Complementary Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation
Amur Region, Part 5
After treaties in 1991 and 2001 were not able to complete define the disputed border between the Russian Federation and the Republic of China, the two states were party to the Complementary Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation on the Eastern Section of the China–Russia Boundary in 2004. The disputed territories were islands at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers. Possession of the two islands was significant for military control of the Amur region, as the Russian city of Khabarovsk is in close proximity to the disputed border. China wished for the boundary to be the channel north of the islands, resulting in China’s possession of Bolshoy Ussuriyski and Tarabarov Island. Russia insisted that, consistent with the 1860 Treaty of Beijing, the southern channel should make up the boundary, allowing for Russian possession of the islands.
Once negotiations were concluded, Tarabarov Island and part of the Abagaitu Islet were relinquished by Russia, and Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island was divided in half. The agreement was ratified in 2005, and it came into effect on October 14, 2008. In both the Russian Federation and the Republic of China, the agreement was unpopular because of the mutual loss of territory. Russian Cossacks protested the division of Bolshoy Ussuriyski Island in 2005. Media outlets in Taiwain and Hong Kong were critical of the agreement, as they felt the islands were Chinese territory forever lost to Russia. Furthermore, Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island is still claimed by Taiwan. Despite the unpopularity of the agreement, the Russian Federation and the Republic of China consider the agreement to be a success. The border between the two states is now definitively declared, and economic cooperation in the region has been increased.
Group 3
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Morris Low, et al. East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. 31-33. Print.
Guo, Rongxing. Cross-Border Resource Management. 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier, 2012. 216-217. Print.
Wiegand, Krista. Enduring Territorial Disputes. 1st. ed. Athens: University of Georgia, 2011. 240-241. Print.
Picture: http://www.economist.com/node/11792951
October 14, 2004
The Treaty of Aigun
Amur Region, Part 2
The Amur region grew in importance for Russia during the 1850s. Count Nikolas Muravyov-Amursky led expeditions into the region during the first part of the decade, and during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the Russian presence in the Amur region was expanded significantly. The Amur River became an important waterway for the Russian military as gateway to the Pacific, and several military outposts were built. With the increased settlement, the region was virtually controlled by Russia. China was unable to respond militarily to the challenge. While Russia was establishing outposts and assuming control of the nearby maritime region, China was taking part in a number of devastating conflicts. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864, which wiped out a large number of Chinese citizens, coupled with the Second Anglo-Chinese War of 1856-1860, provided Russia with the opportunity to gain new territory in the frontier along the border.
The Treaty of Aigun, named after the Chinese town in which it was signed, was concluded in May 1858. The signers were the Russian Count Muravyov-Amursky and the Manchu official Yishan. As part of the treaty, Russia received all land north of the Amur River. Another large part of land to the east of the Ussuri River was also given to Russia. The Treaty of Aigun amounted to an estimated two million miles of new territory for Russia. In addition to territory, Russia gained more control over regional trade and near exclusivity in the use of the Amur, Ussuri, and Sungari Rivers. Two years later, the terms of the Treaty of Aigun would be confirmed in the Treaty of Beijing, which established the Ussuri River as the border between Russia and China. Despite the Treaty of Aigun and the Treaty of Beijing, the border between Russia and China was not agreed upon in manner precise enough as to prevent future conflict. China was fully aware that it had been forced into the Treaty of Aigun, and border disputes continued into the 20th century.
Group 3
Tzou, Byron. China and International Law: The Boundary Disputes. 1st. ed. New York: Praeger, 1990. 47-48. Print.
" Russia and China end 300 year old border dispute." BBC World News (1997): BBC News. Web. 12 Feb 2014. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/analysis/29263.stm.
"Russian-Chinese Treaty of Aigun concluded 155 years ago." Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. 28 May 2013. Web. 12 Feb 2014. http://www.prlib.ru/en-us/history/pages/item.aspx?itemid=1042.
Picture: http://qingdynastyyong.blogspot.com/
May 1858
The Treaty of Nerchinsk
Amur Region, part 1
As Russia sent explorers and settlers eastward in the mid-seventeenth century, they struggled over the land in the Amur basin. At the time of Yerofei Khabarov’s 1649 expedition, one bank of the Amur river was ruled by the Daurians and the other by the Manchu, at the time the ruling dynasty of China. Khabarov captured a Daurian fortress that he called Albazino and installed a Russian settlement there, which fought against the Manchu in numerous battles and sieges. Several times the settlers escaped from Albazino to Nerchinsk, where they regrouped before returning to the fortress. Only 100 of the 800 settlers escaped from a 1685 siege, but returned the next year. The next siege lasted a full year and was more deadly still, leaving 40 out of 900 settlers alive. Finally, in 1689, Russian and Manchu delegations met at Nerchinsk to agree on a treaty that gave the Amur region to the Manchu rulers of China.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk gave the lands of the upper Amur to China and called for the destruction of the Russian settlement at Albazino, with the Chinese promising not to populate the Amur basin. The treaty also opened trade with China and included provisions allowing travel and extradition of criminals between Russia and China. China’s northern boundary was extended, now marked by the river Gorbitsa, and a neutral zone was left between the river Ud and the frontier mountains. However, with a lack of both accurate maps and clear descriptions the exact boundary was and is ambiguous.Because the treaty was written using Latin as a lingua franca and translated into Russian and Manchu separately, a great number of differences exist between the various translations, exacerbating the boundary ambiguities. This border between Russia and China held, legally if not precisely, from 1689 until the Treaty of Aigun in 1858.
