China\'s Quest. The History of the Foreign Relations of the People\'s Republic of China - John Garver

Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 183

relaxed. Local governments sought expanded cooperation. Joint Soviet-PRC
commissions worked out river navigation rules.
Then, in early 1963, Mao Zedong abruptly raised what seemed to be, at least
to Soviet leaders, claims on the lands seized by tsarist Russia in the nineteenth
century. After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Beijing criticized Khrushchev’s
“capitulation” for withdrawing Soviet missiles from Cuba: “100 percent
appeasement,” “a ‘Munich’ pure and simple,” Beijing said.^43 Khrushchev
responded to Beijing’s charges of inadequate militancy in a speech to the
Supreme Soviet. The “ultra-revolutionary loud months in Beijing,” the Soviet
leader noted, had not liberated Hong Kong and Macao. This failure was not
some sort of “retreat from Marxism-Leninism,” Khrushchev said, but simply
an application of common sense—as had been his own withdrawal of mis-
siles from Cuba to avert a possible thermonuclear war. A statement by the
Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) seconded Khrushchev’s analysis of
events. In March 1963, the CCP replied to the CPUSA, although it was clear to
all that the real target was Khrushchev. Since the matter of the unequal trea-
ties of the nineteenth century had been raised, the CCP statement said, China
needed to put on record that none of those treaties had any validity. The PRC
could not accept the validity of the “unequal treaties” of the nineteenth century.
The same day, Renmin ribao carried an editorial saying that the nine “unequal

TAIWAN

Sea of

Okhotsk

Sea of

Japan

Ussu

ri R.

Yellow

Sea

Amur

(^) R.
Arg
un^
R.^
BalkLakehash
Lake
Baikal
Peking
Ulan Bator
Hong Kong
Shanghai
Vladivostok
Khabarovsk
Kyakhta Manchouli
PAK.
JAPAN
BHUTAN
NEPAL
OUTER MONGOLIA
MANCHURIA
SINKIANG
KASHMIR
C HINA
INDIA
RUSSI A/USSR
AFGH.
(^) KOR
EA
INNER MONGO
LIA^
Occupied by Russia,
1900–1905; Russian
special rights, 1905–1954
Ceded to Russia
in 1860
Ceded to Russia
in 1858
Occupied by
Russia, 1840–1881
Boundary established by
Treaty of St. Petersburg
in 1881
China agrees independent
under Russian pressure,
1945 and 1950
F IGU R E 7-2 Formation of the Sino-Soviet/Russian Border