182 { China’s Quest
to support it against China. From late 1962 until about 1965, that power was
the United States. Then, as Sino-Soviet tensions mounted and India broke
with the United States over the US intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet Union
emerged as New Delhi’s more reliable anti-China partner. New Delhi would
maintain that alignment all the way to Mikhail Gorbachev’s effort in the late
1980s to maneuver toward rapprochement with China. Gorbachev’s push for
rapprochement with Beijing required Moscow to dilute its security guarantee
to India.^39 Then, after a period of Indian isolation in which it lacked the sup-
port of any superpower, India in the 2000s began moving into alignment
with the United States.^40 The India-US strategic partnership that emerged
in the 2000s cannot, of course, be reduced to 1962. Yet the lesson learned
by India in that year—that China is a powerful country quite prepared to
employ military force to uphold its interests and one which India must take
seriously—was one significant factor in India’s decision to embrace a new
military, security, and strategic partnership with the United States in the first
decade of the twenty-first century.Emergence and Militarization of the Territorial Issue
with the Soviet UnionShortly after the war with India, Mao decided to escalate the conflict with
Moscow from a polemic over Marxist-Leninist theory to an interstate conflict
over territory. This was a momentous step. As noted earlier, one of the core
political beliefs of contemporary Chinese political culture is the idea that be-
tween the start of the first Opium War in 1839 and the founding of the PRC in
1949 China experienced a Century of National Humiliation when all sorts of
evils were inflicted on it by predatory Western powers and Japan. The west in-
cluded tsarist Russia. One of those evils was the seizure of Chinese territory.
Tsarist Russia was among the most aggressive in seizing Chinese territory.^41 In
1858, the Treaty of Aigun ceded the north bank of the Heilung or (in Russian)
Amur River to Russia. In 1860, the Treaty of Beijing ceded the east bank of the
Ussuri River to Russia. In 1888, tsarist Russia seized 500,000 square miles of
Central Asia east of Lake Balkhash in today’s Kazakhstan. In 1945, and again
in 1950, Stalin had insisted that Chinese leaders, first Chiang Kai-shek and
then Mao Zedong, formally recognize the independence of Mongolia. Soviet
leaders were unwilling to compromise Mongolia’s independence. Figure 7-2
illustrates the formation of the Sino-Russian/Soviet border.
During the period of Sino-Soviet friendship in the 1950s, commercial inter-
action flourished across the riverine borders of China’s northeast.^42 Those
borders had been fortified during the standoff between Japan’s puppet state
of Manchukuo and the USSR from 1931 to 1945, but during the 1950s the bor-
der was demilitarized. Customs and visa regimes were greatly simplified and