Peking Border Talks

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32126, 23 October 1969, Page 15

Peking Border Talks

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

NEW YORK, Oct. 22. Territory seized from China by Tsarist Russia under four treaties, and the so-called Thalweg centre-line principle of river boundaries, are involved in the border negotiations now under way in Peking.

The Chinese are not insisting on the straight return of the territory, but they want the Soviet Union negotiators to acknowledge, as a matter of principle, that the bprder treaties were “unequal treaties” imposed on a weak China by a strong Russia in the nineteenth century. The treaties cited by Peking are:

The Treaty of Aigun of May 28, 1858, which gave about 185,000 square miles of territory north of the Amur to Russia, and placed 133,000 square miles east of the Amur and the Ussuri undei joint ownership. The treaty was supplemented a month later by the Treaty of Tientsin, providing for a border survey. The Treaty of Peking of November 14, 1860, under which Russia also acquired the 133,000 square miles that had been under common control. The Tahcheng (or Chuguchak) Treaty signed on October 7, 1864, by which about 350,000 square miles of Central Asian I territory claimed by

China was ceded to Russia. The Treaty of Hi (called by the Russians the Treaty of St Petersburg) of February 24, 1881, which returned the Hi territory to China, but which Peking nevertheless considers unjust on the ground that it still left other territory under Russian control.

In addition, Peking challenges a Russian-Chinese agreement of 1894, in which China was compelled to accept a Russian-British division of the Pamir territory of Central Asia, which had paid tribute to China.

In the Thalweg dispute, the Chinese insist that this centre-line should be the border in frontier rivers.

whereas Moscow has taken the position that the border lies on the Chinese bank of the rivers.