Peking Reaches Out

The English title is an editorial act. The Russian one on the copyright page is flatter and more honest, promising a dossier on Peking's territorial claims past and present. Somewhere between Moscow and the export list a brief for the defence was repackaged as an indictment, and the book is at its most revealing exactly where it is defending.

It is an anthology, and its sources are worth reading off the page. Roughly half the contents are journalism reprinted from Pravda with the dates attached, running from April 1978 to February 1980. The other half is scholarship: long historical essays by M. Sladkovsky, S. Tikhvinsky and V. Myasnikov - three of the most senior names in Soviet sinology - on the Russo-Chinese frontier treaties and on the treatment of history inside the People's Republic. Interleaved are official documents: a Declaration of the Soviet Government, statements by the governments of Vietnam and Laos, and a piece by Tsedenbal of Mongolia.

Those frontier essays are the reason to have it. The nineteenth-century treaties, the mapping of the Amur and Ussuri, and the historiographical quarrel over them are set out at length and from the Russian archives, in English, by the specialists who handled the file.

For once the date is the real date: the book closed in the spring of 1980, as the thirty-year Soviet-Chinese alliance signed by Stalin and Mao was about to lapse unrenewed.

Compiled by G. V. Vasilyev and others.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.