The English title is an editorial act. On the copyright page of this volume, in transliterated Cyrillic, stands the Russian original: Territorial Claims of Peking: Present and History. That is a lawyer's title — flat, defensive, promising a dossier. Peking Reaches Out: A Study of Chinese Expansionism is something else. "Reaches out" is a grab, and "A Study of" claims a scholarly form that the Russian title does not claim for itself. Somewhere between Moscow and the export list, a brief for the defence was repackaged as an indictment. Readers should keep the Russian title in mind throughout, because the book is at its most revealing exactly where it is defending, and at its weakest where the English title promises attack.
For once in this series the date on the spine is the real date. Progress translations often lag their Russian originals by years, and several volumes we have reissued are older books in newer jackets. Not this one. The compilation is signed by five hands — G. V. Vasilyev, M. V. Kapasov, R. A. Mirovitskaya, V. S. Myasnikov and Y. S. Semyonov — and the latest datable item in it is a Pravda despatch from Delhi of 23 February 1980, reporting an election speech by Indira Gandhi. The book was closed in the spring of 1980 and it is arguing about the spring of 1980.
What was happening that spring is the key to everything the book does and does not say. In February and March 1979 China had invaded Vietnam, to "teach a lesson," and had been badly handled in the process. In April 1979 — as the volume itself records — "the Chinese government said that it did not intend to renew the Treaty on Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance between the USSR and the PRC, which will thus be terminated in April 1980." The thirty-year alliance signed by Stalin and Mao in February 1950 was about to expire, and Moscow wanted the record to show whose fault that was. A first round of Soviet-Chinese normalisation talks ran in Moscow from 23 September to 10 December 1979 and produced nothing but an agreement to meet again. This book is the paper accompaniment to that failure: a case file assembled for the moment the alliance formally lapsed.
It is an anthology, and its sources are worth reading off the page. Roughly half the contents are journalism reprinted from Pravda with the date attached, running from 1 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, a piece by Yumzhagiin Tsedenbal of Mongolia. It is a state's brief with an academic annexe.
One byline deserves a note. "Contrary to the Historical Truth," printed here over the name I. Alexandrov, is sourced in the book itself to Pravda of 8 December 1979. Soviet readers of that period understood "I. Alexandrov" not as a person but as a signal: the byline was reserved for statements carrying the authority of the Central Committee apparatus, and its appearance told everyone in the Soviet bloc and every embassy in Moscow that what followed was policy, not commentary. The internal evidence is consistent with that reading — the article speaks throughout in the first person of the state ("our country," "the Soviet side"), quotes Brezhnev twice, and announces the lapse of the 1950 treaty. It appeared two days before the normalisation talks broke up. This is the Soviet government talking to itself in public, and it is the most important text in the volume.
Now to the honest part, which has to come first, because everything else in this introduction depends on the reader trusting that we are not simply reversing the book's polarity.
Chinese territorial claims in this period were real, they were extensive, and they were officially sponsored. The book's foreword notes that China: A General Survey, published in Peking in English and French in October 1979, carried a detailed inventory of "lost lands," and that the exhibition mounted in the Peking Museum of the Chinese Revolution for the PRC's thirtieth anniversary opened with a section on China's "alienated territories." The chapters by Tikhvinsky and Myasnikov document the historiographical apparatus behind this with named journals and dates a reader can check: a February 1962 article in Minzu tuanjie claiming that China's "Western area" had once taken in Kashmir, northern Afghanistan, Kokand, Kazakhstan, Khorezm and parts of Iran; a 1961 academic conference at which a speaker argued that "One should not label those who seek expansion as aggressors and those who fall into decay and are on the verge of perishing, as victims of aggression worthy of sympathy"; the Kuomintang-era geographer Hua Chi-yun's map of "old borders" running from Kamchatka to Singapore. That is a genuine bibliography of a genuine phenomenon, and Soviet sinology was documenting it in detail a decade before most Western scholarship caught up.
The account of the 1969 fighting on the Ussuri also holds up better than a hostile reader might expect. The book states that on the night of 1 March 1969 a Chinese unit of about three hundred moved onto Damansky Island — Zhenbao to the Chinese — with anti-tank guns, mortars and heavy machine guns pre-positioned on the Chinese bank, and opened fire on the Soviet border guards who approached them on the morning of 2 March. Chinese archival material that has since become available broadly supports this: the March 2 action was planned in advance and approved at a high level. Thirty-one Soviet border guards were killed. The book is not lying about that, and the reader who assumes it must be will be wrong.
