4 Contested Border the Sino-Korean boundary.The Korean government declined the Chinese offer.After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.Korea became Japan's protectorate and Japan controlled Korea's diplo- macy and internal affairs.On September 4,1909,China and Japan signed the Jiandao Treaty (Cando in Korean),determining that "China and Korea border along the Tumen River,and the Shiyi River is the boundary in the source area of Tumen."Tianchi on the Changbaishan and its adjacent peaks were declared to be within Chinese territory (Cai 2004,186). After the Allied victory over Japan in August 1945,the Korean peninsula was temporarily divided into two halves along the thirty-eighth parallel on the basis of an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States.Nearly all Koreans were opposed to this division,and the Korean people aspired to form an independent country.But after the outbreak of the Cold War in Europe,the peninsula came under the control of two independent regimes in 1948.Meanwhile,the Korean people started to ques- tion the legitimacy of the Cando Treaty,with South Korea first to raise the issue(Yang 1998).But a resolution depended largely on the attitude of North Korea,which was under Soviet control.In April 1947 Xiong Shihui,director of the Chinese Nationalist gov- ernment's northeast field headquarters,twice cabled the foreign ministry to report survey and mapping activities by Soviet special agents in the Changbaishan region and in North Korea (Tang 2001).On August 26 the Chinese Foreign Ministry presented a note to the Soviet Embassy in China regarding the Soviets'mov- ing the Sino-Soviet boundary markers without China's permission (Tang2001). During the ensuing Chinese civil war (1946-1949),Yanbian was under Chinese Communist Party (CCP)control.The CCP government did not foresee any serious dispute between China and North Korea over the border(Cathcart 2010).The CCP Yan- bian prefectural committee pointed out in an August 1948 docu- ment that the China-Korea border along the Tumen River had been delimited long ago on the basis of nature and thus on the whole presented no problem.At a certain place,the change in river course or formation of a new tributary led to the conver- gence of villages and land of the two countries.Disputes thus