From Crisis Management to Realignment of Forces The Diplomatic “Geometry” of the 1969–1978 Sino-Soviet Border Talks ✣ Alsu Tagirova On the early morning of 11 September 1969, the staff of Beijing Airport observed an unlikely scene: Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and his Soviet coun- terpart, Aleksei Kosygin, were having a polite conversation over breakfast. For the past several months the media in both countries had condemned the ac- tions of the other. Newspapers featured hostile speeches by central and local party elites, as well as collective proclamations from “workers and peasants.” Some people even poured onto the streets in organized protests against the ag- gressive policies of the other country. “Down with the new Tsars!” the Chinese headlines read. “Rebuff the provocateurs!” the Soviet newspapers demanded. On the eve of the meeting, Chinese officials became concerned that the session was a trick—a Trojan Horse—designed to get a Soviet airplane into Beijing airspace and that the plane would actually be carrying Soviet special forces rather than the Soviet premier and his delegation. The suspicion was not unfounded. The Soviet Union had used a similar tactic the year before in Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Soviet leaders had signaled through U.S. diplomats and leaks to Western newspapers that they were considering a nuclear strike against Chinese military sites (though whether they were genuinely consider- ing it is as yet unknown). 1 Thus, the Chinese were forced to the negotiation table. The discussion between the two premiers went on for about three hours, and though often being described as yielding little to no result, it was the be- ginning of a lengthy negotiation process that lasted for another nine years. The existing scholarly literature on the border negotiations in both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with few exceptions, 1. Michael S. Gerson, The Sino-Soviet Border Conflict: Deterrence, Escalation and the Threat of a Nuclear War in 1969 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analysis, 2010), p. 48. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 116–154, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01027 © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 116 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/24/1/116/1980881/jcws_a_01027.pdf by guest on 08 January 2022