And the invasion of Vietnam happened. Five hundred thousand Chinese troops crossed the border of a country that had been at war almost continuously since 1945, wrecked several northern towns on the way out, and their government then spent a year threatening a "second lesson." No amount of context makes that anything other than what the book calls it. On the specific charge that the People's Republic under Mao and under his successors used force and subversion against most of its neighbours, the book's factual case is substantially sound.
The trouble begins where the book has to explain why the Soviet side of the same frontier is different in kind.
Every serious question here converges on two treaties: Aigun, signed 16 May 1858, which gave Russia the left bank of the Amur, and Peking, signed 2 November 1860, which gave Russia the Ussuri region and the Maritime Territory — together some hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, transferred from a Qing state then in the fourth year of a war with Britain and France and in the middle of the Taiping rebellion. The historical chapter narrates this with unusual candour and then draws the opposite conclusion from its own facts. It records that the Anglo-French army took Tianjin in May 1858; Aigun was signed on 16 May 1858. It records that by August 1860 Anglo-French troops were in Tianjin, had sacked and burned the Yuanmingyuan, and that the Emperor had fled — and the Peking Treaty was signed in the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission that November. In the book's telling, Russia was not exploiting this catastrophe but mitigating it: Count Ignatiev "was the mouthpiece of a friendly country," and the Aigun negotiation was "six days of hard bargaining" concluded, at China's own suggestion, "by common consent, for the benefit of the greater and eternal mutual friendship of the two states."
Then comes the sentence the book cannot survive: "So obviously equitable was the Aigun Treaty that the Qing Emperor without hesitation issued an edict on 2 June 1858 to endorse all 'that was discussed in the talks'." Two paragraphs later the authors quote, with evident satisfaction, Alexander II's reaction to the same document: "We could not hope for better." An equitable settlement is not one that exceeds the hopes of one party. The Tsar's remark is in the book because the compilers read it as evidence of Russian good fortune; it is in fact the best short refutation of their thesis, printed by them, in their own text.
Which brings us to the hinge, and to the reason this volume matters more than most of the anti-Chinese literature Progress was producing in these years. On 25 July 1919 the government of Soviet Russia issued a Message to the Chinese People and the Governments of North and South China, restated in a Note of 27 September 1920 — the Karakhan Declarations, after the Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs whose name they carry. They renounced the Tsarist treaties with China, the extraterritorial rights, the concessions, the Russian share of the Boxer indemnity. They were, for a generation of Chinese nationalists and for the men who founded the Chinese Communist Party two years later, the most electrifying thing any European government had ever said to China. This book is, in substantial part, a sustained argument that they did not mean what China took them to mean.
The argument has three moves, and each is worth watching.
The first is periodisation. The book quotes Lenin, in 1900, on the plunder of China — "The bourgeois governments of Europe have long been conducting this policy of plunder with respect to China, and now they have been joined by the autocratic Russian Government" — and then says: "The treaties demarcating the Russo-Chinese frontier were signed much earlier, and Lenin and the Soviet government never regarded them as unequal, as a result of the imperialist policy of brigandage that tsarism began pursuing at the turn of the century." The periodisation of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is thereby converted into a statute of limitations. Annexations carried out in 1858 are pre-imperialist, and therefore not annexations. It is an ingenious use of a Marxist category and a completely illegitimate one; nothing in Lenin suggests that territory taken from a prostrate state at gunpoint becomes legitimate by being taken forty years too early.
The second move is textual. The 1919 Message, the book insists, listed the specific treaties it regarded as unequal — the Treaty of 1896, the Peking Protocol of 1901, the agreements with Japan of 1907–1916 — and said nothing about the frontier. "There is thus not a word in the Message of 1919 about the frontier between China and Russia or about the Russo-Chinese treaties demarcating that frontier." As a reading of a list, that is defensible. But the book then quotes the Message's own general clause, and the general clause is not a list. The Soviet Government, it says, "has renounced all the conquests of the tsarist Government, which had wrested Manchuria and other regions from China. Let the peoples of these regions decide for themselves within the frontiers of what country they wish to live and what form of government they wish to have." That second sentence is not a treaty-validity test at all. It is a plebiscitary principle, and a plebiscitary principle has no natural stopping place at the Amur.
The book knows this, and its third move is the one that should be read slowly. Having invoked Lenin's dictum that "Frontiers are determined by the will of the population," the authors apply it to the disputed territory:
In the other regions adjoining China—the Maritime Territory and the Amur region—the population, which had long consisted mainly of Russians, exercised its right to self-determination and, together with the rest of the Russian people, formed the Soviet Socialist State.
