China should ask Russia to return ‘lost territories’
This coming May 31, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of a treaty between the USSR and China. Although Soviet diplomats reaffirmed the Karakhan Manifesto’s promise to abolish the Tsarist unequal treaties in that agreement, the unequal treaty terms still exist a century later.
Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin bogged down in the Ukraine war, it may be the best time for Beijing to tell Moscow that it must finally recognise China’s rights to its “lost territories”.
In 1919 and 1920, Lev Karakhan, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, sent China proposals promising to return to the Chinese people “everything that was taken from them by the Tsarist government”.
The Karakhan Manifesto further renounced all “conquests” that “deprived China of Manchuria and other areas”.
Finally, the Soviet government specifically mentioned Siberia: “the return to the Chinese people of what was taken from them requires first of all putting an end to the robber invasion of Manchuria and Siberia”.
If Russia is indeed the legal successor to the USSR, which it has claimed since invading Crimea in 2014, then Moscow is also liable to settle outstanding Soviet promises concerning the Karakhan Manifesto and the ultimate return of what is now the Russian Far East to China.
Putin is desperate to import war material from China. That means China now has strong financial leverage over Russia, especially with its gross domestic product, measured by purchasing power parity, of US$33.71 trillion, almost six times bigger than Russia’s US$5.78 trillion.
Therefore, Beijing must begin border negotiations while the iron is hot, threatening to stop its purchases of Russian gas, timber, minerals and petroleum, and even cut its sale of much-needed dual purpose technology to Russia. Without China’s help, the Russian war machine in Ukraine would grind to a halt within months.
Putin and President Xi Jinping recently assured the world that Russia and China have a limitless friendship. Let’s test that claim. What is good for the goose – Russia taking Ukrainian land – should be equally good for the gander – China retaking its old territories in the Russian Far East.
China has the legal documentation – the Karakhan Manifesto – the moral high ground, a population 10 times larger and an economy six times larger than Russia’s. It has patiently waited a century for Russia to fulfil its promises. A hundred years is long enough. The time is ripe for Beijing to take action now.
Jon K. Chang, NWOSU research associate, and Bruce A. Elleman, US Naval War College. The opinions expressed are strictly their own