China vs. Russia.
The Chinese need natural resources and land for their growing population. The Russians have just about stopped breeding and their population is in steady decline. Sooner or later the resource rich, sparsely populated regions of Eastern Russia are going to start looking pretty good to the Chinese.
They had numerous clashes along this border back in the 60's. Here's some history......
Chinese-Soviet border clashes
Centuries-old dispute became open combat during Cold War
By Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive
Damansky Island, known to the Chinese as Zhen Bao, is an uninhabited stretch of land, about 1 1/2 miles long by a half-mile wide. It sits in the Ussuri River, the border between northeastern China and Russia's Siberian Far East. It would be an unremarkable geographic feature in a remote, heavily forested landscape -- if it hadn't been the center of a remarkable mini-war three decades ago between rival communist powers.
Between March and September of 1969, long-simmering tensions between China and the Soviet Union boiled over into a series of violent border clashes -- incidents that threatened to spark widespread conventional, or even nuclear, war.
The conflict had roots going back centuries. Czarist Russia and imperial China had rival claims over border territories in that region dating back to the 1600s. In 1860, Russia imposed an agreement on China's waning Ch'ing dynasty that roughly set up the current common border.
In 1951, two years after the communist victory in China's civil war, Beijing signed an agreement with Moscow -- accepting China's existing border with the U.S.S.R., as well as armed Soviet control over the Ussuri and Amur border rivers.
But the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s -- an ideological fallout between communism's two vanguard nations -- radically changed relations between the two communist neighbors. The Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-1960s, a power struggle unleashed by Mao against the government bureaucracy, created great internal instability. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 also increased Chinese suspicions of Moscow's intentions.
It was during this time that the ongoing ideological dispute between China and the Soviet Union became territorial -- as Beijing declared its northeastern border with the U.S.S.R. was the result of "unequal" agreements made a century earlier.
There had been a series of incidents along the Ussuri River, involving clashes between Soviet and Chinese groups -- in some cases, Soviet river patrols and Chinese fishermen, or Soviet border guards and Chinese demonstrators -- dating back to the mid-1960s. But these clashes had been, for the most part, unarmed. That all changed in March 1969.
Christian Ostermann, of the Cold War International History Project, recently uncovered a report, sent to East Germany's leadership, in which the Soviet Union describes its version of the first deadly border clash, which took place on Damansky, or Zhen Bao, Island on March 2, 1969:
"Our observation posts noted the advance of 30 armed Chinese military men on the island of Damansky. Consequently, a group of Soviet border guards was dispatched to the location where the Chinese had violated the border. The officer in charge of the unit and a small contingent approached the border violators with the intention of registering protests and demanding (without using force) that they leave Soviet territory, as had been done repeatedly in the past. But within the first minutes of the exchange, our border guards came under crossfire and were insidiously shot without any warning. At the same time, fire on the remaining parts of our force was opened from an ambush on the island and from the Chinese shore."
Chinese reports of the time, meanwhile, condemned the Soviets for carrying out "blatant provocation" against Beijing's border guards.
Several dozen people were killed during the March 2 incident. But a second, much more serious clash took place on the same island 13 days later.
According to Chen Jian, associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and author of "China's Road to the Korean War", the Soviet side was more prepared for the March 15 incident.
"Concerning the March 2 incident, the Chinese side mobilized several hundred soldiers, but only several dozens were involved in the fighting on Zhen Bao Island -- which lasted from 8:40 to 9:40 p.m.", says Chen. "According to Chinese sources, the Soviet side sent in about 70 soldiers, assisted by two armored vehicles and two other automobiles.
"The fight on March 15 lasted from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Both sides concentrated at least several thousand troops around the Zhen Bao island area. Directly involved in the fighting on Zhen Bao Island were more than 200 Soviet soldiers, who were assisted by about 25 tanks and 35 armored vehicles. The Chinese side put in around 300-500 soldiers. From 1:35 to 3:30 p.m., the Soviet side used long-range artillery to support its troops."
Chen adds that, according to Chinese sources, the two battles for Damansky/Zhen Bao Island resulted in a total of 250 Soviet casualties and more than 100 Chinese casualties. Beijing also claimed to have destroyed 17 Soviet tanks and armored vehicles during the fighting.
Other incidents took place several months later, thousands of miles to the west, along the border between China's northwestern Xinjiang province and what was then the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
Diplomatic attempts to end the violence were, at first, thwarted by ideological fervor. In March 1969, following the two Ussuri River incidents, an attempt by Soviet leaders to establish contact with their Chinese counterparts was broken off -- after operators in Beijing refused to put the Soviets through.
"The operators refused, calling the Soviets 'revisionists,'" says Chen Jian. "When (Chinese Premier) Chou En-lai learned of this, he said to them, 'How can you do this?'"
In the meantime, both nations prepared for war. China began a program to build massive, underground complexes for protection against a Soviet nuclear attack. For their part, Kremlin leaders were building up their conventional forces in the Soviet Far East -- to 27 divisions by 1969, and nearly twice that number by the mid-1970s. Several Soviet divisions also were deployed in Mongolia -- which had signed a friendship treaty with Moscow.
Publicly, Washington did not take sides in the crisis. But in a U.S. State Department "intelligence note" dated June 13, 1969, analysts wondered if China had more to gain from the cross-border tensions than did Moscow.
"Chinese propaganda has emphasized the need for internal unity and urged the populace to prepare for war," the intelligence note states. "It is tempting to suggest that the incidents have been engineered solely as a cement for internal politics."
By September 1969, diplomacy finally prevailed. Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, who had attended the funeral of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, stopped in Beijing on his way home to Moscow. Kosygin was met at Beijing airport by Chou En-lai, and after a meeting that lasted nearly four hours, the two men worked out an agreement that ended the border clashes and reduced tensions between their countries.
Many analysts say the immediate winner of the Chinese-Soviet border clashes was the United States. Suspicious of Soviet intentions, China decided it was strategically wise to improve relations with Washington. Soviet leaders, meanwhile, decided to relax Cold War tensions -- which led to the policy of detente in the 1970s.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and the other former Soviet republics that border China have worked to bury the old border disputes. In April 1997, at a ceremony at the Kremlin, representatives from Russia, China, Kazakstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan signed an agreement limiting the number of troops along their collective borders.
2006-10-22 17:24:24
·
answer #1
·
answered by Yak Rider 4
·
0⤊
0⤋