There it is. The Maritime Territory had a Russian majority in 1917 because of what happened in 1860; the settlement was the content of the annexation. Self-determination is being administered to the settlers and the result read back as a ratification of the conquest that put them there. Every colonial power in the twentieth century made this argument, usually in worse faith and rarely in the vocabulary of Lenin. It is the single most damaging sentence in the book, and the compilers printed it because they could not see it.
There is a fourth manoeuvre, the driest and in some ways the saddest. What exactly, juridically, was the 1919 Message? The book's answer: an offer. "A proposal to conclude an agreement on the annulment of treaties is juridically quite different from a unilateral renunciation of these treaties." Since no Chinese government of the warlord period ever formally accepted, "the Soviet proposal to consider the unequal treaties null and void was left hanging in the air. There are absolutely no grounds for referring to the 1920 Note as proof of the Soviet government's unilateral renunciation of any treaties." The volume then quotes the Soviet Mission's note of 13 December 1923 to make the point in the language of contract: the Chinese government "will acquire the rights arising from the principles of the Soviet declarations only when these principles are formalised in a bilateral act of international significance."
Measure the distance travelled. In 1919 a revolutionary government told the Chinese people that it had given back what the Tsars had stolen, and asked nothing in return. By 1980 the same state's lawyers explain that this was a conditional offer which lapsed for want of acceptance, and that whatever survived of it was discharged in full by the Agreement of 31 May 1924. That is not a falsification of the historical record — the 1924 Agreement exists, the negotiating history is roughly as described, and the book is right that Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and, later, Mao himself both praised the 1924 settlement in exactly those terms. It is something more disquieting than falsification: the complete conversion of a revolutionary act into a piece of treaty administration, performed by people who no longer register that anything has been lost.
The reply to this argument was in print eleven years before the book appeared, and it came from people with no investment in Chinese nationalism either. Under the heading "The Sino-Soviet Border Dispute," Intercontinental Press of 7 April 1969 carried a long analysis over the name Pierre Gousset, written on 24 March, three weeks after the fighting on the Ussuri. It starts from the same 1920 Note that the Progress compilers spend so many pages narrowing, and quotes it: the Soviet government "declares null and void all treaties which the former Russian government concluded with China. It renounces claim to all the territory taken from China and restores to China unconditionally and forever everything that the czarist government and the Russian bourgeoisie rapaciously took from it." The 1980 volume's case is that "all treaties" here means some treaties, enumerated elsewhere. Gousset's is shorter: "Marxists and the revolutionary anti-imperialist movements have never recognized as eternal the dictated treaties by which the imperialist powers carved up the flesh of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, Lenin and Trotsky officially disavowed all dictated treaties." What went wrong came later: "after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, Stalin failed to respect the promise made by Lenin and Trotsky. There is where the main responsibility lies for the conflict in the Far East between the two workers states."
What makes that article worth recovering is that it declines the mirror-image error. Gousset does not hand the Maritime Territory to Peking. "Of course, nineteenth-century imperial China was an empire oppressing many nationalities in the same way as czarist Russia or the European imperialist powers. The ultimate fate of the territories Lenin and Trotsky promised to return to China was to depend on the application of the right of nationalities to self-determination." He allows that the inhabitants might well "have opted in favor of autonomy within the USSR, or of independence, or of a Sino-Soviet condominium," and adds that "The same principle would no doubt have applied to not a few national minorities living on the territory of the People's Republic of China." That is precisely the position the 1980 volume claims to hold and does not: self-determination as a live question with an unknown answer, rather than a certificate issued retrospectively to whoever the annexation had already installed. On the clashes themselves the piece refuses to act as prosecutor for either party — the question "is not so much who provoked the last two incidents on March 2 and March 15 as why these incidents have been deliberately inflated by both sides."
The same current said the same thing about the war this book was written to denounce. The Fourth International's statement of 21 February 1979, printed in Intercontinental Press on 12 March, condemned the invasion of Vietnam without qualification — "The military offensive launched by the Chinese bureaucracy cannot be seen simply as a border incident. It is an act of war" — while refusing the Soviet framing of it: "It is the conflict between the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies, for which the Kremlin bears the historic responsibility, that constitutes the framework for the clashes between the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Khmer Rouge leaderships." And Livio Maitan, in "How Can There Be Wars Between Workers States?" (Intercontinental Press, 9 April 1979), supplied the explanation this volume most conspicuously lacks. Once "socialism in one country" is accepted, he wrote, "it becomes logical to accept and even to advocate a division into spheres of influence; and therefore to become preoccupied with the defence—and eventual extension—of these spheres. Border questions in turn acquire an importance which far exceeds their intrinsic significance." That is a description of the book you are holding.
