Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Stalin's plan, his script for the Chinese works beautifully because when the nationalists unite with the communists to fight the Japanese, they think he's also going to provide soldiers. They don't get it. Once they're in, Russia is out of this thing. Shanka goes roaring up China.

He reaches [music] his home base in Shanghai. Pause. And he turns his guns on the communists and just massacres them in droves. If you add up all the territory that the Russians took from the Chinese sphere of influence, it's greater than all US territory east of the Mississippi.

Russia has posed existential threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they've disappeared from the pages of history, courtesy of the Russians. People are worried about whether there's going to be an enduring relationship with uh China and Russia. And if you look at this picture, uh, the relations look more glacial than cordial and the little one's hauling on the arm of the big one.

And one wonders about that. So, um, it turns out my expertise is on Russo Chinese relations and that's what I studied in graduate school. My dissertation was a history of their border from the opium wars, the mid-9th century until outer Mongolia was uh snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere uh in the 1920s. So, it's fun to talk about this particular topic.

Before I get going, I'm going to do some terminology. I'm going to use the word Russia to refer to the Tsarist, Soviet, and modern periods. The same way that you use France to describe its many monarchies and many republics, the Boleviks thought they were special, so they came up with special words for special people, Soviet, Soviet Union. But it turns out they were temporary, and Russia is the enduring thing.

So that's it on terminology. Before I speculate on what the future is going to look like, our only database that we have is whatever happened from this second backwards. What people call history, but it's just whatever is in the past. That's it.

That's our database. And so I'm going to look at when Russia was strong and China was weak from the mid-9th century to the mid 20th century. Then the reversal of the power balance and then in the recent period ...