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MONGOLIA
CONFIDENTIAL
1.
The significance of the Mongolia expulsions of Chinese workers came up in various conversations, some of which led on to the wider implications.
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2. The Mongolian Foreign Ministry predictably described the expulsions as planned long in advance as part of a social policy to remove those who were not doing socially valuable jobs. No more Chinese would need to leave until after the winter because there is no job movement between October and March although 300 Chinese "had applied for exit visas". Relations with China had not suffered, and there had been no incidents on the border or any Chinese complaints about the presence of Soviet troops. On the contrary the Mongolians hoped to develop trade with China, supplying timber and coal in return for Chinese textiles and food. However there had been no initiatives for direct contact from either side.
3. The Chinese inevitably took the opposite line. In their view the Mongolians had thrown out the Chinese workers in order to demonstrate their independence in the Sino/Soviet context; this was a transparent move whose purpose was to persuade the Chinese to negotiate separately on the Mongolian border. As noted separately, the Chinese show no signs of doing so (despite the view of the US Embassy in Peking that a deal on Mongolia might perhaps be concluded as this was the most important area of the border for the Chinese).
4.
Mr Ogura of the Japanese MFA, who had years before been the desk officer responsible for the decision to open a Japanese Embassy in Ulan Bator, had an interesting side-light on the Mongolian position. He said that he had always argued that the Japanese might be able to use an Embassy in Mongolia to drive wedges between China and the Soviet Union if they became too close together. It was not clear how this could be done and I detected no real signs of independent thinking in Mongolia. However the history of Mongolian expansion in the 13th century, and the interesting assertion that the Russians had never suffered any calamitous damage from attacks from the West but had been effectively defeated by attacks from the East, suggests that the Mongolian factor could conceivably be worth watching. There was certainly no great affection for the occupying Russian troops in Mongolia.
2 November 1983
Mark Trist
M Elliott
Far Eastern Department
CONFIDENTIAL