DEVELOPMENTS IN SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85T00875R001100180003-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: T
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 4, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 15, 1973
• Content Type: IM

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DIRECTORATE OF
INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence Memorandum
Developments in Sino-Soviet Relations
NRIO review(s) complet9late Department review
completed
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Top Secret
15 February 1973
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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Directorate of Intelligence
15 February 1973
INTELLIGENCE MEMORANDUM
Developments in Sino-Soviet Relations
Relations between the USSR and China over the
past several weeks have been marked by intense com-
petition for influence in such key areas as Japan
and Western Europe, In an effort to upset plans for
joint Soviet-Japanese projects to exploit Siberian
resources, Peking has coupled blunt language on the
Soviet danger with a more flexible economic policy
aimed at presenting China as an attractive long-term
trading partner. As talks on mutual force reductions
were getting under way in Vienna, the Chinese did
their best to convince the West Europeans that Moscow
cannot be trusted.
New Sino-Soviet frictions are bound to emerge
in the wake of the Paris agreement on Vietnam, as both
Moscow and Peking move to prevent the other from gain-
ing a dominant position in Indochina. Bilateral re-
lations remain sour, and no progress has been made at
the border talks in Peking. There has been no major
trouble recently along the frontier, but each side con-
tinues to maintain and improve its military posture
in areas near the border.
Note: This memorandum is one in a series of rep^rts
on Sino-Soviet relations. It was prepared by the
Office of Current fntellige~zce., with contribut,ic-ns
from the Office of Strategic Research.
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Partly as a means of diverting Japanese eco-
nomic attention from the USSR, the Chinese are dang-
ling the prospect of further expansion of Sino-Japa-
nese trade. They have agreed to sell 200,000 tons
of crude oil to Japan in 1973 and have said they are
willing to increase sales to 1,000,000 tons per year
in 1973 and 1974. Negotiations have also been com-
pleted for the Chinese purchase of two entire ethyl-
ene plants to be financed by five-year Japanese Exim
Bank loans. This is the first time since the Cultural
Revolution that Peking has accepted long-term commer-
cial credits.
Although the Chinese obviously see Japan as a
critical area in their competition with the Soviet
Union, they are likely to proceed cautiously in the~.r
economic diplomacy. Tokyo is already China's largest
trading partner, and Peking is wary of becoming so
closely entangled with Japan that it risks becoming
economically dependent. On the other hand, the Chi-
nese almost certainly will not overreact if Japan
consummates its Siberian deals with Moscow. In short,
Peking's options are in many respects limited--a situ-
ation that could benefit Tokyo in its dealings with
both the Soviet Union and China.
The Soviets are displeased with the slow pace of
discussions on Soviet-Japanese economic cooperation,
and particularly with the cautious attitude of the
Japanese Government toward joint ventures in Siberia.
Soviet officials suspect that China is somehow re-
sponsible for Tokyo's go-slow attitude, and increased
Sino-Japanese economic dealings over the past several
weeks have undoubtedly compounded theiz concern. So-
viet Ambassador Troyanovsky confided to the US ambas-
sador in Tokyo on 30 January that he had doubts about
Japanese willingness to cooperate in Siberia.
Troyanovsky pointedly noted that Tokyo seemed con-
cerned about the effect this might have on relations
with Peking. Nevertheless, in recent weeks he has
been lobbying actively, in an attempt to elicit a
more positive and explicit commitment from the Japa-
nese Government on joint economic ventures.
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Europe: Chinese Trying...Soviets Sensitive
Italian Foreign Minister Medici heard familiar
Chinese themes during his mid-January visit to Peking.
The Chinese, he said, "harped constantly" on the theme
that Europe must serve as a counterforce to the USSR,
warning that if it did not, the world power balance
would be "dangerously" altered. Both Chou En-lai and
Foreign Minister Chi Peng-fei expressed their strong
approval of the European Communities as a starting
point for eventual political and military unity.
Such praise of the EC has been a staple of Chi-
nese diplomacy for over a year. As their endorsement
has become more open, Chinese spokesmen have had some
difficulty explaining hcw support for a movement that
leads toward a greater concentration of "monopoly cap-
italism" squares with the needs of the working class.
