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Letters | China must act fast to reclaim ‘lost territories’ from Russia
- Readers discuss why the time is right for China to press Russia on unequal treaties signed during Soviet times, the ban on a Hong Kong protest song, and the pleasures of ‘zoning out’
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This coming May 31, 2024 will be the 100th anniversary of a treaty between the USSR and China. Although Soviet diplomats reaffirmed the Karakhan Manifesto’s promise to abolish the Tsarist unequal treaties in that agreement, the unequal treaty terms still exist a century later.
Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin bogged down in the Ukraine war, it may be the best time for Beijing to tell Moscow that it must finally recognise China’s rights to its “lost territories”.
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In 1919 and 1920, Lev Karakhan, the Soviet deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, sent China proposals promising to return to the Chinese people “everything that was taken from them by the Tsarist government”.
The Karakhan Manifesto further renounced all “conquests” that “deprived China of Manchuria and other areas”.
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Finally, the Soviet government specifically mentioned Siberia: “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”.
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