Sino-Soviet border conflict

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sino-Soviet border conflict was seven months in 1969 when the world's two largest socialist states nearly went to war with each other. At its center was a frozen river island called Zhenbao in Chinese, Damansky in Russian, barely large enough to matter strategically, yet capable of drawing the Soviet Union and China toward a nuclear exchange. How did two communist allies reach the point where one side was debating whether to plant nuclear mines along the other's border? The answer runs through a disputed river boundary, a Cultural Revolution, and the death of a Vietnamese revolutionary whose funeral became the unexpected turning point.

• 2. The Disputed Rivers

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  From around 1900, after the Treaty of Peking assigned Outer Manchuria to Russia, the eastern Sino-Soviet border had been demarcated by three rivers: the Argun, the Amur, and the Ussuri. On paper, that sounds tidy. In practice, river boundaries create conflict because rivers contain islands, and islands need to be assigned to one side or the other. Under what is known as the thalweg principle, a river boundary is set at the median line or the area most suitable for navigation. China claimed the islands on that basis. The Soviet Union claimed and already effectively controlled almost every island along both rivers, including those that international law would have placed on the Chinese side. A separate dispute in the west centered on roughly 52,000 square kilometers of Soviet-controlled land in the Pamirs, along the border of Xinjiang and the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, where a 19th-century agreement had set the boundary at the ridge of the Sarikol Range but left the exact line contested through the entire 20th century. In 1964, the two sides had actually reached a preliminary agreement on the eastern section, including Zhenbao Island itself, which would be handed to China. Then CCP chairman Mao Zedong gave a public interview telling a Japanese delegation that Russia had unilaterally absorbed vast territories in Siberia and the Far East. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was outraged and refused to approve the agreement. A deal that was nearly done evaporated, and the buildup on both sides began in earnest.

• 3. Armies at the Edge

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  In 1961, the Soviet Union kept 225,000 men and 200 aircraft at the Sino-Soviet border. By 1968 those numbers had grown to 375,000 men, 1,200 aircraft, and 120 medium-range missiles. China stationed 1.5 million troops on its side and had tested its first nuclear weapon, known as the 596 Test, at the Lop Nur basin in October 1964. The sheer disparity in scale shaped how each government calculated risk. Soviet military planners feared that a massive Chinese conventional incursion could threaten the cities of Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, and Khabarovsk and cut crucial nodes of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Arkady Shevchenko, a high-ranking Soviet defector, later described the Politburo as "terrified" that the Chinese might make a mass incursion into Soviet territory, and quoted the Soviet leadership as acknowledging that despite overwhelming weapons superiority it would not be easy to cope with an assault of such magnitude. Mao's strategic doctrine offered a pointed answer to Soviet nuclear superiority: an asymmetric deterrence built on sheer human numbers. Mao had long argued that weapons "are not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive." Senior Soviet officer Nikolai Ogarkov concluded that even a limited counterforce nuclear strike on China would be dangerous, because a few weapons would "hardly annihilate" a country that size and China would "fight unrelentingly." Some Soviet bureaucrats argued privately that the only real defense against a massive Chinese conventional assault was to use nuclear weapons first, with a few even advocating the deployment of nuclear mines along the border itself. Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20-the 21st of August 1968 and the proclamation of the Brezhnev Doctrine pushed Mao to conclude that the Soviet Union now had an ideological justification to invade China and remove him from power. Chinese historian Li Danhui later wrote that by 1968 China had already begun preparations "to create a small war on the border."

• 4. The Ambush on Zhenbao

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  On the 2nd of March 1969, a group of People's Liberation Army troops ambushed Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island. The Chinese had selected 900 soldiers from units commanded by staff members with combat experience, given them special training and special equipment, and secretly moved them into position on the island in advance. The two sides disagree sharply on what the casualty figures were: Chinese sources reported 58 Soviet dead and wounded and 29 Chinese dead, while Soviet sources claimed at least 248 Chinese killed on the island and frozen river with 32 Soviet border guards dead and 14 wounded. The battle on the 2nd of March lasted roughly two hours. Both sides claimed victory, though neither force remained permanently on the island afterward. A second, larger engagement on the 15th of March began around 09:45 or 10:00 with artillery fire from the Chinese bank. Soviet tanks and mechanized infantry launched a counterattack at 13:00, and by 19:00 the battle was over. Soviet General Oleg Losik ordered the deployment of the then-secret BM-21 "Grad" multiple rocket launchers, and the Soviets fired 10,000 artillery rounds over a nine-hour engagement along with 36 sorties. One enduring trophy of the fighting was a T-62 tank, which the Soviets tried and failed to recover on the 17th of March and again on the 21st of March; Chinese navy divers eventually pulled it onto shore, and it was later placed in the Chinese Military Museum. A scholarly consensus has since emerged that the March fighting was a premeditated act of aggression orchestrated by the Chinese side, though the question of why Mao chose that particular moment remains disputed. Five Soviet soldiers received the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country's highest honor. Colonel Demokrat Leonov led four T-62 tanks in a counterattack on the 15th of March and was killed by a Chinese sniper while leaving a destroyed vehicle.