Group 3
The Territorial Terms of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689. V. S. Frank. Pacific Historical Review , Vol. 16, No. 3 (Aug., 1947) , pp. 265-270
"The Amur's siren song." The Economist. Dec 17th 2009. http://www.economist.com/node/15108641
"Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first treaty between Russia and China, concluded." Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. Web. 10 Feb 2014. http://www.prlib.ru/en-us/History/Pages/Item.aspx?itemid=658.
Image source: http://history.cultural-china.com/chinaWH/upload/upfiles/2009-11/09/treaty_of_nerchinsk__the_first_treaty_between_russia_and_china8ece83df84e905ad63a3.jpg
1689-1858
Trans-Siberian Railroad
Amur Region, Part 3
The Trans-Siberian Railroad was the material display of Russia’s desire for a permanent foothold on the Pacific coast. Not long after the Amur region had come under Russian control, the imperial government recognized the need for a railroad to connect the region with the Russian heartland. Such a railroad would bolster Russia’s internal development of the region and project Russia’s military power. Ames’ account of Russian railway construction provides a full description of the trans-Siberian railroad’s construction, but the most notable points regarding the Amur region is that construction began simultaneously at Vladivostok as in the west, and that the first completed segment ran through Manchuria. Ultimately, an all-Russia link would be completed in the Amur valley by 1916.
In particular, Russia’s desire for a militarily secure railroad arose from the concern that the Amur region, recently acquired from China, might return to the Chinese. Fears of reconquest by demographic means became common in the period. These fears had real roots in the massive settlement program, described by Marks, that the Qing dynasty had enacted in Manchuria. The notion of a few Russian outposts against the entirety of China would remain a latent ethnic concern even into the Soviet and modern era, and the trans-Siberian railroad was a means of improving the odds of permanent Russian settlement in the Amur region.
However, the greater railroad projects in the Amur region did not simply represent a means of bolstering Russia against the Chinese threat. In the late 19th century, Russia saw itself as much of a colonial power as any European state, and the railroad held promises of facilitating a Russian expansion into China. Marks notes how the most ambitious of Russians even hoped for an expansion of Orthodoxy into China through railroads extending into China. While that would not come to pass, the construction of the trans-Siberian railroad and its Manchurian branches provided the infrastructure needed for any sort of economic, military, or social control over China by Russia.
Group 3
Ames, Edward. "A century of Russian railroad construction: 1837-1936."American Slavic and East European Review (1947): 57-74.
Marks, Steven Gary. Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
"File:Banknote 5000 rubles (1997) back.jpg" From Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed February 12, 2014. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Banknote_5000_rubles_%281997%29_back.jpg
1891-1916
Damansky Island Conflict
Amur Region, Part 4
After the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s, the Chinese began to dispute the current borders on the argument that "unequal treaties" by the Russians had stolen Chinese territory. On March 2, 1969, the border units of the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China clashed at Damansky (Zhenbao in Chinese) Island. After fierce fighting, the Soviet border forces managed to hold control of the island. Ultimately the Chinese and Soviets would not escalate the matter any further, but the border incident demonstrated that old rivalries between the Romanov and Qing dynasties had not been swept away by Communism. Russia had only gained control of the region in the last one hundred years, and the escalation of the conflict to the level of bloodshed demonstrated that the border remained an open question to the Chinese.
Besides causing loss of life and nearly dragging two nuclear powers to war, the incident also resonated in historical memories on both sides. In China, Yang Kuisong notes how the Cultural Revolution stoked flames of both ideological assault against the Soviet "revisionists" and cultural memory of national humiliation by colonial powers. In the Soviet Union, popular imagination sprung on the fear of outposts of Russians being subsumed by waves of Chinese invaders. One poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, even went so far as to claim "Vladimir and Kiev,/you see in the smoking twilight /The new Batu Khans, /bombs rattling in their quivers." Although these examples may be the most heated examples of propaganda, they demonstrate how important this region was on a cultural level. For both nations, the Amur region, as distant as it might be from the Russian or Chinese heartlands, was as dear as Moscow or Shanghai. Just as the legal matter of the border dispute would not be resolved in this period, the societal impact of this region would resonate even in contemporary times.
Group 3
Kuisong, Yang. "The Sino-Soviet Border Clash of 1969: From Zhenbao Island to Sino-American Rapprochement." Cold War History 1, no. 1 (2000): 21-52.
For the poem cited,
Yevtushenko, Yevg. "(Poem)-ON THE RED USSURI SNOW." Current Digest of the Russian Press, The (formerly The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press) 21, no. 15 (1969): 12-13.
Image: "We will not attack unless we are attacked, if we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack," Chineseposters.net. Accessed February 12, 2014. http://chineseposters.net/images/e13-783.jpg
March 2, 1969