Ninety percent of China's land boundaries demarcated: F M official

China has signed border treaties or agreements with 12 neighboring countries, demarcating 90 percent its land boundaries, according to an article posted on the Foreign Ministry's official Website on Wednesday.

With 14 neighboring countries and a total of 22,000 kilometers of land boundaries, China is a country with the longest land border lines and the largest number of neighbors in the world, said Liu Zhenmin, general director of the ministry's department of treaty and law, in an interview with the Oriental Outlook magazine.

Liu said China signed border treaties and agreements with Myanmar, Nepal, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1960s and has resolved the boundary issues with Russia, the Laos, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan since the 1990s.

Liu said China's negotiations with Russia or the former Soviet Union on the boundary issues started from 1964. China and Russia share a 4,300-kilometer-long border.

After many rounds of negotiations, on June 2, 2005, China and Russia reached the final deal over their eastern border, agreeing to share around fifty-fifty the last disputed land, a group of islands totaling 375 square kilometers.

On the demarcation work with India, with which China shares 2,000-kilometer-long border, Liu said the border lines between the two countries were never demarcated officially in the past and the disputed areas were as large as 125,000 square kilometers.

He said China and India began to discuss border issues since the 1980s. To maintain peace and stability at the border areas, the two countries signed two agreements in 1993 and 1996 respectively.

In 2003, the prime ministers of the two countries designated special envoys for demarcation work, who conducted five rounds of negotiations in the following years.

In April 2005, China and India signed an agreement of political guideline on demarcation during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India.

Liu said Chinese government's boundary policy has been consistent through out the years.

"That means with concerns of safeguarding national sovereignty and stabilizing neighboring relations in mind, China seeks to solve boundary issues with relevant countries in a fair and reasonable way through equal consultation and with the principle of mutual understanding and accommodation," he said.

Source: Xinhua