Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise
10/31/20251 hr 31 min
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.
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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
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSarah Paine· Guest0:00
People are worried about whether there's gonna be an enduring relationship with, uh, China and Russia. And if you look at this picture, uh, the relations look more glacial than cordial and the little one's hauling on the arm of the big one, and, uh, one wonders about that. So, um, it turns out my expertise is on Russo-Chinese relations. In- that's what I studied in graduate school. My dissertation was a history of their border from the Opium Wars, the mid-19th century, until outer Mongolia was, uh, snatched from the Chinese sphere of influence and parked in the Russian sphere, uh, uh, in the 1920s. So i- it's fun to talk about this particular topic. Before I get going, I'm gonna do some terminology. I'm gonna 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. Soviet. 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