The Sino-Soviet border conflict, also known as the Sino-Soviet crisis, was a seven-month undeclared military conflict between the Soviet Union and China in 1969, following the Sino-Soviet split. The most serious border clash, which brought the world's two largest communist states to the brink of war, occurred near Damansky (Zhenbao) Island on the Ussuri (Wusuli) River in Manchuria. Clashes also took place in Xinjiang.
In 1964, the Chinese revisited the matter of the Sino-Soviet border demarcated in the 19th century, claiming the region of Outer Manchuria originally ceded by the Qing dynasty to the Russian Empire by way of unequal treaties. Negotiations broke down amid heightening tensions and both sides began dramatically increasing military presence along the border. Sino-Soviet relations worsened further following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Border confrontations escalated in March 1969 when a group of People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops launched a surprise attack on Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island in Manchuria, resulting in dozens of casualties on both sides. Soviet leadership feared that despite superior nuclear and conventional weapons technology, the Soviet Army would struggle against the PLA's numbers, guerrilla warfare experience, and people's war doctrine. Historians have suggested Mao Zedong provoked the clash to further the radical sentiments of the Cultural Revolution or to elevate China's international standing towards the Cold War's two superpowers.
Further clashes occurred in August at Tielieketi in Xinjiang and raised the prospect of an all-out nuclear exchange. The crisis de-escalated after Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai on 11 September in Beijing, and a ceasefire was ordered with a return to the status quo ante bellum. In October, the Soviet Union contemplated a massive nuclear strike on China, prompting a government and military evacuation of Beijing.
To counterbalance the Soviet threat, the Chinese government sought a rapprochement with the United States. This resulted in a secret visit to China by Henry Kissinger in 1971, which in turn paved the way for President Richard Nixon's official visit to China in 1972. Sino-Soviet relations remained sour after the conflict despite the re-opening of border negotiations, which continued inconclusively for a decade. Serious talks did not occur until 1991, when an agreement was reached shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. The border issues were conclusively resolved between China and Russia following a treaty signed in 2003 and an additional agreement in 2008.
Background
Disputes between China and Russia on border issues date back to the eighteenth century.
History
Under the governorship of Sheng Shicai (1933–1944) in Northwest China's Xinjiang Province, China's Kuomintang recognized for the first time the ethnic category of a Uyghur people by following the Soviet ethnic policy. That ethnogenesis of a "national" people eligible for territorialized autonomy broadly benefited the Soviet Union, which organized conferences in Fergana and Semirechye (in Soviet Central Asia) to cause "revolution" in Altishahr (southern Xinjiang) and Dzungaria (northern Xinjiang).
Both the Soviet Union and the White Movement covertly allied with the Ili National Army to fight the Kuomintang in the Three Districts Revolution. Although the mostly Muslim Uyghur rebels participated in pogroms against Han Chinese generally, the turmoil eventually resulted in the replacement of Kuomintang rule in Xinjiang with that of the Chinese Communist Party.
In 1949, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union formed an alliance and both countries accepted the status quo along their border. In 1951, the two countries signed a Border Rivers Navigation Agreement.
As the Sino-Soviet split developed in the 1960s, border tensions emerged. Amid heightening tensions, the Soviet Union and China began border talks. Although the Soviet Union had yielded all of the territory of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo to the Chinese Communists in 1945, which decisively assisted them during the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese now demanded territorial concessions on the basis that the 19th-century treaties transferring ownership of the sparsely populated Outer Manchuria, concluded by Qing dynasty China and the Russian Empire, were "Unequal Treaties" and amounted to the annexation of rightful Chinese territory. Moscow would not accept that interpretation, but by 1964, both sides had reached a preliminary agreement on the eastern section of the border, including Zhenbao Island, which would be handed over to China.
In July 1964, CCP chairman Mao Zedong, in a meeting with the Japanese Socialist Party delegation, stated that Russia had unilaterally incorporated vast territories in Siberia and the Far East as far as Kamchatka. He stated that China and Russia still had not resolved this issue. The comments were leaked to the public. Outraged, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev refused to approve the border agreement.
Geography
The border dispute in the west centered on 52,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi) of Soviet-controlled land in the Pamirs that lay on the border of Xinjiang and the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1892, the Russian Empire and the Qing Dynasty had agreed that the border would consist of the ridge of the Sarikol Range, but the exact border remained contentious throughout the 20th century. In the 1960s, the Chinese began to insist that the Soviet Union evacuate the region.
From around 1900, after the Treaty of Peking (1860) had assigned Outer Manchuria (Primorskiy Kray) to Russia, the eastern part of the Sino-Soviet border had mainly been demarcated by three rivers, the Argun River from the tripartite junction with Mongolia to the north tip of China, running southwest to northeast, then the Amur River to Khabarovsk from northwest to southeast, where it was joined by the Ussuri River running south to north:
The modern method (used for the past 200 years) of demarcating a river boundary between states today is to set the boundary at either the median line (ligne médiane) of the river or around the area most suitable for navigation under what is known as the 'thalweg principle'.
There is nothing in either the 1858 or the 1860 treaty to suggest the border is anywhere other than the thalweg.
China claimed the islands, as they were on the Chinese side of the river if they were demarcated according to international law by using shipping lanes. The Soviets claimed and already effectively controlled almost every island along the rivers.
Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union claimed all the islands in both rivers including those that were Chinese according to the thalweg principle. In the 1991 treaty, Russia largely conceded that these islands were Chinese, but Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island, at the confluence of the Amur and the Ussuri Rivers, had become part of the Russian city of Khabarovsk, and China agreed that about two-thirds of the island should remain Russian.
