Gorbachev in China: The Communist Summit : China Wants Soviets to Set History Straight : 4,500-Mile Border Peaceful--but Tough Questions Remain

When Chinese and Soviet military patrols battled over an obscure Ussuri River island in March of 1969, the bloody clashes changed the world.

The exchange of fire on what the Soviets call Damansky Island--known to the Chinese as Zhenbao--shattered any lingering Western image of monolithic communism. The Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s had degenerated to the point where the two countries stood on the brink of war.

Today, the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet border--the longest in the world--is again peaceful. Troops have been reduced, trade is growing and at some border towns tourists can take day trips to the other side. But arguments over old treaties, shifting navigation channels and poorly marked hinterlands are still unresolved.

Border Issue on Agenda

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing this week, and his discussions with Chinese leaders, may push forward efforts to solve the border issue. In recent years, much progress has been made. But tough problems remain.

In the background is the firm Chinese belief that vast areas of what is now the Soviet Union--about 577,000 square miles --once belonged to China. This land, according to the Chinese, was taken from the Qing Dynasty by Czarist Russia under a series of unfair treaties in the mid-19th Century.

Ever since it raised the issue of unequal treaties in the 1960s, Beijing has said it does not want the land back, it merely wants Moscow to set the historical record straight by acknowledging that the treaties were unfair. The border outlined in those old agreements can still serve as the basis for a settlement, Beijing says, in what it considers a magnanimous concession.

Moscow disputes the Chinese historical view. The Soviets also worry that any statement along the lines of Beijing’s demand could open the door to future Chinese claims.

Wants Land Returned

Of more immediate sensitivity, Beijing also charges that over the past 100 years or so, Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union have failed even to adhere to the unequal treaties. Beijing contends that the Soviet Union now controls about 11,500 square miles of what should be Chinese land. Most of this land is in the Pamir Mountains where the Soviet and Chinese borders approach Afghanistan. Some lies elsewhere along the border of Xinjiang and Soviet Central Asia, while hundreds of islands in the Amur and Ussuri rivers between northeastern China and Siberia constitute a small but important portion. Beijing wants this land back.

Besides these broad disputes, there is the practical problem of surveying and marking the border. Some stretches of the western sector in Central Asia are virtually uninhabited desert. In the eastern sector, stretching from Mongolia to the Sea of Japan, agreement has been reached on the principle that the border should run along the main river navigation channel. But with the location of the main channel open to dispute--and subject to natural changes over time--agreement on a principle does not automatically clarify ownership of every island.

Among the sticking points is Bear Island, known in Chinese as Heixiazi, at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers across from the important Soviet city of Khabarovsk. It is controlled by the Soviet Union, which for strategic reasons is loath to give it up. But the Chinese, apparently accurately, insist that it is south of the main navigation channel and thus should be theirs.

‘A Lot of Excuses’

“The Soviet side has made a lot of excuses,” said Zhu Ruizhen, a professor at the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Sometimes they argue that Bear Island is north of the border line. Sometimes they argue that this island is very important to them strategically, because it is very close to Khabarovsk. Maybe this issue will have to be resolved at the very end of the negotiations. Perhaps both sides will have to find some compromise. For example, maybe the Soviet side will make a compromise concerning Bear Island, and China will in return make some concessions in the western sector.”

Moscow, however, fears making any territorial concessions to anyone. With its own borders--and those of Eastern European countries--shaped by World War II, the immutability of postwar borders is a vital principle for the Soviet Union. Moscow fears that concessions in Asia could open the way to much more serious territorial demands concerning its European frontiers or affecting the stability of Eastern Europe.

There is also a basic Soviet fear of Chinese expansionism, the type of fear that comes from looking at a map showing the vast, resource-rich, underpopulated expanses of Siberia, and thinking about 1.1 billion land-poor Chinese just across the border.

Such visions go deep into the Russian psyche. The Mongol hordes of the distant past are associated with the Chinese of today. The Soviets retain a strong collective memory of the devastation wrought by Genghis Khan and his horsemen, although 750 years have passed since they swept a path of plunder into Russia. That they did the same to China has little relevance in the Soviet mind.

More recent history has also given the Soviet Union cause for concern. During China’s chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Soviet citizens openly worried that some regional Chinese leader along the border might act on his own to mobilize enough troops and additional manpower to breach the border and effectively cut the Soviet Union in two--perhaps simply by camping on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Massive Buildup

This sort of fear was a contributing factor in the massive Soviet military buildup of the 1970s, including location of a large number of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles and stocks of chemical weapons in Siberia. Moscow also built a second branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Baikal-Amur Main Line, largely because the old route lies so close to the Chinese border.

For all these reasons, the Kremlin simply does not believe the Chinese assurance that, if the Soviets acknowledge that they hold territory gained in unequal 19th-Century treaties, this will not open the door to new territorial demands.

“Although there are important historical differences, the Chinese drive for the ‘reunification of the motherland’ includes, in principle, our Maritime Region (the Soviet Pacific coast) just as much as Hong Kong,” said a Soviet Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be identified by name. “But for us, the Maritime Region is not some faraway colony like Hong Kong for the British. It is an integral part of the Soviet Union today, and the people who live there are Soviet citizens.”

