ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with that part of mainland Asia which lies east of meridian 60° east. That line lies close to the boundaries separating Iran from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The evolution of political boundaries in this extensive region finds a unity in the sets of relationships between China and the colonial powers of Russia, Britain, France, and Japan. China formed the hub about which these other states operated. Russia
occupied the sector from Vladivistok to Afghanistan; the British theatre stretched from Afghanistan to Thailand and included the Malayan peninsula; France dominated Indochina and Japan held sway in the Korean peninsula. Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal secured small, important footholds on China’s coast, but the duration of even Hong Kong was but a moment in the perspective of China’s history. Asia’s political boundaries evolved in three phases. In the period before
1914 the colonial powers carved out their Asian empires and set the limits of those Asian states such as Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, Nepal, and Thailand, which were not directly controlled. Apart from the SinoRussian treaties of 1689 and 1727, these Asian states invariably negotiated from a position of weakness. Indeed, with the exception of China, it seems likely that the other states were not totally annexed because of Britain’s preoccupation with the need to avoid common boundaries with other colonial powers and China. That British policy of self-denial did not stop Russia from acquiring large areas of northern Afghanistan or prevent France from compelling Thailand to disgorge extensive tracts in the Mekong valley. Britain’s ineffective attempt to create the buffer state of Tibet from a province of China was successfully duplicated by Russia, which detached Outer Mongolia in 1910 and subsequently prevented any resumption of that area by China. The second phase lasted until the end of World War II, and it was
characterized by the preservation of the status quo. There were minor boundary alterations involving Afghanistan and Thailand, but Japan’s major efforts to redraw boundaries in Indochina and Manchuria failed entirely. During this period the internal boundaries of the British and French empires were maintained. These unilateral domestic limits provided the lines of cleavage along which those empires split in the third phase. The replacement of those empires by a number of independent Asian states is the chief characteristic of this latest period. However, this third phase is marked by three other developments. A number of independent states have negotiated definitive boundary agreements with each other. China has been in the forefront of this activity and has reached
settlements with Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, and Burma. In each case the new agreements have either confirmed existing international or traditional limits or altered them only slightly. A number of boundary disputes have emerged and fighting has occurred between China and the Soviet Union, India and Pakistan, India and China, and Thailand and Laos and Cambodia. Conflicts within the region yielded three cease-fire lines in Kashmir, Korea, and Vietnam which became international boundaries. That in Vietnam disappeared in 1975 when the country was unified. The political boundaries of Asia did not evolve in an orderly fashion
through the stages of allocation, delimitation, demarcation, and adminis tration identified in Chapter 3. For example, the boundary along the northern watershed of the Amur River which allocated territory between Russia and China in 1689 was never demarcated. Sections of the boundary between Afghanistan and Iran were precisely delimited by arbitrators and were demarcated very quickly once their decisions were accepted. The delimitations of the period before 1914 were not always free from ambiguities, and the boundary monuments erected at that time were sometimes not maintained carefully. This has meant that in the latest period some of the independent states of Asia have faced three major types of boundary problems. First, it has been necessary to agree on a meaning of imprecise descriptions inherited from colonial administrations. Such a problem led Cambodia and Thailand to the International Court o f Justice in 1961. Secondly, where new states have been formed by elevating internal boundaries to the level of international limits there has often been a problem of deciding where these internal limits lay. That difficulty once bedevilled relations between India and Pakistan in the Great Rann of Kutch. Finally, states have had to try to negotiate lines to close the gaps east and west of Nepal which Britain was unable to close through agreement with China.
