High Tension on China-Russia Border

The close relations existing between Beijing and Moscow from 1949-58 represent an exceptional interlude in the much longer historical pattern of mutual suspicion and hostility between China and Russia. China and Russia had border disputes since the seventeenth century when Tsarist forces occupied Nerchinsk and Yakasa in the Amur region (north of Mongolia and west of northern Nei Mongol). The eighteenth century saw Russian incursions in the Lake Balkhash area, near Northwest Xinjiang. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russians had seized a total 1.4 million square kilometers, and another 1.5 million by 1900. The Russians codified these gains through a series of 'unequal treaties,' as current Chinese histories call them.