Sino Soviet Conflict And War Of 1969

Table of Contents

A tale of two ‘Reds’

The Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China had a disputed border and fought a brief war in 1969.
Both the countries followed the same communist ideology but still their relations were not always good.

1945 – USSR helped the Communist Party take control of Manchuria and ultimately win the Chinese civil war
1949 – PRC established with the blessings of USSR
1950 – Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance.
Much technical and financial help provided by USSR to the new communist republic

1956 – Differences between Mao and Khrushchev over the latter’s policy of ‘De-stalinization’
1956 – China criticized the USSR’s handling of Hungarian uprising of 1956.
1959 – USSR was not happy with Mao’s ‘Great leap forward’
Eary 1960s – USSR signs nuclear test treaties with the USA – China sees this as ‘surrender’.
1962 – Soviet diplomatic relations broken off.

A seven-month undeclared military conflict.
A series of border clashes led to the larger ‘clash’ in March 1969
It brought the world’s two largest communist (and nuclear) states to the brink of largescale war
Trigger = Zhenbao (Damansky) Island on the Ussuri (Wusuli) River, near Manchuria.
The Ussuri or Wusuli river

As Sino-Soviet tensions heightened in the 1960s, ownership of these tiny, uninhabited, and strategically meaningless river islands along the Ussuri became an issue of contention.
The river was designated as a boundary line between China and the Soviet Union by the 1860 Treaty of Peking.
The specific dispute over the border centered on differing interpretations of the 1860 Treaty of Peking, which identified the Amur and Ussuri rivers as forming a part of the eastern boundary between China and Russia.
There were two main points of contention.
First, China repeatedly claimed that the Treaty of Peking was an “unequal” treaty forced upon a weak China by czarist Russia.
China, according to this view, was forced to make concessions to a more powerful neighbor that “forcibly incorporated” 400,000 square kilometers of Chinese territory into Russia

On 2 March 1969, Chinese troops ambushed and killed a group of Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island, one of the many disputed islands on the Ussuri River.
Armed skirmishes continued into the spring and summer, with both sides contributing to a massive military buildup in the region. For several harrowing months, as the world watched, China and Russia teetered on the brink of a nuclear conflict.

The border crisis was defused diplomatically in September 1969, when Soviet Premier Kosygin flew to Beijing for high-level border talks with Chinese premier Chou Enlai.
The conflict resulted in a ceasefire, with a return to the status quo.
Ultimately, the dispute was resolved in a series of border agreements that Russia and China concluded in 1991, 1994 and 2004
China received several hundred islands on the Argun, Amur, and Ussuri rivers, including Damansky (Zhenbao).

‘By initiating a limited attack, flexing some muscle, and killing a few Soviets, China sought to forcibly demonstrate that it could not be bullied, and that a future Soviet attack would be fiercely resisted.’
Mao wanted to teach Moscow a “bitter lesson’’.
China started talks with USA
Normalisation of Relations with USA
USA president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972