China's Territorial Disputes (23 page)

Then a strange thing happened. As late as May 1995, Governor Nadzratenko of the Maritime Territory was bellowing that he would resign “if even one meter of Primorye land were given to China.”
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Then the governor flew to Moscow in early 1996 to meet with Yeltsin, where he secured the president’s order to remit to Primorye Krai emergency credits guaranteed by the finance ministry and partial settlement of budgetary debts to the territory of 1,270 billion rubles.
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More importantly, Nazdratenko had himself selected as the official proxy of Boris Yeltsin in Primorye, which meant that Nazdratenko had pledged his support to Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election of June and July 1996. When Yeltsin issued a decree on 11 April 1996 reconfirming his commitment to the 1997 timetable for the demarcation works, ahead of his visit to Beijing on 24 April, the governor first claimed that he had failed to convince the president to delay final demarcation of the border, then later claimed that he had never asked for concessions on the border demarcation.
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As to his resignation threat, Nazdratenko argued that, while before he was answerable only to the president who appointed him, after his election to the governorship in December 1995, he could not be so irresponsible as to “make an ostentatious point by resigning.”
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The governor then accompanied Yeltsin to China, where he did not raise the boundary issue even once. Nazdratenko’s insubordination thus reflects less of a desire to create difficulties for Sino-Russian relationship in the Far East than a broader domestic struggle for power and money within the milieu of post-Soviet Russian “clientalist capitalism and
nomenklatura
democracy.” Nazdratenko’s subordination, on the other hand, reflects satisfaction with the “side-payment” that he and his government received from Yeltsin in exchange for quietening his opposition to the boundary agreement. The border demarcation was finally completed in November 1997, when President Yeltsin issued a joint statement with his Chinese counterpart to that effect on yet another visit to China.
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Findings and conclusions

Why was it possible for a claimant country like Russia to forgo territory that, only a few years before, it was prepared to go to war to retain? Certainly, there could not have been movement on the border issue in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet schism and the enunciation of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, when Beijing was in the grip of a pathological megalomaniac and its xenophobic Cultural Revolution and preparing for nuclear war with Moscow after the Zhenbao/Damansky conflict. There could also not have been any boundary negotiations in the 1970s and early 1980s, when Moscow added more than a quarter of a million troops in the Far East in response to warming relations between China and the United States, supported the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and invaded Afghanistan. What changed? The macro-climate in international politics, principally resulting from Gorbachev’s program to restructure a near-bankrupt Soviet economy, and defuse military tensions with its neighbors and the West, increased the Soviet win-set for border negotiations. The waning years of the Soviet Union were characterized by budget deficits, price increases, falling production, and chaotic property rights.
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A resolution of the border problem in the Far East would enable Moscow to reduce its expensive military presence there while also encouraging the development of local resources by promoting trade and investment from the countries of East Asia into what was hitherto a heavily subsidized region. Russia after the Soviet collapse also wanted to do everything it could to entice the Chinese into purchasing Russian weaponry, in order to keep its armament factories open. Obviously, a Soviet Union that is more dependent on trade with countries outside its own Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) economic bloc will rate the cost of non-agreement on issues of boundary, trade and security with its biggest neighbor higher than when it was relatively economically self-sufficient. Meanwhile, combating inflation and ostracized by the rest of the world after the Tiananmen Square incident, Beijing looked to a speedy resolution of one of its major border disputes to reduce Russian mistrust and suspicion, boost cross-border trade, and create a foreign policy success to forestall possible post-Soviet Russian overtures to the Taiwanese.

In fact, the economic relationship is a good barometer of the political climate and boundary difficulties between the two countries (Figure 4.3 and Table 4.1).
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From a base of 522 million rubles in 1950, trade between the PRC and the USSR grew swiftly, reaching a peak of 1,849 million rubles in 1959. From 1952 to 1959, some half of China’s foreign trade was with the Soviet Union. From 1960, when the Soviet government withdrew all its technicians from China, trade began to decline precipitously, to reach its lowest level of 42 million rubles in 1970, in the aftermath of the Zhenbao/Damansky crisis. Afterward the trade figures showed a slight increasing trend, reaching 317 million rubles in 1980. Meanwhile, the 1969-1978 series of border talks had begun and ended. As a result of a partial trade embargo enacted by the PRC to punish the Soviets for invading Afghanistan, mutual trade again fell to 17
フ
million rubles in 1981. However, it increased again from the following year onward, until it surpassed the previous high in 1988, soon after cross-border talks reopened. Trade-dependency of an economy does seem to vary proportionately with the cost of non-agreements and the size of bargaining win-sets, although admittedly, the willingness to revive negotiations and resume trade both have politics as a common denominator.

