In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century.This lecture was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s role in the whole thing.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.SponsorsMercury helps you run your business better. It’s the banking platform we use for the podcast — we love that we can see our cash balance, AR, and AP all in one place. Join us (and over 200,000 other entrepreneurs) at mercury.comLabelbox scrutinizes public benchmarks at the single data-row level to probe what’s really being evaluated. Using this knowledge, they can generate custom training data for hill climbing existing benchmarks, or design new benchmarks from scratch. Learn more at labelbox.com/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.Timestamps(00:00:00) – How Russia took advantage of China’s weakness(00:22:58) – After Stalin, China’s rise(00:33:52) – Russian imperialism(00:45:23) – China’s and Russia’s existential problems(01:04:55) – Q&A: Sino-Soviet Split(01:22:44) – Stalin’s lessons from WW2 Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
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. 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.
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