Chinese and Soviet governments' views
The Soviets had possessed nuclear weapons for a longer time than the Chinese and so the Chinese adopted an asymmetric deterrence strategy that threatened a large conventional people's war in response to a Soviet counterforce nuclear first strike. Chinese numerical superiority was the basis of its strategy to deter a Soviet nuclear attack. Since 1949, Chinese strategy, as articulated by Mao, emphasized the superiority of "man over weapons". Although weapons were certainly an important component of warfare, Mao argued that they were "not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale." To Mao, "non-material" factors like "creativity, flexibility and high morale" were also "critical determinants in warfare".
The Soviets were not confident that they could win such a conflict. A Chinese incursion could threaten Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, and Khabarovsk, as well as crucial nodes of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, all close to the border. While the Chinese lacked nuclear missiles, a few of their nuclear-capable aircraft might reach Soviet targets. According to Arkady Shevchenko, a high-ranking Soviet defector to the United States, "The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a mass intrusion into Soviet territory". A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic: "Despite our overwhelming superiority in weaponry, it would not be easy for the USSR to cope with an assault of this magnitude". China's "vast population and deep knowledge and experience in guerrilla warfare" would nearly certainly cause the Soviets' launching of an attack on China's nuclear program to end in both states being "mired in an endless war".
Concerns about Chinese manpower and its people's war strategy ran so deep that some bureaucrats in Moscow argued that the only way to defend against a massive conventional onslaught was to use nuclear weapons. Some even advocated deploying nuclear mines along the Sino-Soviet border. By threatening to initiate a prolonged conventional conflict in retaliation for a nuclear strike, Beijing used an asymmetric deterrence strategy that was intended to convince Moscow that the costs of an attack would outweigh the benefits.
China had found its strategic rationale. While most Soviet military specialists did not fear a Chinese nuclear reprisal and believed that China's arsenal was too small, rudimentary, and vulnerable to survive a first strike and to carry out a retaliatory attack, China's massive conventional army caused great concern.
Nikolai Ogarkov, a senior Soviet military officer, believed that a massive nuclear attack "would inevitably mean world war". Even a limited counterforce strike on China's nuclear facilities was dangerous, Ogarkov argued, because a few nuclear weapons would "hardly annihilate" a country the size of China, which, in response, would "fight unrelentingly".
The USSR had watched with disbelief the chaos and attacks on Soviet citizens in China during the Cultural Revolution, which increased fears of Chinese unpredictability. Soviets were aware of their numerical inferiority; Leonid Brezhnev cited Mao's infamous speech at the 1957 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, in which he said "I’m not afraid of nuclear war" because even if half of all Chinese died, "there are still 300 million people left". "How will the war between the USSR and China end?", one popular Russian joke asked: "With the unconditional surrender of the USSR after it has taken 400 million Chinese as prisoners of war". Many dark jokes alluded to a future in which Russians would have to learn Chinese. Famous dissident Andrei Amalrik predicted in Will the Soviet Union Surve Until 1984? (1970) that war with China would begin within ten years and cause the USSR's collapse.
Eastern border: Heilongjiang (1969)
The Soviet Border Service started to report an intensifying Chinese military activity in the region in the early 1960s. Tensions at first built slowly, but the Cultural Revolution made them rise much faster. The number of troops on both sides of the Sino-Soviet border increased dramatically after 1964. Militarily, in 1961, the Soviets had 225,000 men and 200 aircraft at the border. In 1968, there were 375,000 men, 1,200 aircraft and 120 medium-range missiles. China had 1.5 million men stationed at the border and had tested its first nuclear weapon (the 596 Test in October 1964, at Lop Nur basin). Both sides' political rhetoric was increasingly hostile.
The key moment in escalating Sino-Soviet tensions was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20–21 August 1968 and the proclamation of the Brezhnev Doctrine that the Soviets had the right to overthrow any communist government that was diverging from what was defined by the Kremlin. Mao saw the Brezhnev Doctrine as the ideological justification for a Soviet invasion of China to overthrow him and launched a massive propaganda campaign attacking the invasion of Czechoslovakia, although he had condemned the Prague Spring as "revisionism". On 21 August 1968, the Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, gave a speech in Revolution Square in Bucharest that denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was widely seen both in Romania and abroad as virtual declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. Romania began to move away from the Soviet sphere of influence, towards the Chinese sphere of influence.
Speaking at a banquet held at the Romanian embassy in Beijing on 23 August 1968, Zhou Enlai denounced the Soviet Union for "fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism and social imperialism". He went on to compare the invasion of Czechoslovakia to the Americans in the Vietnam War and more pointedly to the policies of Adolf Hitler towards Czechoslovakia in 1938 to 1939. Zhou ended his speech with a barely veiled call for the people of Czechoslovakia to wage guerrilla war against the Red Army.
The Chinese historian Li Danhui wrote, "Already in 1968, China began preparations to create a small war on the border." She noted that prior to March 1969, the Chinese troops had twice attempted to provoke a clash along the border, "but the Soviets, feeling weak, did not accept the Chinese challenge and retreated." Another Chinese historian, Yang Kuisong, wrote, "There were already significant preparations in 1968, but the Russians did not come, so the planned ambush was not successful."
Battle of Zhenbao (Damansky) Island
On 2 March 1969, a group of People's Liberation Army troops ambushed Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island. According to Chinese sources, the Soviets suffered 58 dead and wounded. The Chinese losses were reported as 29 dead. According to Soviet sources, at least 248 Chinese troops were killed on the island and on the frozen river, and 32 Soviet border guards were killed, with 14 wounded.