CONFIDENTIAL
DSR UC
10.
Outside China, military aid and training have been
provided to some African Governments, Pakistan, North
Korea and the Indo-Chinese states.
(c) The Sino-Soviet Dispute
11. The fulcrum of China's foreign policy is her
hostility to the Soviet Union. This has its origins in
the expansion of Russia in the Far East at China's
expense in the nineteenth century, giving Russia and
China a very long common frontier, and has been
compounded by deep ideological differences. The
Chinese Government has expressed readiness to negotiate
on the basis of the present frontiers with the Soviet
Union, provided the latter acknowledges the unequalness
of the nineteenth century treaties. The Russians, for
their part, are most unlikely to agree to anything
which could cast doubt on the permanence of their
frontiers. Their life-line to the Far East, the Trans-
Siberian railway, passes close to the Chinese frontier
(they are building a new track further to the north).
They are bitter about the Chinese-caused rift in the
world communist movement and feel threatened by Chinese
influence in the Third World. More fundamentally, they
fear the long-term military threat posed by a growing
nation of 900 million, which is developing rapidly but
remains short of agricultural land, to a nation of a
quarter that size with vast areas of virtually empty land
separating its population centres from China's. On the
Chinese side, China, having forcefully and permanently
rejected the Soviet claim to primacy in the world
/communist
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