Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

Japan in this battle is just taking anybody, young boys, old people, whoever they can put into that army they're putting into it. If the Russians had run one more battle against the Japanese, the Japanese supply lines would have collapsed. If Japan had demanded more at those peace talks, Nicholas II would have gone back to war and he would have slaughtered them because he had all these cracked troops that are just sitting there and the Japanese literally don't have the men. Little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China.

Incredible. This uh effect on China was far more devastating than the opium wars. The Chinese like to talk about these as being rebellions or uprisings. Give me a break.

They're civil wars. So, I'm going to talk to you today about one of the two great generations in modern Japanese history. They are the Maji generation named after the Maji emperor here and that generation transformed Japan into the only and the first and the only non-western modern power in that period. And the second great generation of modern Japanese is of course the post-war generation that transformed their country into a global powerhouse.

And I'm going to ask a question or try to both ask and answer it is what caused the reversal of the balance of power in Asia in the period that I'm going to talk to you about it. And it's a really consequential question about why these tectonic changes take place in the international system because historically uh China had always been uh the dominant civilization in Asia from time in memorial and then upstart Japan um winds up doing things or China winds up doing things and it reverses and has profound effects and it's a very relevant question in our own day when there's an ongoing reversal of the reversal when China is on the comeback and uh threatening to put Japan back in its box. So it's really interesting to ask why how do these things happen? So that's the background of what I'm talking about.

But if you think about China back in the day before Japan trounced China in the first SinoJapanese war, Chinese believe that there's only one civilization, theirs naturally. And they believed that of course it's the best because there's only one that makes it easier to be the best. But uh ...