Sino-Soviet Border Conflict

Sino-Soviet border conflict
Part of the Cold War and the Sino-Soviet split
Some of the disputed areas in the Argun and Amur rivers. Damansky/Zhenbao is to the southeast, north of the lake
Date March 2 – September 11, 1969 Location Border between China and the Soviet Union Result Status quo ante bellum Territorial changes Dispute was resolved in a border agreement between Russia and China, signed on 14 October 2004. China was granted control over Tarabarov Island (Yinlong Island) and approximately 50% of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (Heixiazi Island) near Khabarovsk.
Belligerents
Soviet Union	China
Commanders and leaders
Leonid Brezhnev	Mao Zedong
Strength
658,000	814,000
Casualties and losses
59 killed 94 wounded (Soviet sources) 27 Tanks/APCs destroyed (Chinese sources) 1 Command Car (Chinese sources) Dozens of trucks destroyed (Chinese sources) One Soviet T-62 tank captured	71 killed and 68 wounded (Chinese sources) ~800 killed (Soviet sources)

Sino-Soviet border conflict
Zhenbao Island and the border.
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	中蘇邊界衝突
Simplified Chinese	中苏边界冲突
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōng Sū biānjiè chōngtū IPA [ʈʂʊ́ŋ sú pjɛ́ntɕjê ʈʂʰʊ́ŋtʰú] Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Zung1 Sou1 bin1gaai3 cung1dat6
Alternative Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	珍寶島自衛反擊戰
Simplified Chinese	珍宝岛自卫反击战
Literal meaning	Zhenbao Island self-defense
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhēnbǎo dǎo zìwèi fǎnjí zhàn
Russian name
Russian	Пограничный конфликт на острове Даманский
Romanization	Pograničnyj konflikt na ostrove Damanskij

The Sino-Soviet border conflict was a seven-month undeclared military conflict between the Soviet Union and China at the height of the Sino-Soviet split in 1969. Although military clashes ceased that year, the underlying issues were not resolved until the 1991 Sino-Soviet Border Agreement.

The most serious of these border clashes—which brought the two communist-led countries to the brink of war—occurred in March 1969 in the vicinity of Zhenbao (Damansky) Island on the Ussuri (Wusuli) River; as such, Chinese historians most commonly refer to the conflict as the Zhenbao Island Incident.

Under the governorship of Sheng Shicai (1933–1944) in northwest China's Xinjiang (then Sinkiang) province, China's nationalist Kuomintang recognized for the first time the existence of a "Uyghur people", following Soviet ethnic policy. This ethnogenesis of a "national" people eligible for territorialized autonomy broadly benefited the Soviet Union, which organized conferences in Fergana and Semirechye (in Soviet Central Asia), in order to cause "revolution" in Altishahr (southern Xinjiang) and Dzungaria (northern Xinjiang). Both the Soviet Union and the White movement covertly armed and fought with the Ili National Army which fought against the Kuomintang in the Three Districts Revolution. Although the mostly Muslim Uyghur rebels participated in pogroms against Han Chinese in general, the turmoil eventually just resulted in the replacement of Kuomintang rule in Xinjiang (northwest China) with that of the Communist Party of China in the 1940s.