A Chinese official in Urumchi has been quoted having told some western and Japanese journalists that the Soviet Union nibbled away 1,080 sq. miles of his country’s territory along the Sinkiang border between 1972 and last year in addition to the 185 sq. miles of area which it had absorbed in the northern part of the province between 1960 and 1969. On the face of it, this is an incredible statement on several counts. The Chinese government would not have kept quiet all these years if the Russians were, in fact, grabbing its territory, however gradually. Indeed, Mr. Mao Tse-tung himself spoke more than once on the subject of other people’s, including China’s, territories having been seized by the Russians and he did not suggest at any time that the Russians had taken over or were trying to take over any more in Sinkiang. The fact that the Chinese fought as hard as they did in 1969 to protect what they regarded as their right over some islands in the Ussuri would make it difficult to accept the Chinese official’s statement that in the case of Sinkiang the Russians have got away without having had to fire a single shot. Above all, even if it is conceded for the sake of argument that the Chinese authorities have not been posted with what has been happening on the Sinkiang border and that it is only recently that they have discovered the Soviet occupation of their land, it is inconceivable that they would not have made the charge in the full glare of publicity in Peking instead of doing so rather quietly in Urumchi.
Why then has the official in question made the charge? It is not easy to answer this question, especially in view of the fact that Mr. Lin Fu-hen himself has said that though incidents had occurred over persons and cattle straying across the border, the Russians had not seized any more territory in the past one year. For, it suggests that the Chinese are not planning to launch a big propaganda offensive against the Soviet Union on this particular question. But in a sense the statement itself offers one possible clue to what has happened on the ground. While clearly one cannot at all be certain in such matters, it cannot be ruled out that the Russians have consolidated their frontier in the Sinkiang region – it was at best thinly patrolled before the sixties – and prevented access to grazing fields on their side to tribesmen living on the Chinese side of the common border. Mr. Lin Fu-hen’s statement that the Russians had driven out Kirghiz and Uzbek tribesmen and their herds and then blocked access to the area with heavy barbed wire barriers lends support to the above interpretation. And if this is in fact what has happened, the Chinese, too, may not be unduly aggrieved. For they would be as keen to prevent contact between their tribesmen and Soviet tribesmen as the Russians. But all this cannot and does not clinch the issue. More details would need to be available before one can draw any conclusion, even a tentative one.