• 5. August and the Nuclear Brink

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  On the 13th of August 1969, approximately 300 Soviet soldiers supported by tanks and two helicopters attacked and defeated Chinese forces at Tielieketi in Xinjiang. The CIA's President's Daily Briefing that same month described the conflict as having "explosive potential" and noted that the potential for war between the two states "clearly exists," including a possible Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities. The Chinese did not believe a Soviet nuclear strike was genuinely imminent until the 27th of August, when CIA director Richard Helms publicly announced that the Soviets had been asking foreign governments what their reaction would be to a preemptive attack on China. That announcement caused Chinese leaders to begin evacuating Beijing. On 23 and the 29th of September, China conducted two unannounced nuclear weapons tests; the second was a 3-megaton thermonuclear device, intended to verify China's nuclear strike capacity. In October, the Soviet Union contemplated a massive nuclear strike on China. Lin Biao issued Order No. 1 to strengthen combat readiness against an enemy surprise strike, and China's three top-secret nuclear production plants, which were located close to the border, relocated to interior Third Front areas. Soviet concerns ran deep enough that ten reconnaissance satellites were launched between the 25th of February and the 23rd of April, compared to just two in the two months before and six in the same two-month period the prior year.

• 6. The Funeral That Stopped a War

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  Ho Chi Minh died on the 2nd of September 1969, and his funeral in Hanoi became the unlikely arena where the crisis began to wind down. Both Zhou Enlai and Alexei Kosygin attended, though at different times; Zhou deliberately flew out of Hanoi to avoid being in the same room as Kosygin. North Vietnam's alarm at seeing its two leading supporters on the verge of war prompted the North Vietnamese to act as go-betweens, passing messages between the Soviet and Chinese delegations. Romania's Prime Minister Ion Gheorghe Maurer, also in Hanoi for the funeral, drew Zhou aside on the 7th of September to deliver a message from Nixon that the United States wanted an opening to China. Kosygin, flying home from the funeral, was denied permission to use Chinese airspace and was forced to land for refueling in Calcutta, where the Indian government passed him word that China was willing to discuss peace. He immediately turned around and flew back to Beijing. On the 11th of September, Kosygin and Zhou held talks at Beijing Airport, a venue that was itself symbolic of how cold relations had become. They agreed to return ambassadors who had been recalled and to open border negotiations. Three weeks before these talks, on the 21st of March, Kosygin had tried to phone Mao directly to propose a ceasefire; the Chinese operator who answered the call addressed him as a "revisionist element" and hung up. The contrast between that rebuff and the Beijing Airport meeting captures how much the nuclear fears of August had shifted the calculation on both sides.

• 7. Toward Rapprochement

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  Zhou argued to Mao that a war with the Soviet Union would weaken China's position toward the United States, a country with which China was simultaneously seeking to improve relations. Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to China in 1971, during the period known as Ping Pong Diplomacy, meeting with Zhou. That meeting paved the way for President Richard Nixon's official visit to China in 1972, when he met with Mao. The sequence was not accidental. Nixon had used multiple backchannels to reach Mao: in August 1969 he visited Pakistan to ask General Yahya Khan to pass a message to Mao; on 2-the 3rd of August he visited Romania and asked Ceaușescu to do the same. Ceaușescu had already demonstrated his independence from Moscow by refusing to sign the Warsaw Pact statement condemning China after the March clashes, a refusal that produced no statement at all and was widely seen as a Soviet diplomatic defeat. Border negotiations between China and the Soviet Union resumed in 1969 but continued inconclusively for a decade. Serious talks did not take place until shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. On the 16th of May 1991, CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev witnessed the Sino-Soviet Border Agreement, which confirmed that Zhenbao Island belonged to China. A residual dispute over three islands in the Amur and Argun rivers carried into the next decade. In the border agreement signed on the 14th of October 2003, China received control over Tarabarov Island, Zhenbao Island, and roughly half of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island near Khabarovsk. On the 21st of July 2008, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signed an additional border agreement in Beijing, marking the final acceptance of the eastern boundary demarcation and transferring the last contested territory, nearly four decades after the shots on a frozen river island had brought the two countries to the edge of nuclear war.