Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

**Sarah Paine** (0:00)
People are worried about whether there's going to be an enduring relationship with China and Russia. And if you look at this picture, the relations look more glacial than cordial, and the little ones hauling on the arm are the big one. And one wonders about that. So 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 in the mid-19th century until Outer Mongolia was snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere 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 Bolsheviks thought they were special. So they came up with special words for special people. Soviets, 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 19th century to the mid 20th century, then the reversal of the power balance. And then in the recent period, when China has been strong and Russia weak, China and Russia actually discovered each other late in their histories. It was the early part of their last dynasties when the Russians were after fur, very lucrative in those days, and that brings them out to the Pacific. But their relations were only episodic until we get to the mid 19th century, which is where my story is going to begin. So in the 18th century, China was strong, Russia was weak, but that one doesn't last very long. And both empires followed the rules for continental empire. And if you want to survive in a continental world, that's what both of them historically have been. You don't want to have two front wars because you have multiple neighbors, any one of them that can come in at any time. And if they gang up on you, that's trouble. So you take on one at a time. Also, you don't want any great powers on the borders. This is the fundamental problem with their relationship, is because today's friend can be tomorrow's foe, and that is truly problematic. So what do you do to solve that problem? Well, you take on your neighbors sequentially, you set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising and just the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you wait the opportune moment to pounce and absorb, and that is Vladimir Putin's game. But if you play this game, you're surrounding yourself by failing states because you're either busy destabilizing them or ingesting them. So the curious might ask, are Russia and China unlucky with all the very dysfunctional places that surround them, or are they complicit? Also there are no enduring alliances in this world because the neighbors figure it out that the hegemonic power offers nothing but trouble in the long term. And there's also no counsel on when to stop expanding. So both Russia and China are known for overextending, overdoing it, and then that may help explain some of their periodic implosions over their long and bloody histories. Very high mortality rates. Before you dismiss this paradigm, you've seen it operating in real time in Syria and Ukraine. There are people who do this.
And it also explains why all those ancient ruins are ruins. This sort of warfare is ruinous. But anyway, it lies at the basis of many of the great civilizations of Eurasia. This is how they did things. All right. So I'm going to start my story in the mid-19th century, when the Chinese were beset by a whole series of rebellions that just about wrecked them. And the Russians take advantage of all of this. Remember the second rule of continental empires, no great power neighbors. And the Russians repeatedly derailed the rise of China by scripting the Chinese to do things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese interests, but pretty good for Russian interests. And it takes the Chinese a long time to figure it out. They have governments coming and going in this period. It's a difficult period, but they eventually figure it out by the time Mao reunifies China in 1949 So I'm going to go through each of those examples in turn, starting with a really big one, which are the Opium Wars. This is when Britain and France are coming at China in order to force China to trade on their terms. And this corresponds with the two biggest rebellions of China's period of rebellions, the Taiping and the Nian Rebellion. So here's a big chart that's a simplified chart. The rebellions actually start in the late 18th century. Rebellions are misnomer. These are civil wars. Either people are like minority people who want out of empire. They want to secede other people who want to overthrow the government in Beijing. The peak period is in red. The really big ones are in white. So China has got the two front war problem, right? It's got Europeans coming at them, plus all of this. In fact, the Chinese have so many fronts that know how to deal with it. So the Russians come on in to the Chinese and say, Hey, we can deal with the British and French for you and solve that problem. Then you can deal with all the internal stuff. However, we need to have you sign a couple of pieces of paper for us. The Treaty of Vaigun of 1858, the Treaty of Peking of 1860, what do they do? They cede to Russia large swaths of territory in Central Asia and the Pacific coastline. And the Qing dynasty, they were vague on geography. They're beset by these other things. They don't understand that Europeans think these pieces of paper are permanent things. And they figure that once they put their house back in order, they're going to come back and get the territory later. OK, the second example of ruinous Russian mediation that is going to keep China in turmoil. So in the first Sino-Japanese War, Japan trounces China, boots them from their tributary in Korea. And then the Japanese also want some territory on the Laodong Peninsula. It isn't labeled very well there. But anyhow, what the Chinese do is they go to the Russians to help them counterbalance Japan so that Japan doesn't take this Chinese territory in the Asian mainland. Russia gets its buddies, France and Germany, the so-called Triple Intervention, to gang up on Japan. And Japan looks at it, three great powers? I don't think so. So they bail. So from the Chinese point of view, so far so good, except. What the Russians promptly do is take for themselves the very territory that had just been denied to Japan. And the story gets worse. Because all the European powers, or many of them, plus Japan come in and they carve out big concession areas throughout China. So that China is not going to have full sovereignty over its territory for several generations, right? So instead of one relatively small Japanese concession area, they get foreigners everywhere. And so think about second rule, continental empire, no great power neighbors, not happening. Well, this is going on. Well, the Bolsheviks come to power, and then they're going to apply these rules as well. When they do come to power, they're very weak because Russia has been devastated by World War I. And then the Bolsheviks don't win their own bitter civil war until 1922 And so then as now, they relied on a really cheap, but incredibly effective strategy of strategic communication. The Russians really understand other people's emotional life and what sets them at odds with each other, and they know just how to serve out the propaganda that sets people at each other's throats. And their propaganda is going to help the Chinese really despise the Japanese and the Europeans, while Russia's even greater predation, the ones you've already seen, go unnoticed. So here's Lev Karakhan, he was a deputy foreign minister. In 1919, he sends a missive, his Karakhan Manifesto to the Chinese foreign ministry, and he says, hey, we're not imperialists, we're Bolsheviks. We're going to return all the lands from those unequal treaties and be your friend from ever more. Unlike all the other evil imperialist powers, we're not like that anymore.