While admitting that there was an apparent contradic-
tion in the Chinese position, a Chinese diplomat re-
cently explained that support
for the EC was necessary to counter ne threat of So-
viet "social imperialism" which endangered all Euro-
pean workers. Once again, China's national goal of
countering the Soviets in Europe takes precedence over
the ideological goal of furthering the interests of
the proletarian revolution.
While the Chinese realize that they can influence
European events only marginally, they have probably
been heartened by recent signs that they are having
at least some impact. In part in response to China's
repeated encouragement of European unity, the EC set
up a Far East working group in mid-January; ambassa-
dors of the eight EC countries that have relations with
Peking will now be encouraged to confer regularly in
Peking. A less concrete, but symbolically important,
signal was the positive response given a request by
Peking's ambassador in Brussels for informal consul-
tations with NATO ambassadors. Not surprisingly, the
Chinese envoy said he would like to discuss prospects
for a Conference on European Security and Cooperation
and force reductions.
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Chinese opposition to both European security
and force reductions took a new turn in late January
just as preliminary talks on force reductions were
getting under way in Vienna. The Chinese mill t:a.ry
attache'* an Moscow planted a spurious rumor alleging
that ovei,, the last six months Soviet military strength
in Czechoslovakia had been secretly doubled in prepa-
ration for eventual force reductions. Should reduc-
tions be made, the attache said, Soviet force levels
would stand roughly where they were before any cut-
backs. The same story was also circulated in diplo-
matic circles in Budapest by the Chinese, with the
added allegation that troop strength in Hungary had
also been increased. Obviously, the Chinese, con-
cerned that further detente in Europe will strengthen
the Soviets in the East, want to sow doubt among
West Europeans as to the wisdom of relaxing their
guard against Moscow,
Soviet sensitivity to Chinese meddling in West-
ern Europe has been apparent in recent commentaries
denouncing Peking for making common cause with the
opponents of detente in Europe. Soviet media have
castigated China's negative attitude on force reduc-
tions in Europe and have portrayed NATO as Peking's
"Atlantic trump-card" against the USSR. The steady
drum-beat of criticism suggests that Moscow is more
and more uneasy about the c?,unage the Chinese could
do to Soviet detente policies.
The "Sea of Peace," and NATO
China's often-repeated propaganda line that the
Mediterranean should be a "sea-of-peace" with neither
a US nor Soviet military presence has r y been
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diplomat ssing this issue are now trying to con-
vince European statesmen to be wary of growing Soviet
influence in the Mediterranean in general and North
Africa in particular, but now they are not counterbal-
ancing. their argument by criticizing the presence of
the US fleet. In fact, the spokesmen have been prais-
ing NATO as a barrier to Soviet ambitions in the Medi-
terranean.
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A Postponed Trip and an International Conference
To further their goals in Europe, the Chinese
had planned a wide-ranging journey by Foreign Minis-
ter Chi Peng-fei in February and March to reciprocate
the visits of the numerous European delegations that
have been to Peking over the past year. The sched-
uled trip will probably be postponed, however, be-
cause Chi will almost certainly head the Chinese dole
gation to the International Conference on Vietnam
opening in Paris in late February,
A key question is whether the conference will
be the occasion for additional Sino-Soviet polemics.
Since both Moscow and Peking have enthusiastically
endorsed the Vietnam agreement and have urged the
North Vietnamese to comply with the accords, it ap-
pears that there will be little divergence of view
on Vietnam. The two do not see eye-to-eye on Cam-
bodia, however, and if this issue arises at Lhe con-
ference, the differences may boil up to the surface.
..and a Post-War Vietnam
In the wake of the recent agreement on Vietnam,
new manifestations of Sino-Soviet competition in
Indochina are likely to emerge. The policies of each
side will be chosen with a sharp eye on how best to
prevent the other from gaining a dominant position
in Southeast Asia. This is largely what prompted
Khrushchev's successors to reverse his policy of
benign neglect toward North Vietnam. One of the
first acts by Brezhnev and his colleagues was to
mount a serious challenge to China in its own back-
yard. Peking took up the challenge, and for more
than eight years Indochina has been the scene of in-
tense Sino-Soviet competition.
