Open the world map, we will find that China is the country with the longest land border in the world, with a total length of about 22,800 kilometers, and the long border line has put forward many problems for China in border governance.
Due to the weakening of national strength and the change of political power, modern China has been arbitrarily divided up by Western powers, leaving a large number of territories out of the embrace of the motherland, and also bringing about a series of territorial disputes. After liberation, China has continuously made breakthroughs in territorial disputes, and at the same time set a model for the world to resolve territorial disputes.
In this process, the settlement of the territorial dispute between China and Tajikistan is a typical case that has been praised by the world.
1. The roof of the world is occupied by China, and the decline of the Qing court is surrendered
First, let's take a look at the Pamir Plateau. From an early age, we learned from textbooks that the Pamir Plateau has the title of "roof of the world", which reflects the geographical characteristics of the Pamir, which is both tall and large.
She is said to be "high" because the average altitude of the mountains on the Pamir Plateau is more than 4500 meters, and its main peaks are even more than 6000 meters above sea level, and the two famous peaks in the western part of the plateau, "Communist Peak" and "Lenin Peak", are both above 7000 meters;
She is "big" because the Pamir Plateau as a whole spans more than 100,000 square kilometers and spans southwestern China's Xinjiang, southeastern Tajikistan, and northeastern Afghanistan.
Located in the southeast of Central Asia, the Pamir Plateau was an important passageway to the ancient Silk Road and was of great strategic importance on the world's geographical map.
In China, the eastern part of the Pamir Plateau is currently in the Kyzyl-Su Kirgiz Autonomous Prefecture and Kashgar region of Xinjiang.
Since ancient times, there have been countless historical works in China that record the Pamirs, and they first appeared in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, called "Buzhou Mountain". During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, there was a myth that the gods worked together to hit the Mountain of Zhou, which was widely spread in later generations.
During the Western Han Dynasty, the country prospered, the Central Plains began large-scale foreign trade, and the Pamir Plateau became an important channel for merchants to trade with each other, and since then, various dynasties in China have historical records of the Pamir Plateau.
If this is the case, then why did the Pamir Plateau later become a territorial dispute between China and other countries? This begins with the decline of the Qing government.
During the Qianlong period, the national strength was still at its peak, and in 1759, the Qing army completed the pacification of the northwestern Zungar Department and the size and Zhuo, which caused the western countries to surrender, and the Pamir at that time was called "Onion Ridge", and the western territory of China was also extended to Lake Balkhash and the Puchi River. At its peak, the Qing Dynasty placed the entire Pamir Plateau within the map of the country.
However, with the gradual decline of the Qing Dynasty and the increasing power of Tsarist Russia, the ambitions of the Tsar could not be hidden. The Russian army continued to advance, invading the area east of Lake Kashgar and repeatedly invading Chinese territory.
In the 1860s, the incompetent Xianfeng Emperor signed the Treaty of Beijing with Tsarist Russia, making a series of compromises on the northwestern border, which also laid the foundation for the chaos of the northwestern border.
In 1864, when there was a Hui rebellion in the Xinjiang region, the Tsarist Russian army, which had been coveting on the border line for a long time, finally waited for the opportunity, and they colluded with the rebel army to openly invade the western territory of our country, launch a war, and directly threaten the Qing government.
At that time, the Qing court had long lost its former courage, and the weak Tongzhi Emperor soon succumbed to the threat of the enemy and signed the "Treaty on Surveying and Dividing the Northwest Boundary" with Tsarist Russia, directly ceding a large area of territory in the west to Russia, involving a land area of 440,000 square kilometers.
The signing of the "Contract on surveying and dividing the Northwest Boundary" caused our country to lose a large area of territory, and at the same time directly caused a chaotic situation on the western border for a long time thereafter.
Throughout the history of human civilization, the collapse of every dynasty was inevitably accompanied by border turmoil, and the Qing Dynasty at that time was no exception. After the signing of the "Treaty on surveying and dividing the Northwest Boundary", the situation in China's northwest border area became more and more turbulent, and riots occurred one after another among various ethnic groups, of which the "Agubai Rebellion" caused the greatest impact.
Known as the "Butcher of Central Asia", Agubai was originally a Uzbek, brutal and brave, and from 1865 to 1877, at the instigation of Britain and Russia, he led an army to invade Xinjiang and seize a large area of land in China.
Later, the Qing government sent Zuo Zongtang into Xinjiang to quell the rebellion, and through a year, he eliminated Agubai and recovered Xinjiang.
Since then, the Qing government has also sent emissaries to negotiate with Tsarist Russia many times, hoping to recover the territory ceded, but almost all of them are fruitless, and in the 1860s, the land area ceded by the Qing court to Russia reached 600,000 square kilometers.
2. The wolf's ambitions were still dissatisfied, and Britain and Russia privately divided the Pamirs
Although Russia has seized a large amount of our territory by illegal means, its ambitions have not yet been satisfied.
After Zuo Zongtang eliminated Agubai, the Qing government demanded that Russia return Ili, but the other side cleverly proposed "extortion" conditions, demanding that Russia's borders continue to extend to the Chinese side.
Such a shameless condition was first rejected by the Qing court, but in the subsequent negotiations, the Russians finally made a compromise among the representatives of the Qing government through coercion and inducement, and signed the "Treaty on the Renewal of the Kashgar Boundary".
Under the terms of the treaty, China and Russia redrawn their borders, which is equivalent to China's ceded territory in the northwest again. What makes people even more helpless is that the treaty has demarcated a triangle between the Sino-Russian border as a "region to be discussed", which also leaves room for greedy Russians to continue their "fantasies".
