China Agrees To Border Talks

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31987, 14 May 1969, Page 17

China Agrees To Border Talks

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

HONG KONG, May 13.

China has agreed to a Soviet proposal to hold a meeting of their joint commission on navigation on boundary rivers, the New China News Agency said today.

But China has suggested a June meeting, instead of one this month, as the Russians had proposed, The agency said that Peking had agreed that the commission should meet in Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East, as proposed by Russia. The meeting will be the fifteenth of the commission, which was set up in 1951 to regulate border problems. It last met in Peking in 1964. Khabarovsk is about 150

miles from the Chinese border and is itself in an area to which China has indicated territorial claims. The Chinese statement rejected a Soviet accusation, made on May 3, when the Kremlin proposed the border talks, that China was responsible for the failure of the commission to hold its usual meeting last year. The Russians should shoulder full responsibility for this "singlehanded sabotage” the New China News Agency said.

About 50 Russians and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers died in fierce fighting last March for the island of Damansky, known to the Chinese as Chen Pao, on the border river Ussuri. The Chinese territorial claims relate to territory ceded by the Manchu emperors to the Russian tsars in the nineteenth century.