In provi.~Ii_ng increased military and political
support to North Vietnam, the Soviets gave Hanoi an
alternative to exclusive reliance on China for out-
side help. For their part, the North Vietnamese
tried--with considerable success--to maximize the
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aid of both big brothers by playing them off against
each other. At certain critical junctures during
the war, Hanoi wa; even able to induce a modicum of
cooperation between the two adversaries in expediting
the flow of military and economic assistance to North
Vietnam. With the mining and bombing at an end,
the Soviets will not have to depend to the same ex-
tent on Chinese cooperation to transport material
from the USSR to North Vietnam. Last week a Soviet
Foreign Ministry official acknowledged, in a conver-
sation with foreign diplomats, that there would be
plenty of Sino-Soviet rivalry with respect to post-
war aid; he added that this would work to Hanoi's
advantage.
A recent article in Izvestia confirms that compe-
tition with Peking is a central factor in Moscow's
attitude toward the new situation in Vietnam. The
author takes pains to refute "Maoist" attempts to
discredit Soviet aid to Hanoi during the war, and
denounces "imperialist and Maoist" propaganda claims
that Soviet rehabilitation aid would infringe on
North Vietnam's sovereignty. Izvestia is remarkably
open in pointing out, approvingly, that the agreement
signed in Paris "logically entails the establishment
of relations between the US and the DRV on the basis
of peaceful coexistence." This is a development that
the Soviets would clearly welcome as an additional
counter to Chinese influence in Hanoi. Moscow's
views were also reflected in private remarks of a
Soviet official to a US diplomat who had asked what
kind of Vietnam the Soviets would like to see evolve
in the future. The Soviet replied that Moscow's
interest would be best served by a "strong and united
Vietnam that is nationalistic rather than pro or anti
any particular great power." Despite such strong
words, Moscow seems to believe that a unified nation
is a long way off, and that it can live with two
Vietnams in the meantime.
China has a keen interest in curbing Soviet in-
roads in Hanoi and has indicated that it sees some ad-
vantage in a continued US role in Indochina as a
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counterweight to Soviet influence. Neither the So-
viets nor the Chinese have made any secret of the
fact that they welcome the cease-fire, particularly
inasmuch as it helps to remove a serious obstacle
to the improved relationship both
More Polemics at the UN
Not content with its frequent blasts at the
Soviet Union in speeches during the fall UN General
Assembly session, the Chinese delegation in New
York renewed the polemics in a letter in mid-Janu-
ary to UN Secretary-General Waldheim. The letter
accused Stanislaw Trepczynski, the Polish president
of the General Assembly, of "catering to the needs"
of the Soviet Union by reserving a seat for Peking
in the special committee of the World Disarmament
Conference, despite Chinese objections. The letter
charged that this and other actions by Trepczynski
were designed to turn the committee into a "tool"
of the Soviet Union for perpetuating Moscow's
"fraudulent" disarmament policies.
A Blast on Agriculture--The Pot to the Kettle
Departing from its practice in recent months
of refraining from public disparagement of the So-
viet leaders for their handling of domestic policy,
in early February Peking took aim at Brezhnev's
identification with Soviet agricultural interests.
Charging that, like Khrushchev, the "Brezhnev clique"
had "made a mess of agriculture," the article argued
the ranking Soviet officials who were recently dis-
missed were only "scapegoats." The irony of this
attack is that by all counts the Chinese harvest
this year will fall far below expectations and Pe-
king will have to purchase even more grain on the
world market. In this context, Peking's attack on
Moscow may have been an effort to beat the Soviets
to the punch.
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Soviets Rename Far Eastern Localities
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trealiuti branded "unequal" by Puking
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~Mantnvka) I~ihnlhnl.. ~'
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,Ussuriysk `(tnlyukii, Pristan') JAPAN .I
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'Pn k rlinansk (Snchan)
-, ~ad;,;os~o
0 00 700
Stun Mel
Ir_~IVSIIU
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High Soviet officials continue to criti
cize
China's internal policies in private conversations
with foreign leaders.
The Frontier Dispute Changing Names
Occasionally, Soviet sensitivity to Chinese
claims to huge chunks of Siberia shows through in
unusual ways. On 26 December 1972, for example, an
official decree of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR
Russianized the names of nine Far Eastern towns lo-
cated on territory claimed by China and thereby re-
moved some evidence that any Chinese had ever inhab-
ited the area. All but one of the towns are in
Primorskiy Kray, and some are near the border with
China where fighting broke out during 1969. The
official list does not cover all of the geographic
names of apparent Chinese origin in the area, and
further changes may be announced later.
