The story of Sino-Soviet relations is one full of ups and downs. Sometimes the two countries were allies, other times they were rivals. By the late 1960s, the two were rivals once more. China did not fight the Soviet Union (Chen Lifu’s proposal of arming and funding Kazakh, Kyrghiz, and Tajiki separatists were ignored), but it did fight against Soviet aligned countries or rebel groups. In Vietnam, the Soviet Union backed the Viet Minh, who likely would have taken over the entire country had China not intervened in support of its favored faction. The Soviet ally of Mongolia hosted Chinese Communist exiles who raided ROC territory. The Soviet ally of East Turkestan promoted Uygur separatism.
The war in Vietnam and Laos was winding down. In January 1968, Viet Minh leader Võ Nguyên Giáp was killed in Laos. Chinese troops began to withdraw from Vietnam and Laos. Chiang Kai-shek declared that the war had been a success. The last troops returned to China in 1969. From this point on, fighting the Viet Minh and Pathet Lao was mostly the responsibility of the Vietnamese and Laotian governments respectively. The Chinese air force would aid Vietnam and Laos on occasion. The Soviet Union had abandoned all attempts to aid either the Viet Minh or Pathet Lao years earlier. Instead, the Soviets courted favor with Cambodia and Indonesia instead. Chiang Kai-shek was not overly concerned with these developments.
(Võ Nguyên Giáp, 1911-1968)
The Chinese Communists in Mongolia continued to launch raids into Chinese territory. The raids into Suiyuan, Chahar, and Xing’an provinces became less frequent as the decade went on, as the Chinese military presence on the border increased. The Chinese exiles turned their focus towards Xinjiang. At the same time, the East Turkestan government was sending agents into Xinjiang to foment rebellion. In 1966, the Kumul rebellion began in Northern and Eastern Xinjiang. The rebellion involved over 10,000 mostly Uyghur residents of Xinjiang, joined by volunteers from East Turkestan. The rebellion lasted until 1968, when it was crushed by Chinese general Ma Bufang. China was determined to bring the fight back to Mongolia and East Turkestan.
Both the East Turkestan and Xinjiang governments sought to subvert each other through propaganda. Both sides had a hard time making their case. The Communist government of East Turkestan had a hard time appealing to devout Muslim Uyghurs in China. The Chinese government had a hard time making the case for Chinese rule to Uyghurs. Nevertheless, both sides found people willing to work against their governments. In 1968, China sent Uyghur volunteers trained at the Academy of Central Asia into East Turkestan. Xinjiang Governor Yulbars Khan helped the volunteers. They intended to overthrow the Communist government, and they failed. Ehmetjan Qasim, the East Turkestani leader, celebrated the failure of the “reactionary imperialists.”
(Left: Yulbars Khan, Right: Ehmetjan Qasim)
In 1967, Defense Minister He Yingqin formulated the New Mongolia Policy, which was approved by Chiang Kai-shek. The new policy was that forces of the Republic of China Army had the authorization to cross the border into Mongolia to fight Chinese Communists. The military was reluctant to actually cross the border, fearing that fighting in Mongolia might get China into a war with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Wu Heling, an ethnic Mongol who had previously been involved in the Mengkukuo government, formed the Mongolian Freedom Association. The Mongolian Freedom Association was made up of Mongols in China, including Mongolian defectors. Its goal was to overthrow the Communist government in Ulaanbaatar. Some of its members disguised themselves as nomads and destroyed a small Chinese Communist outpost in Ömnögovi Aimag. Chinese soldiers crossed into Mongolia and fought skirmishes with Chinese Communists in 1968.
Chiang Kai-shek and Georgy Malenkov had something in common. Neither man wanted the violence in East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Northern China to escalate further. Neither side was likely to gain much from continued fighting. The two agreed to meet in a neutral country in 1969. India was the perfect country to host such a meeting. It was politically stable and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was friendly towards both countries. The two men met to discuss terms to define the new relationship between the two countries. The East Turkestan Republic was a thorny issue. The USSR was determined to keep its puppet regime while China saw viewed the regime as occupying part of Xinjiang province. Nevertheless, China agreed to stop sending revolutionaries there. China also agreed to stop all incursions into Mongolia. The Soviet Union agreed to stop any support for Chinese revolutionaries and to reign in the Chinese exiles in Mongolia. In addition, China and the USSR would drop their opposition to North and South Korean membership in the UN respectively. Hopefully, the talks would lead to lasting peace, but neither leader was confident that it would.
