184 { China’s Quest
treaties” of the nineteenth century, including the 1858, 1860, and 1888 trea-
ties with Russia, needed to be “reexamined” and “renegotiated” and possibly
“renounced” or “revised.” It continued:
You [Khrushchev] are not unaware that such questions as those of Hong
Kong and Macao relate to the category of unequal treaties left over by
history, treaties with the imperialists imposed on China. It may be
asked: in raising questions of this kind, do you intend to raise all ques-
tions of unequal treaties and have a general settlement? Has it every
entered your heads what the consequence would be? Can you seriously
believe that this will do you any good?^44
Mao personally ratcheted tension up further in a talk with a delegation of
the Japan Socialist Party in July 1964, saying:
There are too many places occupied by the Soviet Union.... The Soviet
Union occupies an area of 22 million square kilometers while its pop-
ulation is only 200 million. It is time to put an end to this allotment.
Japan occupies an area of 379 thousand square kilometers and its pop-
ulation is 100 million. About a hundred years ago the area to the east
of [Lake] Baikal became Russian territory and since then Vladivostok,
Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other areas have become Soviet territory.
We have not yet presented our bill for this list.^45
Mao’s words clearly suggested that the entire territorial distribution
among states in eastern Siberia needed to be revised. Many Soviet leaders,
including Khrushchev, concluded that this was Mao’s true aim. This was why
he wanted a Soviet-American thermonuclear war. With Soviet cities and in-
dustry destroyed, the “lost territories” of eastern Siberia and Central Asia
could be re-gathered by China. These fears touched on a very long failure of
Russian governments to truly develop the Russian Far East, and a large and
growing demographic imbalance between the Russian Far East and China’s
increasingly densely populated and industrialized northeastern region. It also
touched on Russian memories of Adolf Hitler, who only twenty years before
had also spoken in terms of ratios of populations to territory and the need
for an equitable redistribution. Several months after Mao’s comments to the
Japanese Socialist delegation, Moscow charged that Mao’s territorial demands
were reminiscent of “his predecessor” (obviously Hitler) for Lebensraum. Five
years later, in 1969, when some Soviet leaders favored a large-scale nuclear at-
tack on China to reduce the Chinese population by several hundred million,
these images of Mao’s sweeping claims on Soviet territory were part of their
cognitive map.
Mao’s actual objectives in implicitly laying claim to large tracts of the
USSR were probably more modest. Mao raised the territorial issue at the
time and in the fashion he did as part of his competition with Moscow