Border Disputes over Damansky Island and the Troubled Relations between Russia and China | GeoCurrents

Border Disputes over Damansky Island and the Troubled Relations between Russia and China | GeoCurrents

As has been discussed in earlier GeoCurrents posts, the choice of a toponym one uses can be an incendiary matter: Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf, the Sea of Japan or the East Sea, the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas Islands. Another case in point is an island on the Ussuri River, approximately 150 miles south of Khabarovsk and 350 miles east of Harbin, known as Damansky Island in Russian and as Zhenbao Island in Chinese. The Russian name honors a Russian railroad engineer Stanislav Damansky who died in the area in the late 1880s. The Chinese name translates as ‘rare treasure island’. But this tiny island is not much of a treasure from the economic point of view. Its territory is a mere 0.74 square kilometers (0.29 sq mi). During periods of high water on the Ussuri River it is flooded entirely. Nor does it come with its own exclusive economic zone, as do sea islands. Yet in March 1969 Damansky/Zhenbao island became the site of a bloodbath which left several hundred Soviet and Chinese military and border guards dead. And even today this speck of land, together with two bigger islands near Khabarovsk, remains the focal point of simmering Russian-Chinese tensions.