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Электронное приложение к журналу «
Международная жизнь
»
Author : V. Vorobyev
Senior research fellow, Institute for International Studies, Moscow State Institute (University) of Inter-
national Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; head of the RF delegation
at the border talks with China in 1998-2006, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
TEN YEARS AGO, Russia and China signed the Treaty of
Good Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation. Treaties be-
tween governments do not ordinarily set up relations between
countries. They at best aptly reflect the state of cooperation and
reproduce understandings reached between them. Some major
political treaties are good enough to set up bilateral relations for
long term and outline substantive guidelines for their further
expansion.
Today's Russian-Chinese border is one of the fragments of the
former border between the Soviet Union and the PRC inherited
from Tsarist Russia. This fragment is taken to comprise two
parts. The eastern part extends from Mongolia to North Korea (some 4,200 km.) and
the western part ranges from Mongolia to Kazakhstan (under 100 km). All Russian-Chi-
nese border disputes were about the eastern section.
After Japan's defeat in 1945, this line unilaterally established by the Soviet Union and
giving the latter actual control over the entire water surface in the Amur and Ussuri, their
islands included, remained unchallenged.
It was a warning of sorts signaling that Beijing reserved its own opinion about the border
when the PRC leadership remained conspicuously silent in the face of blistering attacks
of the so-called "rightists" with regard to Russian-Chinese delimitation also covering the
Soviet era during the course of the "let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign launched
by the Communist Party of China in the late 1950s. Soon after, the atmosphere along
the border became disturbing. In 1963, the parties agreed for a meeting between their
delegations to discuss boundary problems.
Regretfully, it proved impossible to nail down tentative agreements. The snag was that
the delegations agreed to put off the discussion of the moot points of delimitation in
the area of islands at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri so that these points would
not stand in the way of the needed accords. The decision to temporarily exclude this
area from the scope of agreements proved to be a positive precedent, but at that time it
prevented the sealing of all other accords.
Finally, beginning in 1993, Russia conducted boundary talks with China together with
Treaty of 2001 and Russian-Chinese Border Settlement Talks