China's Territorial Disputes (24 page)

From the time hostilities between Chinese civilians and Soviet border guards were first reported in 1967 until Gorbachev’s Vladivostok speech in 1986, the top leaders of both China and the Soviet Union were in firm control of their respective domestic political scene. They did not yet have to manage rising centrifugal forces or a gathering populist discourse. Neither set of leaders saw any need to engage in diplomatic negotiations with each other to construct or affirm domestic political support, nor were Soviet leaders like Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, or Chinese leaders like Mao and Deng, under pressure to accommodate the domestic political needs of the other. They saw no need to confront each other with anything more than polemics after 1969, but also felt no pressure to compromise. In terms of distribution of gains, the outcome of the Damansky/Zhenbao incident was a non-cooperative stalemate, based on physical intimidation through a matching military build-up of manpower, conventional arms and nuclear weapons. In fact, all pretenses at engaging in boundary discussions ceased in 1978 when the Soviet Union turned its attention to providing material and moral support to pro-Soviet regimes in Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique, and the Chinese were kept busy trying to recover from the devastating chaos of the Cultural Revolution by experimenting with economic reforms. It was only in 1987, 1988 and the first half of 1989 that both Mikhail Gorbachev and Zhao Ziyang tried to emulate each other in promoting domestic price reforms and relaxation of political controls by restarting border trade and boundary negotiations.

Leaders’ strategies of domestic reconfiguration may critically affect their assessments of the cost and benefits of synergistic linkages. The Soviet economy was in bad shape by the mid-1980s. Total factor productivity had been decreasing for the last ten years. In the first term and the first half of the second term of his presidency, US president Ronald Reagan was determined to engage the Soviet Union directly in a conventional and nuclear arms race, and indirectly by supporting covert resistance against Soviet-inspired Marxist-Leninist regimes in Afghanistan and other parts of the Third World. This put Moscow in the difficult position of having to retrench its military forces in order to avoid imposing more sacrifice on its Soviet consumers.
¹⁵⁵
Once such a decision was taken, it was only natural for the Gorbachev government to desire a settlement of outstanding boundary issues in order to boost trade, especially in a region like the Russian Far East, which depended so much on economic subsidies from the center. Thus the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev identified tangible benefits from a security agreement that would permit economic restructuring (
perestroika
) and its prerequisite of political openness (
glasnost
) to take place. Meanwhile, the sudden relaxation of controlled prices for basic commodities led to spiraling inflation in China, and Zhao was blamed by Deng for the recession which followed the equally sudden re-imposition of price controls. To shore up his faltering political standing, Zhao and his associates attempted to use the reforms inspired by Gorbachev to legitimize and rationalize China’s own reform program, by suggesting the inevitability and irreversibility of China’s market, bureaucratic and legal reforms. Furthermore, as the Cold War wound down, Beijing’s “pivot position” since the early 1970s as the “strategic balancer” on the side of Washington against Moscow was no longer of much value to the United States. China was facing an increasingly unfriendly world,
¹⁵⁶
especially after the “Tiananmen Massacre” and the collapse of Communism worldwide, and sought a speedy resolution to historical differences with its northern neighbor.

Having witnessed how Mao’s intransigent behavior doomed all earlier border talks with the Soviet Union, and how even Zhou Enlai apparently spewed polemics at Kosygin during their Beijing airport meeting by vowing to continue the ideological struggle against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the next ten thousand years,
¹⁵⁷
the role of leadership in international negotiations can never be gainsaid. At least in the first two years after the Zhenbao/Damansky conflicts of March 1969, the general feeling of the Soviet leadership seemed to be that Beijing was keen to maintain the border issue to provoke the Soviet Union for its own “anti-Soviet and chauvinistic goals.”
¹⁵⁸
With class warfare having destroyed the fabric of Chinese society and amidst the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution, Mao looked to an old formula for regime unity - the struggle against imperialism. The political purpose of the military conflicts of 1969 and the extended boundary altercations before and after was the mobilization of the Party and the Chinese people on his terms to divert public attention from domestic troubles to external threats.
¹⁵⁹

