Window on Eurasia

Chinese Texts Say Siberia a ‘Temporarily Lost’ Chinese Land, Russians Complain

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 20, 2006 – Chinese textbooks currently portray “Western
Siberia up to and including Tomsk oblast as temporarily lost Chinese
territories,” according to a researcher in the Altai Republic. And as
a result, many Chinese students expect that “sooner or later,” the
Chinese will return there.

Andrei Ivanov, a professor at the Altai State Agrarian University, said
at a session of “Altai – Our Common Home” earlier this month that
one of his students had met a Chinese student who had said that “we
are a growing nation and that in reality sooner or later we will come
back here”
[http://newsrussia.net/?politic?id_66702/].

The existence of such claims in textbooks used in Chinese schools
reportedly has been confirmed by Beijing. And Russian media outlets in
Siberia and the Far East have made much of this over the last ten days,
according to a report on the Russkaya liniya website
[http://www.rusk.ru/Newsdata.php?idar=16220].

Ivanov, whose group unites scholars and students from the Altai, the
Eastern Kazakhstan Oblast of Kazakhstan, the Xinjiang Autonomous
District of China, and the Khovdo and Bayan-Ul’gi aimaks of Mongolia,
said meetings of people from all these regions could help overcome such
misconceptions.

But that is far from the most immediate reason the group exists, he
noted. It was created to bring together legislators from all these
countries in order to improve the drafting of lws governing
environmental proteciton, the use of natural resources, and recreation.

The group’s next event will be an international student school which
wil take place in the Chemal district of the Altai Republic two weeks
from now. According to Russian news agencies, there will be students
from Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, but not from China, even though
it is normally represented.

The Russian news agency reports, however, did not indicate whether the
dustup Ivanov’s comments highlighted concerning the claims of Chinese
textbooks about Siberia were the reason for the absence of Chinese
students this time around.