The tradition offers no comfortable alternative claim to the Amur, and should not pretend to. What it does offer is the method the book has abandoned. Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin (1928), in the third section on the Chinese revolution, turns on the distinction the compilers of 1980 cannot afford to make: "Lenin really taught us to differentiate rigidly between an oppressed and oppressor bourgeois nation. From this follow conclusions of exceptional importance." Applied to 1858 and 1860, that distinction places Tsarist Russia unambiguously on the oppressor side of the transaction — which is why the book has to argue that the transaction took place before the categories switched on. And on the underlying question of whether Soviet policy toward the Far Eastern frontier was ever a matter of principle rather than of state convenience, Trotsky's judgement in "The Beginning of the End" (October 1937) is worth setting beside the 1980 volume's insistence on the sanctity of the treaty line: "The surrender of the Amur Islands has completely untied the hands of Japan with respect to China." Islands on the Amur were negotiable in 1937, when Moscow was placating Tokyo, and non-negotiable in 1980, when Moscow was isolating Peking. The frontier did not change. The requirement did.
Two silences complete the picture, and both are in the book's own field of vision.
The first is Afghanistan. Y. Dimov's chapter, "20,000 Kilometres of Provocations," contains a full section on Afghanistan, denouncing Peking for "smuggling arms to Afghan tribes inhabiting the villages along the border with China" and for weaving conspiracies against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan from its earliest months. The chapter was written in 1979. The book was closed in the spring of 1980, at least three months after Soviet forces entered Afghanistan in December 1979, and there is not one word about them anywhere in the volume. The foreword, meanwhile, defines the enemy: imperialism's "urge to dominate other countries and peoples, to interfere, both covertly and openly, in their internal affairs, to dictate terms, to establish spheres of influence, and to 'teach them lessons' by main force." And when the book has to explain the Soviet divisions stationed in Mongolia, it reaches for a formula that was, at the moment of printing, being used daily about Kabul: "These troops are in fraternal Mongolia at the request of the Mongolian government." The compilers were not being sly. They had a category for cross-border force — hegemonism — and it simply did not attach to their own state.
The second silence is Kampuchea. The book is entirely right about the Pol Pot regime, whose overthrow was a deliverance, and right that Peking sponsored it. But the overthrow arrives in these pages as spontaneous combustion: national patriotic forces formed a United Front in December 1978, and "The Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime collapsed in January 1979." A chapter titled "Victory of the People's Revolution" is contributed by Ros Samay. The Vietnamese armoured columns that actually took Phnom Penh in the first week of January 1979 are not in the book. Six weeks later China crossed the Vietnamese border and the book calls it aggression, correctly. The two events are given opposite categories, and the only operative difference is which side did it.
The same asymmetry runs through the volume's treatment of islands. N. Borodin's chapter on the Senkakus takes Japan's side in full against the Chinese claim, which rests on possession before the Japanese seizure of 1895. Elsewhere the book denounces "the Peking rulers" for supporting "these monopolies' unlawful claims to the Kuriles, which are Soviet territory" — the Kuriles having been taken from Japan in 1945. Prior possession settles the matter in the East China Sea and settles nothing in the Sea of Okhotsk.
What is worth keeping? More than the foregoing suggests. The historical chapters by Sladkovsky and Myasnikov are the work of trained scholars and, read against their own conclusions, are a usable documentary spine: Nerchinsk, Kyakhta, Aigun, Peking, the Chuguchak Protocol of 1864, the St Petersburg Treaty of 1881, the Pamir exchange of 1894, the 1924 Agreement and the diplomatic correspondence of the 1920s are set out with dates and archival references that can be checked. The survey of irredentist historiography inside the PRC is a real contribution. The foreword's use of the writer it calls Lu Xin — Lu Xun — is honest and well chosen, particularly his 1934 demolition of the claim that Genghis Khan was Chinese, which ends with the observation that "The Russians were subjected earlier than we were, so they should have been the ones to say" it. That is a Chinese internationalist mocking Chinese great-power myth-making, quoted accurately, and it is the best thing in the book. And the chronology of border incidents, stripped of its adjectives, remains a serviceable reference.
Read it, then, as two books bound together. One is a competent and largely accurate dossier on the nationalism of the Chinese state at the end of the Mao era, compiled by people who knew the material. The other is a legal defence of a frontier drawn by Tsarist gunboat diplomacy during the Opium Wars, conducted by the heirs of the government that once offered to give it back. The second book is the historically important one, because it contains its own indictment. The Message of 25 July 1919 survives in these pages, quoted at length — but only inside an argument for why it did not mean what the Chinese people understood it to mean. A state that has to explain, at that length, why its own revolutionary promise was merely an unaccepted offer has already told you what became of the revolution.