It might have seemed as though China had “gained” Damansky/Zhenbao and 600 other islands at the expense of Russian “losses.” However, we should note that settling the riparian boundary according to the
thalweg
principle only meant that Russia had resolved a border dispute by adhering to widely accepted international law, and that, in exchange, China announced openly that she had abandoned all territorial claims to the Russian Far East, although it was territory which she had little opportunity to recapture anyway. Aside from domestic difficulties and the threat of American dominance faced by both states at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, which drew them closer together, it must not be overlooked that they never fought a war against one another, although March 1969 probably had the perverse effect of making them realize how easily they could have started one. Once Gorbachev decided to apply “reverberation” on the Chinese to achieve “synergistic linkages,” he could count on a reservoir

Figure 4.3
Sino-Soviet trade, 1950-1989

of goodwill dating back to the 1950s, when the two countries were ideological comrades and the Soviet Union rendered much technical aid to their Chinese brethren in exchange for ideological support.

Aside from feelings of past friendship, the fact that all boundary negotiations were conducted away from public scrutiny, or even knowledge, until the day they were announced upon conclusion, helped to lessen public attention to the tradeoffs and possible concessions. Measures taken by both sides to keep fishermen and herb-gatherers from the disputed islands after the Zhenbao/Damansky incident also prevented local interests which might have opposed the border settlements from organizing, or at least not fast enough to obstruct the border talks. The fact that there are no territorial seas, much less

Table 4.1
Sino-Soviet trade volume 1950-1989 (millions of rubles)

Source: For 1950-1955, G. Grause,
History of Economic Relations Between Russia and China,
trans. M. Roublev (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translation, 1966), p. 284. For 1956-1971,
The USSR National Economic Yearbook.
For 1972-1973,
Facts On File Yearbook.
For 1974-1982,
Soviet Foreign Trade Yearbook.
For 1983-1989,
China’s Custom Statistics.

200-mile radius “exclusive economic zones,” to claim around these riparian islands certainly expedited the settlements, once a friendly atmosphere prevailed between the two states. However, this in no way meant that the border settlements went unchallenged. Having long perceived that Moscow had been siphoning off natural resources from the region, residents of the Russian Far East then felt that the Russian central government was leaving them to the mercy of Chinese illegal immigrants, profiteering traders, laborers, spies, poachers, bootleggers and drug-traffickers. Although the governor and the legislature of the Primorye Krai (Maritime Province) rejected the border agreement as compromising to their territory’s sovereignty, this objection came after the fact, and the introduction of a visa to regulate Chinese visitors took much of the wind out of his nationalist sails. The anti-agreement position of the governor, local politicians, and nationalists like the self-styled “Ussuri Cossacks” was also undercut when Beijing suggested both sides withdraw troops and armaments 100 kilometers from the common border, Moscow transferred all border posts back to central control, and the Russia’s president and foreign minister personally reassured their Chinese counterparts that all border markings would be put in place and the transfer of islands completed.

In the Chinese case, in the 1987-1991 stage of the boundary negotiations, both state and society were “uniformly” in favor of the agreement, for they stood to gain all they had asked for in exchange for giving up virtually nothing. In fact, Heilongjiang was so enthusiastic about promoting border trade with the RFE in the early 1990s that, in response to Russian complaints of Chinese illegal immigration and the smuggling of drugs and contraband goods, the Chinese central government had criticized the provinces’ leaders for laxity in administering border trade properly.
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Preferences within the Russian federation were clearly divided between Moscow, which favored the agreement and would seek all ways and means to apply it, and the RFE inhabitants and authorities, who wanted to scuttle it for being detrimental to their own interests. Unfortunately for the region, Moscow was much stronger politically, economically and militarily, and its gains would be more than balanced by the region’s losses, and this allowed the Russian central government to reach a deal with the Chinese over the heads of its provincial bosses. It should not be forgotten that monetary transfers from Moscow to the region constituted a blatant but attractive form of side-payment to the cash-strapped regional leadership to induce them to compromise on the boundary and other issues important to the center. Although pressure groups within Russia did adopt a hard-line attitude against territorial transfers to the Chinese in defense of what they defined as the “national interest,” Yeltsin’s support for negotiations and synergistic linkages between the two states established in expectation of joint gains was strong enough in this case to isolate and override potentially disruptive influences against implementation of the negotiated agreement.