Conversely, once Gorbachev decided to mend ties and settle the boundary dispute between China and the Soviet Union, he set about creating a constituency for negotiation with China by expanding the win-set of the Chinese leadership. While Gorbachev’s Vladivostok speech in July 1986, in which he conceded the
thalweg
principle in drawing the riverine section of the Sino-Soviet boundary, provided the Chinese with sufficient political space (face) to reopen border negotiations, his visit to Beijing in May 1989 was, in the words of political scientist Janice Gross Stein, a victory for “suasive reverberation,”
¹⁶⁰
or in plain speech, public diplomacy. Gorbachev’s leadership on both counts succeeded in normalizing Sino-Soviet relations by personally breaking the deadlock over the border question, shaking Chinese assumptions and expectations that any Soviet leader since Khrushchev must be unrelentingly hostile toward their country, demonstrating the irreversibility of his goodwill by his public pronouncements and concrete actions, and employing his considerable charismatic charm and image of honesty to create or mobilize public opinion in China toward his visit to that country. Given the high visibility of the Chinese reform movement, Gorbachev probably hoped that a high-profile visit there would provide him with a boost to the momentum of his reforms back home. From this aspect, the result of his visit to China was uncertain. On the other hand, Gorbachev’s “suasive reverberation” struck such a chord with Chinese students, intellectuals and journalists that after the Tiananmen incident and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Deng referred to the corrosive effects of Gorbachev’s reform policies as constituting “a great danger from the north” to China,
¹⁶¹
against which China’s Communist leadership must be vigilant.

Insofar as threats to security in a deteriorating political economy constrain domestic reconfiguration, a boundary agreement that reduces uncertainties about security in a potentially hostile environment will only be more welcomed now than in the past. In other words, shrinking domestic-economic and foreign-security win-sets forced the leaders of both countries to seek agreement on the basis of positions (options, preferences) that their predecessors had the luxury of rejecting. Because leaders saw the border issue as “synergistically” linked, any agreement that was reached at one (inter-state) table had consequences for the other (intra-state) table. If there was no settlement of the boundary question, then military tension between the two countries could not be lowered, as troop withdrawals from the border regions could not be carried out, nor could profitable cross-border trading take place, since the border would remain more or less impassable. On the other hand, if there were no moves to withdraw troops or reopen the border, then there could have been no question of achieving a boundary agreement. Domestic imperatives, in this case by pressuring the two sets of leaders toward more accommodating positions, worked to favor Level I agreement rather than hinder it, at least with regard to the boundary question and the related issue of encouraging cross-border trade. Besides, achieving agreement on the long-running border dispute would crown a comprehensive and final settlement of the equally long-running split in the socialist bloc. There would be no better way to dramatize the reconciliation of two Communist giants, not to mention distract attention from the domestic unpopularity of both Gorbachev and Zhao, than to have a summit meeting take place between the then leaders of the Soviet Union and China. With anti-Sovietism no longer the main, or even major, ingredient in the foreign policy orientation of the Chinese leadership since then, both sides could finally proceed to resolve the border territorial issue amicably, or set it aside for the time being. “Synergy” as an expectation of joint gains through cooperation from negotiations should, therefore, not be seen as being derived from an “additive” game, with separate dynamics driving each level of the game independently, or with the causal force coming out of one level of the game to drive the other level. Rather, “synergy” should be perceived of as an “interactive” game, with intertwining dynamics, where bargaining advantages (or setbacks) are mutually reinforcing, as is demonstrated in this analysis. This is the understanding on which rests the basis of two-level game analyses, and this case of Sino-Russian boundary dispute illustrates this aspect of the framework very well.

4 The Zhenbao/Chenpao/Damansky Islands dispute

1    
Thalweg
is a German word for “channel course” which has entered the vocabulary of international maritime law. It refers to the deepest part of the river, not necessarily its center.

