Beijing

China's official news agency said Saturday it will adopt the Chinese Pinyin phonetic alphabet beginning Jan. 1, when Peking will become Beijing (pronounced bay-jing) and the agency Xinhua instead of Hsinhua.

In Beijing’s view, in the absence of an explicit treaty provision, the central line of the main channel—the Thalweg principle—provided a legal basis for delimiting the boundary in the two rivers. On this basis, Beijing claimed that 600 of the rivers’ 700 islands—including Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, just 180 miles southwest of an important Soviet city, Khabarovsk—belonged to the P.R.C.