Names of towns in the USSR are frequently re-
placed, but this i:; the first time in recent memory
that Chinese names have been changed. There is prec-
edent, however, for wholesale changes of certain
kinds of names for obvious political reasons. Thus,
similar--but more sweeping--alterations from Japa-
nese to Russian names were made in southern Sakhalin
and the southern Kuriles after the USSR took control
of these areas at the end of World War II. Similarly,
as the USSR annexed territories along its West Euro-
pean border during the war, German names in former
East Prussia and Polish names in the former eastern
part of Poland were replaced by Russian ones.
Border Talks Sterile. . .But in Session
The USSR's chief negotiator at the border
talks in Peking, Deputy Foreign Minister Ilichev,
and Soviet Ambassador Tolstikov returned to Peking
on 1.2 January after a four-week stay in Moscow, but
there has been no hint of any forward movement in
bilateral relations. A Soviet Foreign Ministry of-
ficial recently told a L'S Embassy officer that
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Ilichev attended a plenary session of border negoti-
ators shortly after his return, but took no new ini-
tiatives. Predictably, the Foreign Ministry offi-
cial blamed the continuing impasse on Chinese obdu-
racy.
Information on how the border negotiations are
conducted has been sparse. In all likelihood the
pace of the talks since their inception in October
1969 has not been uniform. It has probably depended
on whether new initiatives were under discussion or
whether the two sides were merely oin throucfh the
motions.
Officials of both sides hold out little hope
for early progress at the frontier negotiations,
but both countries seem intent on keeping them go-
ing. A Soviet diplomat I Irecently commented
that despite the lack of progress, the talks provide
a useful way to gauge Chinese attitudes,
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Soviet Officials Cite China's "Mini-Deterrent"
On two recent occasions, Soviet officials have
openly acknowledged China's developing strategic nu-
clear capability against the USSR. In December an
official of the Soviet UN delegation, in a talk with
US officials, raised the issue of China's relation-
ship to SALT and the need to take China into account
in agreements on future strategic force levels. He
noted that the USSR had a special problem: Chinese
nuclear weapons systems could strike the USSR but
not the US, and thus would not be considered stra-
tegic in US-Soviet terms. The official admitted
that the "splendid superiority" needed to retain a
nearly complete Soviet pre-emptive or disarming capa-
bility against China was rapidly going, if not al-
ready gone. In short, he concluded, China already
has a "mini-deterrent" against the Soviet Union.
The same basic points were made by a public
lecturer in Leningrad on 21 January. The lecturer
asserted that China has developed a "second-strike"
capability against the USSR and that by relocating
"ICBMs" in silos farther away from the Soviet bor-
der, Peking has eliminated the threat of "surgical"
air or land attacks on its missiles.
These open acknowledgments of Chinese capabili-
ties against the USSR are unusually candid, and a
far cry from Soviet-inspired rumors about a possible
"surgical strike" during 1969, when fighting broke
out on the Sino-Soviet border. At that time Moscow
was trying--not without success, it turned out--to
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intimidate the Chinese, but whether the Soviets ac-
tually considered such an attack a practical policy
option is unknown. It seems likely that the recent
Soviet comments reflect Moscow's view of current
realities in the light of continuing Chinese ad-
vances in nuclear weaponry. The remarks also seem
to suggest that the Kremlin is aware that Peking's
much improved international position over recent
years, and particularly its growing ties with the
US, make it much more difficult to contemplate any
unprovoked military action against China.
The Military Situation: China's Defense Along the
Soviet Border
The Chinese; like the Soviets, are improving
their military posture along the common border.
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ina must still rely on a "people's war"--the mo-
bilization of the entire population--to repel any
Soviet invasion, gradual modernization of the Chi-
nese forces has enabled Peking to plan for major
resistance nearer the border than was practical a
few years ago.
There is no evidence that the Chinese are pre-
paring for offensive action against the Soviet Union.
They appear to be well aware that they are still no
match for the heavily mechanized, modern Soviet
forces.
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Although
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