its neighbor’s position and wish to“accommodate” it would in due course lead to a different outcome.
The delimitation and demarcation processes proceeded more or lesssimultaneously, with a series of agreements being announced through the
1990s.28 By the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the river sections had
been finalized bar the intractable “set-aside” issues. The governments ofthe three Central Asian Socialist Soviet Republics bordering China(Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) had from the beginning participatedin the Sino-Soviet discussions of the western boundary sector (which was
far more complex and difficult than the river sectors), and they agreed tocontinue jointly when they became sovereign states, at first in a trinational commission under a Russian chairman (seed of the future
Shanghai Cooperation Organization). In due course, these negotiations
separated, and by the beginning of the next century, the western boundary
had been agreed and legitimized in three treaties, while the entirety of the
Sino-Russian boundaries29 was also covered by treaty. Detailed protocols
protected the two sides’ interests in the set-aside areas, Bear Island andanother island on the Argun River, with China’s right of navigation past
Khabarovsk guaranteed. Moscow and Beijing joined in mutuallycongratulatory celebrations of the peaceful resolution of a centuries-old
and deeply conflicted dispute—and that seemed to be the end of thematter for the present.
Then, to the astonishment of those who had followed thesedevelopments in detail, in 2004, Moscow and Beijing jointly proclaimed
that continued negotiations, previously unannounced, had produced
solutions to the last two “set-aside” problems. The parties had found it
unnecessary to wait for that future, “wiser generation” but had made thenecessary compromises to reach agreement in this one.
28

This laborious, vexed procedure is described, in much vivid detail, in IWASHITA
Akihiro’s account of A 4,000 Kilometer Journey Along the Sino-Russian Border, Slavic
Eurasian Studies 3, (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2004).
29
The eastern sector plus a fifty-mile remainder sector in the west. The negotiations
between Beijing and the three new Central Asian states were protracted and vexed, several
times being on the point of breakdown. The cases of Kyrgyz-China and Tajikistan-China
were especially difficult, with intense engagement of political parties challenging
provisional agreements reached without their agreement.

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The compromises made by the two sides to reach the deal formalized
in a supplementary agreement on the eastern section of the Sino-Russian
boundary line in Beijing in 2004 can be inferred (their details have notbeen made public). On June 2, 2005, Chinese Foreign Minister Li
Zhaoxing and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signed thecertificate for the exchange of the instruments of ratification for the
supplementary agreement on behalf of their respective governments in
Vladivostok and exchanged the instruments of ratification and thecertificate. The “main contradiction” for each side was different, and they
were separable. For Moscow, retention of the portion of Bear Island
offshore of Khabarovsk, long regarded by the inhabitants as part of thecity, continued to be nonnegotiable. Unwilling as Russia has historically
been to cede territory, to relinquish the upstream end of Bear Island wassmall change for a final settlement. For Beijing, what mattered most was
to acquire the upstream portion of Bear Island, thus restoring the Fuyuan
Channel (forgetting Kazakevich) to its treaty-defined status as an inland
waterway of China, both its banks Chinese sovereign territory. As long as
China’s right of navigation through the confluence was guaranteed, there
was no need for Beijing to insist on repossession of the end of the islandthat abutted Khabarovsk; it could be ceded to Russia. By this stage, thetwo teams of boundary negotiators could work together with a common
purpose: to fine-tune a boundary so as to balance the interests of theirprincipals and of local populations and regional authorities so that the
proposed alignment would be broadly welcomed and Moscow and Beijing
could jointly proclaim achievement of a “win-win” solution, as they duly
did.
So the needs and demands of both parties, which had long appeared
to be irresolvably contradictory, could now be met by the straightforward
process of partition. Thus, short, indeed tiny, new stretches of SinoRussian land boundaries were created on Bear Island and the other putaside problem island in the Argun River. And with their demarcation, theentire length of the Sino-Russian boundary thus became agreed, defined,
and legitimated, marking the opening of a period of unprecedented SinoRussian amity.

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