Fears Called Paranoia

In Chinese eyes, these various Soviet fears are paranoid.

“They should recognize that Czarist Russia invaded China and imposed unequal treaties,” commented Zhao Dalun, deputy director of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe Institute of the People’s University of China. “This is history. It should be acknowledged. We aren’t seeking to make the present Soviet leaders take responsibility for it.”

Zhao said that even at the height of Sino-Soviet mistrust in the late 1960s, Chinese leaders never sought the return of territories lost through the unequal treaties.

“They were simply saying that in the history of Sino-Soviet relations, there also were problems,” Zhao said. “We wanted to remind them that such historical problems existed.”

The Soviet Union, however, overreacted to developments in China, contributing to the worsening of relations, Zhao said.

“When (former Soviet leader Leonid I.) Brezhnev was in power, he overestimated the threat to the Soviet Union from China,” Zhao said. “Because of this, he put many troops along the border. Finally, in 1969, armed conflict broke out on Damansky Island.”

Soviet and Chinese troops clashed in two encounters there on March 2 and 15, 1969, with each side blaming the other for touching off the fighting by trying to take over border territory. The Chinese did not report their casualties, but the Soviets disclosed that 31 of their border guards were killed in the first clash and six in the second.

Colonel Among Casualties

In the second round of fighting, one of the casualties was a colonel, the Soviets reported, and the presence of a senior officer at a remote outpost suggested that the Soviets had committed a large number of troops there after the first clash. This is corroborated by one reconstruction of the March 15 encounter, which tells of mortar and artillery exchanges, and use of tanks and armored personnel carriers in a nine-hour battle that cost the Soviets about 60 casualties and the Chinese hundreds of dead and wounded.

In Beijing, an estimated 10,000 demonstrators besieged the Soviet Embassy the day after the first incident. Four days later, tens of thousands of Russians demonstrated outside the Chinese Embassy in Moscow, breaking dozens of the building’s windows.

The March clashes on China’s northeastern border were followed by skirmishes the following summer between Chinese and Soviet forces in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China.

China has had cause to fear the superior military power of both Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union.

Roy A. Medvedev, a free-thinking Marxist historian and longtime dissident who was recently readmitted to the Communist Party, acknowledged as much in a recent interview.

‘Grounds for Fear’

Territories in regions of Siberia near the Amur and Ussuri Rivers “were unquestionably seized by Russia from China,” Medvedev said. “In fact, they were part of the Chinese empire. They were populated by small, weak, indigenous peoples. The Russian empire coveted them and took them. . . . Historically, China did have grounds for fear of Russia, for a very strong mistrust.”

Until Gorbachev agreed a few years ago that the navigation channel could form the border in the Amur and Ussuri rivers, the Soviet Union had insisted that the boundary ran on the Chinese shore. This viewpoint, not enforced during the 1950s period of alliance, played an important role in adding to the bitterness of the 1960s border dispute.

Medvedev agreed that Moscow’s stance on this had been unreasonable.

“The world over, borders are the middle of rivers, but here they were on the Chinese bank, so that a Chinese fisherman setting out in a boat was violating our frontier,” Medvedev said. “Of course that was unfair. When we were friends, it was not such a big deal, but when hostility arose, it grew into a very serious dispute.”

Concrete Progress

While many problems remain, the two sides have made concrete progress.

The Soviets have reportedly removed an undetermined number of their troops in the border region, now estimated at 500,000. China is believed to have considerably more troops there, although the precise number has not been made public. Soviet weaponry is described by Western authorities as much superior to that of the Chinese.

Also, spokesmen for China and the Soviet Union announced last October that they had settled most of their differences on the eastern section of the border.

Teams of Chinese and Soviet experts have been conducting land and aerial surveys of the western sector, working especially rapidly in preparation for the current summit.

Eventually, some sort of compromise trading of conflicting territorial claims will probably be necessary if the border dispute is to be fully resolved.

But among the hot spots on which agreement already has been reached, according to a March report in Wen Wei Bao, a Beijing-affiliated Hong Kong newspaper, is the island the Soviets call Damansky.

It looks as if the world, if it cares to use the island’s real name, will have to call it Zhenbao.

TOUCHY TERRITORIAL ISSUES 1. Pamir Mountains: Most of the 11,500 square miles of disputed land claimed by China is in the Pamir Mountains, located in a remote area where the Soviet and Chinese borders approach Afghanistan.

2. Bear Island: At the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri rivers across from the Soviet city of Khabarovsk. Still controlled by the Soviet Union for strategic reasons. The nations agree that their border at this point should run along the main navigational channel. But the Chinese say Bear Island is south of the main channel and should thus be theirs.

3. Damansky Island: In 1969, Soviet and Chinese troops clashed here twice in border disputes. For years, Soviet officials insisted the boundary ran on the Chinese shore. However, Gorbachev agreed a few years ago that the navigational channel could form the border in the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Recently, the national settled the issue and the island was returned to China, which calls it Zhenbao.