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Report from China: The Chinese Account of the 1969 Fighting at Chenpao

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Neville Maxwell
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Extract

The origins and course of the fighting over the Ussuri island of Chenpao in March 1969 are as sharply disputed as the island itself. That fighting had broken out on 2 March was announced in a broadcast from Moscow that day and a Soviet Note to Peking of the same date charged that the Chinese had deliberately organized an armed provocation by sending troops across the state boundary line. Soviet frontier guards had been dispatched to warn them off Soviet territory: “The Chinese servicemen let the Soviet frontier guards approach them to a distance of a few metres and then suddenly, without any warning, opened point-blank fire at them.” Simultaneously, other Chinese troops, lying in ambush on the island itself, opened fire at the Soviet frontier guards on the ice. The Chinese, in this version, used machine-guns, mortars and artillery as well as automatic rifles, and about 200 troops. In later Soviet accounts that number was enlarged to 300. The Russians said they lost 31 killed and 14 wounded in the action but that they “expelled the violators from Soviet territory.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 56 , December 1973 , pp. 730 - 739
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1973

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References

1. Soviet Government statement of 29 March 1969, Soviet News, 1 April 1969.

2. Ginsburgs, George, in New School Bulletin (New York), 10 05 1969Google Scholar .

3. InProblems of Communism (Washington), 01/04 1971Google Scholar .

4. See Gittings, John, “How They Lost China,” in Far East Economic Review (Hong Kong), 13 11 1969Google Scholar .

5. Not all the islands are contested, of course. Those which lie on the Russian side of the main channel the Chinese recognize as Soviet territory.

6. The Chinese explain these remarkable films by saying that they were taken to refute the denials of any such incidents which the Russians were persisting in at diplomatic level. They were taken by cameramen with the Chinese frontier guards – the latter being under orders not to risk clashes by intervening to protect civilians.