Sarah Paine

Okay, 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 Liaodong Peninsula that 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 territory, 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's 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 while 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 predations, 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.