In 1891, the swollen Tsarist Russia once again sent a large-scale army to the Pamir, they personally tore up the original agreement, invaded the "to be discussed area", and continued to advance eastward to the Sarekol Ridge. At this time, the British saw the Russian rampage on the Pamir, had no scruples, and also developed greed, and they also feared that sooner or later the Russians would touch their own interests.
Therefore, Britain and Russia secretly colluded in an attempt to privately divide China's territory. After the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government was weakened again, and Britain and Russia also took the opportunity to reach an agreement in 1895 to privately divide China's territory in the Pamir.
At this time, the Qing government was obviously no longer able to change this situation of loss of power and humiliation, but it was still making a final effort to protect the territorial borders.
On the one hand, the Qing government declared that it would "never recognize" the occupation of our territory by Britain and Russia, and expressed strong condemnation and dissatisfaction with its banditry; on the other hand, the imperial court also sent additional troops to the border area to strengthen the border guard along the Sarekole Ridge. Although the loss of territory has become a fact, the "last stubbornness" of the Qing government has also left hope for the recovery of the territory in the future.
3. The tone of the negotiations between China and Tajikistan will be set, and the territorial dispute will be finally resolved
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, although modern China experienced chaos, it also adhered to the same principle, that is, to uphold the sovereignty of China's territory in the northwest of the Pamir and not to recognize the illegal occupation of Britain and Russia.
The Soviet government, established after the October Revolution in Russia, also acknowledged the Pamir border dispute between China and Russia, although actual control of the disputed area remained in the hands of the other side. Due to social unrest and the weakness of the state, the Chinese government was unable to recover the lost territory for decades to come.
The time came to 1991, when China had undergone ten years of reform and opening up, and its comprehensive national strength was constantly improving, on the contrary, the "big brother" of the socialist camp, the Soviet Union, was constantly in trouble with itself, and at the end of that year, it announced its disintegration, and the republics also declared independence.
Tajikistan declared its independence before the formal collapse of the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, about 28,000 square kilometers of land in the disputed area between China and Russia on the Pamir Plateau were all inherited by Tajikistan, in other words, the Sino-Soviet territorial dispute became a Sino-Tajik territorial dispute. After Tajikistan inherited the disputed area of the Pamir, the Chinese government soon began territorial negotiations with Tajikistan.
At that time, many people believed that China had not been able to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union on the disputed territory because the Soviet Union was strong and strong, and it was the "big brother" of socialism, and the odds of China's negotiations were not great, while Tajikistan was different, in front of China, it was a "land of bullets", and it was easy to recover the lost territory. However, this is not the case.
For Tajikistan, its land area is only 140,000 square kilometers, which is not as large as the area of China's Guangdong Province, and the disputed area of 28,000 square kilometers, accounting for 20% of its land area, is not a small amount!
Moreover, this "disputed land" was originally a dispute between China and Russia (China and the Soviet Union), and it has no direct relationship with Tajikistan, and the Tajikistan side only inherited it from the Soviet Union. As a result, territorial disputes on the Pamir Plateau suddenly became complicated.
For China, since ancient times, there are historical records that the Pamir Plateau belongs to Chinese territory, and the treaties signed in the past also show that it is a piece ceded from Chinese land. For Tajikistan, it is the property inherited from the "elder brother" of the Soviet Union, and it is necessary to settle the account and find my "elder brother" to calculate it.
In the face of territorial disputes with Tajikistan, the Chinese government has always maintained a firm position and strengthened China's sovereignty over the disputed territories since ancient times, but at the same time, the Chinese leaders have not taken too drastic measures in consideration of the actual situation in Tajikistan, but have always maintained territorial negotiations with the Tajikistan side.
In the process, China has also provided assistance to Tajikistan on many occasions for economic construction and helped Tajikistan get rid of poverty.
Perhaps touched by China's great power style of treating people with courtesy, the Tajik side has been cooperating with the Chinese side in the negotiation work, for the Chinese side, although the dispute has not been resolved, as long as the two sides can still sit at the negotiating table, then everything is possible.
In 1997, China and Tajikistan reached an agreement on the disputed areas of the Uzbeli Pass and the Karazak Pass, an important step towards resolving the territorial dispute.
Three years later, in July 2000, China signed agreements with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to make detailed agreements on the boundary issue, which also laid the foundation for the final settlement of the China-Tajikistan border issue.
In 2002, President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan was invited to visit China, during which China and Tajikistan agreed on a long-standing disputed area, and about 1,000 square kilometers of the 28,000 square kilometers of disputed land will be returned to China, marking the end of the border dispute between China and Tajikistan.
On September 20, 2011, representatives of the border guards of China and Tajikistan held a ceremony at the Pamir Plateau At Pile No. 75 of the Chinese side, which represented a satisfactory settlement of the territorial dispute that has existed for more than 130 years.
Many people may have the question: China has recovered 1,000 square kilometers from 28,000 square kilometers of disputed territory, accounting for only 3.5% of the disputed territory.
In fact, the settlement of the territorial dispute between China and Tajikistan has also set a model for resolving territorial disputes worldwide. China and Tajikistan have a huge disparity in national strength, but in the years of negotiations, China has never put pressure on Tajikistan as a big country, did not adopt the tactics of "economic blockade" and "military intervention" used by some Western countries, but established an equal and harmonious negotiation relationship with the other side, and finally achieved results acceptable to both sides through political wisdom and negotiation skills.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that after the recovery of the disputed territory, China sent geological experts to the Pamir Plateau for routine surveys, but in the process of exploration, a rare uranium ore resource was accidentally discovered. Such good news also seems to confirm the old saying: Those who have attained enlightenment, Heaven help also.