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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/04 CIA-RDP08C01297R000100120005-5 LIMITED OFFICIAL USE - 2 - INTRODUCTION

For the last several years, the Chinese Communist regime has been engaged in "tidying up" its international boundaries. Boundary accords have been signed with Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, Mongolia, and, most recently, with Afghanistan. (The boundaries with Viet-Nam and Laos were established in 1887 and 1895 and have long been accepted and trouble-free.) The five treaties leave only a minor dispute with North Korea (the next to be resolved?) and the major difficulties with India and the Soviet Union. The political nature of the settlements is witnessed by the generous terms offered by the Chinese to their smaller neighbors and the acceptance of the "watershed principle" where applicable. These positions contrast sharply with the Chinese belligerency toward India and the U.S.S.R. including a flat rejection of the Indian-proposed watershed boundary.

THE TREATY

On March 2, 1963, the Afghan and Chinese Foreign Offices announced simultaneously that their common border would be delimited in the near future. In mid-June, 1963, a six-man Chinese delegation visited Kabul and, after brief negotiations, a preliminary delimitation agreement was initialed on July 1, 1963. The formal Accord was signed in Peiping on November 22.

The complete text is reprinted as an Annex.

ANALYSIS

The acceptance by the Chinese Communists of the watershed as the line between the two countries occasions no surprise. This boundary, although it has had no official basis in treaty, has long been the accepted frontier between the two states. While, prior to 1953, Chinese maps showed the entire Wakhan corridor within their territory, in recent years this claim has been deemphasized by the Peiping regime.

The treaty, however, raises two minor questions. The first is the precise location of the Afghan-Chinese-Hunza tripoint. In the Sino-Afghan treaty, the coordinates are indicated as "approximately 37° 03′ north, 74° 36′ east ...". The China-Pakistan treaty, while citing the same elevation (5,630 meters), gives the coordinates as "approximately LIMITED OFFICIAL USE Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/09/04: CIA-RDP08C01297R000100120005-5