In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan.
“If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860.
The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China fully recognizes Russia’s sovereignty over these territories.”
Really? Let’s examine the historical facts.
In 1919 and 1920, then-Soviet deputy minister of foreign affairs Lev Karakhan offered China a manifesto that intended to guarantee and return to China what in 1919 was Manchuria.
However, in the writing of the manifesto, it promised to return to China all of “the conquests made by the czarist government which deprived China of Manchuria” including the Russian far east, taken from China in the two “unequal” treaties in 1858 and 1860.
The manifesto was preceded by a similar pronouncement by Georgii Chicherin, the Soviet government’s people’s commissar for foreign affairs. On July 5, 1918, Chicherin announced to the Fifth Congress of the Soviets: “We notified China that we renounce the conquests of the czarist government in Manchuria and we restore the sovereign rights of China in this territory.”
Russian revolutionaries Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were both in the audience.
The Karakhan manifesto clearly states “that 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.”
It hardly matters that the Soviet Union no longer exists because these territories (formerly northern Manchuria) were assimilated by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which after 1991 simply became the Russian Federation. This is present-day Russia, the legal successor to the previous regime.
The final document was the Karakhan and Wang Zhengting (王正廷) “secret protocol” signed on March 14, 1924, by Soviet and Chinese diplomatic representatives. It states that all previous treaties, manifestos, protocols and documents would not be enforced. This meant “the previous agreements [by Karakhan] were not abolished, they were simply not enforced.”
Since 1991, there have been many former ministers and advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin who have left or defected to the West. It would take an additional treaty or “secret protocol” between China and Russia to annul the Karakhan manifesto. Nothing of the sort exists according to open sources.
Therefore, China still has a legitimate legal right to request “the return to the Chinese people of what was taken from them [in] Manchuria and Siberia.”
Jon K. Chang is a research associate at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. He has a doctorate in Russian history. Bruce A. Elleman is a former professor of maritime history at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island. He has recently retired.
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