2    This section on the geography of Zhenbao Island is taken from Qi Xin,
Zhen Bao Dao Shi Jian Zhen Xiang
[The True Facts of the Zhenbao Island Affair] (Hong Kong: Seventies Monthly Magazine, 1971), 1—2.

3    This section on the historical background of the Zhenbao Island conflict is taken from Qi,
Zhen Bao Dao Shi Jian Zhen Xiang,
3,10-12. For more historical details on the Russian encounter with the Manchu from 1643 to 1860, see John J. Stephan,
The Russian Far East: A History
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), chapter 4, ‘Amur Setback” and chapter 6, “Return to the Amur.” For a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of the events leading up to the signing of the “Treaty of Aigun” in 1858 and the “Treaty of Peking” in 1860 between czarist Russia and Manchu Qing China, see R. K. I. Ouested,
The Expansion of Russia in East Asia, 1857-1860
(Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1968),
passim.
For Russian historiography on the evolution of the Sino-Russian border, see Alexei D. Voskressenski,
The Difficult Border: Current Russian and Chinese Concepts of Sino-Russian Relations and Frontier Problems
(New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1996), chapter VI, “Russian Approaches: Russian Concepts and the Problem of ‘Balanced’ Interpretation of the Russian-Chinese Relations.”

4    See the passage from “The Origin and Development of the Differences Between the Leadership of the CPSU and Ourselves,”
People’s Daily and Red Flag,
6 September 1963, quoted in Dennis J. Doolin,
Territorial Claims in the Sino-Soviet Dispute: Documents and Analysis
(Stanford CA: Stanford University, Hoover Institution Studies 7,1965), 27-28.

5    “A Comment on the Statement of the Communist Party of the USA,”
People’s Daily,
8 March 1963, quoted in Doolin,
Territorial Claims in the Sino-Soviet Dispute,
29-31.

6    Harold C. Hinton,
The Bear at the Gate: Chinese Policymaking under Soviet Pressure
(Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1971), 17.

7    
Ibid.

8    Li Huichun, “The Crux of the Sino-Soviet Boundary Question,”
Beijing Review,
27 July 1981, no. 30,16-17.

9 Hinton,
The Bear at the Gate,
18.

10    Qi,
Zhen Bao Dao Shi Jian Zhen Xiang,
72.

11    
Ibid.

12    Harold C. Hinton, “Conflict on the Ussuri: A Clash of Nationalisms,”
Problems of Communism,
January-April 1971, vol.20, 47.

13    Qi,
Zhen Bao Dao Shi Jian Zhen Xiang,
plates 1,2, 4, 5.

14    Alan J. Day (ed.)
China and the Soviet Union 1949-84, Facts On File,
by Peter Jones and Sian Kevill (New York: Facts On File Publications, 1985), 45.

15    Hinton,
The Bear at the Gate,
21.

16    Wishnick, “In the Region and in the Center: Soviet Reactions to the Border Rift,” quoting I. K. Bokan, Head of the Political Department of the Kraznoznamennyi Far Eastern border district, at a meeting of the Khabarovsk region and city party officials on 22 September 1969. Cold War International History Project,
Bulletin 6-7
(Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1995).
http://www.gwu.edu/~narchiv/CWIHP/BULLETINS/b6-7a15.htm
(accessed 4 July 2003).

17    Suslov wrote a strongly anti-Chinese article in the theoretical journal
Kommunist
(10 October 1969, no.15) entitled “Lenin and the Revolutionary Transformation of the World,” in Hinton,
The Bear At The Gate,
n49, 43. Harold C. Hinton considered Grechko a “hawk-like and anti-Chinese” ally of Brezhnev, but regarded CPSU Politburo member Alexander Shelepin a moderate on China. See Harold C. Hinton,
The Sino-Soviet Confrontation: Implications for the Future
(New York: Crane, Russak & Company, 1976), 39-40, 43.