The Strategic Triangle } 419
The United States supplied military equipment to China during the 1980s
to strengthen China’s ability to defend against Soviet attacks in response to
China’s role in Afghanistan or Cambodia. The most prosaic form of Chinese
support for the Afghan resistance fighters consisted of donkeys. In the rugged
and underdeveloped mountainous regions in which the Afghan resistance
operated, donkeys were often the most reliable form of logistic transport. As
demand for these rugged beasts mounted, supply became a problem. China
stepped in and conscripted donkeys from Xinjiang and China’s northwest.
Throughout the 1980s, Beijing kept strong pressure on Moscow to withdraw
from Afghanistan. In March 1982, following a speech by Leonid Brezhnev
that hinted at a desire to improve ties with China, Deng listed Soviet with-
drawal from Afghanistan as one of three tasks that had to be completed before
PRC-Soviet relations could be renormalized. Eventually, Moscow acceded to
this demand. The last Soviet forces left Afghanistan in April 1989, the month
before Gorbachev arrived in Beijing to renormalize ties and end the long
Sino-Soviet dispute.
A third arena of substantive PRC-US triangular cooperation was joint
electronic monitoring of Soviet military activity in Central Asia. When Iran
was ruled by the shah, Tehran permitted the CIA to maintain posts on Iran’s
northern borders from which US intelligence agencies monitored Soviet mis-
sile tests and electronic transmissions in the Soviet Central Asian republics.
Those posts were closed down by Khomeini’s revolutionary government in
- China under Deng Xiaoping quietly agreed to allow the United States
to establish comparable posts in western Xinjiang. Two monitoring stations,
operated jointly by the CIA and National Security Agency of the United
States and the PLA, were built at Korla and Qitai in central Xinjiang. PLA
specialists were reportedly trained at CIA facilities outside Beijing and at a
special center near Palo Alto, California. Soviet activities which the Xinjiang
facilities monitored included missile, space, nuclear programs, and military
and commercial air flights, as well as all telecommunications in Afghanistan.
The operation of these facilities was, of course, top secret at the time. These
important and highly sensitive joint US-PRC operations reflected the com-
mon interests of the two countries in understanding Soviet, and perhaps later
Russian, capabilities and activities. China claimed in the early 1990s that the
facilities were closed, but scholar Yitzhak Shichor found evidence of their
continued operation into the mid-1990s.^43
Renegotiating the Taiwan Issue: Taiwan Relations Act
and Arms Sales
Under the US legal system, legislation was necessary to allow private entities
in the United States and in Taiwan to conduct relations with one another,