Sarah Paine

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 one's hauling on the arm of 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 czarist 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.