World: A BATTLE ON THE SINO-SOVIET BORDER

FOR the fifth time in six months, the world’s two largest Communist states battled each other across their common border. In the wild, thinly populated region where China’s Sinkiang region and Soviet Kazakhstan meet, Russian border guards and Chinese militia shattered the early morning stillness with grenades and submachine guns. The Soviets apparently got the better of the battle, but the question of who won seemed relatively unimportant. Far more serious was the question: How many such pitched battles can take place before the two giants stumble into all-out war?

The latest fight took place in the vicinity of the Dzungarïan Gates, the ancient traders’ pass that was the scene of two brief but bitter encounters in June; two other skirmishes occurred in March and July farther to the east, along the Amur and Ussuri rivers separating eastern Siberia and Manchuria. In a protest to Moscow, Peking’s foreign ministry charged last week that Soviet border guards had advanced 1¼ miles into Sinkiang’s Yumin County and opened fire on Chinese guards carrying out “normal patrol duty.” The Chinese fell back, they said afterward, to “prevent worsening of the situation.” Two officers were captured by the Russians in the midst of the Chinese retreat, the first prisoners taken in the border fights.

Different Version. Moscow described the battle very differently. The Russians charged that Chinese troops had been systematically organizing “provocative intrusions” in the area since May, despite Soviet protests. Finally a force of 150 launched last week’s attack. According to Russian commentators, Soviet border guards, using armored personnel carriers stormed Chinese positions with submachine guns and hand grenades. Two Russians were killed and eight reported wounded in a one-hour battle, while 25 Chinese died and 25 were wounded. A nagging discrepancy in the Russian account was the contention that the encounter took place six miles east of a settlement called Zhalanashkol. According to both Soviet and Chinese maps, that would put the site of the battle in Chinese territory. This led to speculation last week that the Russians, who have quarreled for centuries with the Chinese over boundaries (see box), have quietly been moving into territory belonging to the Chinese.

The battle took place only five days after representatives of the two nations had met in the Russian border city of Khabarovsk to sign an agreement on river navigation. Observers had thought that the navigation talks might presage productive discussions on borders. The outbreak of shooting seemed to indicate that hostility between sides runs too deep for border unrest to die down.

The battle could, of course, have begun by accident. But Western observers reason that if anybody deliberately started the skirmish, the Russians would seem the more likely culprits. By keeping the Kazakhstan-Sinkiang border stirred up, Moscow may hope to prevent the Chinese from starting trouble along Russia’s more remote and vulnerable far eastern border. There, several cities lie within easy reach of Chinese guns. More important, they lie within an area that was once controlled by China, a point that Peking drives home nightly with Russian-language radio broadcasts beamed to Siberia. The broadcasts sign off with the words: “Good night, citizens of Vladivostok [or Khabarovsk, or Nakhodka], and all of you who are living on temporarily occupied Chinese territory.” Occasionally, the radio offers a leering suggestion that the girls wear their prettiest dresses to greet “the courageous soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.”

Along the border with Sinkiang, on the other hand, the Russians have all the advantages. Their rail network runs to the border, ending at a town ironically named Druzhba (meaning friendship). The Chinese rail system goes no farther than Urumchi, Sinkiang’s capital, 250 miles from the border.

Eve-of-War Mood. In the wake of last week’s skirmish, Peking charged that the Russians have removed civilians from along their side of the border to carve out a twelve-mile-deep no man’s land in order to “intensify the threat of war against China.” The Chinese frenetically warned citizens that it was a “false and deadly dangerous idea” to think that such a conflict would be restricted to the border.

In fostering an eve-of-war mood, Peking might have been reflecting its genuine fear that an all-out struggle may be imminent. But the propaganda serves another purpose as well. Since the excesses of the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, China has been riven by factionalism. Followers of Mao Tse-tung, “revisionist” backers of deposed President Liu Shao-chi, and ultraradical Red Guards are all fighting for power in at least nine of China’s 26 provinces and regions. There have been riots, work stoppages and economic disruptions.

Focusing attention on an external threat is a classic tactic for restoring internal unity, but it is also a dangerous one. With Peking constantly exhorting its citizens to “prepare for the enemy to launch a major war,” and Moscow regularly reporting improvements in its civil-defense system, the climate for conflict already exists. In such a climate, a minor miscalculation could turn a border squabble into a major conflict.