The Sino-Soviet boundary question

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The problem of the boundaries between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union was very nearly solved by a single decision of the new Chinese government, taken soon after it assumed power in 1949. The Communists' predecessors, Nationalist and imperial, had made clear their determination, no less implacable for its being fruitless, to regain the territory that had been taken from China during the long prostration that followed the Opium War (1840-42). The Japanese, the French, the British had all pressed hard on China and trimmed off areas which the Chinese regarded as their own; but Tsarist Russia had amputated huge tracts of territory from China, and these were the lost lands that dominated the irredentist dreams of the Nationalist (and nationalist) Chinese. China's new men reversed their predecessors' policy. Choosing to concern themselves with the future of China as history had left her rather than with attempts to restore the boundaries of her imperial past, they turned their backs on the bequeathed irredentist claims — and, they must have expected, on the intractable disputes which such claims must inescapably have entailed. The People's Republic of China has repeatedly declared that it makes no territorial claims on any neighbor.