Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Summary

• The episode’s core call: the Sino-Russian “bromance” is a countdown, not an alliance. Paine — whose dissertation covered the Russo-Chinese border from the Opium Wars to the 1920s — argues Russia spent a century sabotaging China’s rise, China knows it, and now the power balance has flipped: China has “nine times the population, nine times the GNP of Russia, and their per capita GNPs are converging.” “The question isn’t whether this bromance is going to last forever, but rather when it’s going to end.”
• Russia’s possible endgame is North Korea-ization, not necessarily war with China. Pushed by Dwarkesh on why nuclear-armed neighbors would fight over complementary resources, Paine clarifies she never predicted invasion — the mechanism is worsening terms of trade as Putin corners himself in Ukraine, until Russia sits “under a Chinese yoke.” Some Russians already said it at the 2022 invasion: “Oh my God, that’s our future. It’s North Korea.”
• Siberia could be the prize. Putin “is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open” — and it holds exactly what China covets, above all water: Lake Baikal has over 20% of the world’s surface fresh water, while North China has “blown through their water table.” Belt and Road is already peeling away Russia’s Central Asian sphere.
• The tradeable playbook for the second Cold War: primary theaters probably don’t align — Putin has “a Ukraine fixation,” Xi “a Taiwan fixation,” opposite ends of Eurasia — so the West should avoid superglue events (a hot great-power war), skip “gratuitous trade wars on our allies,” and compound prosperity while the two burn wealth. “Play your cards appropriately and these two will take care of each other.”
• Regime-risk read on China: with ethical rule and economic prosperity gone as legitimacy pillars, the CCP is left with territorial expansion and jingoistic nationalism — but nationalism “is a very heady drink” that clouds judgment, frightens neighbors into coalitions, and impedes crisis de-escalation. China’s nightmare is collapse into luàn (乱); Russia’s is invasion — two different fears driving two different behaviors.
• Xi’s Gorbachev lessons explain his growth-depressing choices: don’t hesitate to deploy the tanks, economic reform only, sinify minorities (Paine’s stated rationale for the Uyghur genocide), and prioritize party monopoly over economic efficiency whenever the two conflict.
• Method warning for forecasters: history reverse-engineers into false inevitability — “It may not even be the right story, but it yields the correct answer” — while the future stays dark, per the Russian proverb she cites: someone else’s mind is darkness. And the closing risk, via Pericles on the eve of Athens’ ruin: “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.”

Deep dive

1. The rules of continental empire: destabilize the rising, ingest the failing

• Paine’s framework for the whole lecture: continental powers with many neighbors must avoid two-front wars and tolerate no great powers on their borders — “today’s friend can be tomorrow’s foe.” The solution: take neighbors on sequentially, “destabilize the rising, ingest the failing, and set up buffer zones in between… That is Vladimir Putin’s game.”
• The corollary is self-inflicted: play this game and “you’re surrounding yourself with failing states.” Her rhetorical question — are Russia and China unlucky with dysfunctional neighbors, “or are they complicit?” — and her check on skeptics: “you’ve seen it operating in real time in Syria and Ukraine.”
• Her methodological ground rule, stated upfront: “our only database that we have is whatever happened from this second backwards” — hence the tour from Russia-strong/China-weak (mid-19th to mid-20th century) through the reversal.

2. Scripting a weak China: treaties, triple intervention, concessions everywhere

• The Opium Wars template: with Britain and France attacking and the Taiping and Nian rebellions raging, Russia offered to “deal with the British and French” in exchange for the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and Treaty of Peking (1860) — ceding huge swaths of Central Asia and Pacific coastline. The Qing, “vague on geography,” didn’t grasp that Europeans treat paper as permanent.
• After Japan trounced China in the First Sino-Japanese War, Russia organized the Triple Intervention to deny Japan the Liaodong Peninsula — then “promptly took for themselves the very territory that had just been denied to Japan,” triggering the Europe-wide carve-up of concession areas. Result: instead of one small Japanese concession, “foreigners everywhere” and no full sovereignty for generations.

3. The Karakhan Manifesto: the big lie that built the myth of Sino-Soviet friendship

• Deputy foreign minister Lev Karakhan’s 1919 missive — “we’re not imperialists, we’re Bolsheviks… we’re gonna return all the lands from those unequal treaties” — offered China a model and mentor. But once the Bolsheviks’ civil war improved, the offer was quietly rewritten to “we’re willing to talk”; Paine has seen the revised telegram in the Taiwan archives. The concessions weren’t returned until the 1950s, after Westerners had returned nearly all of theirs.
• Scale matters: forget Hong Kong — “the Russians had by far the largest concession area of any other country.” Yet from Karakhan comes “the myth of Sino-Soviet friendship,” and the big lie survives because Russians “were the greatest practitioners of imperialism of the 20th century” while communism cast imperialists as the villains. Her modern parallel: blaming NATO expansion for Ukraine — “He’s gaslighting everybody. Russians are the problem.”

4. Stalin plays every China card — funding all sides, deflecting Japan

• The First United Front: Russian aid built the Whampoa Military Academy that made Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition possible — priced at admitting Communists into the Nationalist Party. When the CCP wanted out, fearing proximity to Nationalist guns, Moscow said stay; Chiang reached Shanghai and “massacres them in droves.” Stalin then used the disaster to trounce Trotsky’s world-revolution line: “a lot of Chinese died proving Stalin’s point.”
• Literal derailment: when warlord heir Zhang Xueliang tried to reclaim the Manchurian railways in 1929, Russia deployed over 100,000 troops, tanks, airplanes “and just pound this man.” And in 1936, facing the Anti-Comintern Pact’s two-front threat, Stalin engineered the Second United Front — Dwarkesh adds the 1936 kidnapping detail: Stalin radioed the Communists to spare the kidnapped Chiang, since his death might have dissolved Nationalist resistance. Japan’s apoplectic 1937 escalation followed; “the Chinese are fighting the Japanese so the Russians don’t have to,” at the price of millions of deaths.

5. Yalta’s loot: an empire bigger than America east of the Mississippi

• August Storm, 1945: 1.5 million Soviet soldiers rapidly take Manchuria — then take its industrial base home: 83% of electrical power equipment, 86% of mining, 82% of cement, 80% of metalworking, plus 640,000 Japanese POWs as slave labor. Paine’s indictment: China fought Japan for 15 years; “Russia comes in for the cameo performance at the very end” and takes the spoils.
• Add Outer Mongolia (via a self-serving “status quo” reading of Yalta) and Tannu Tuva (taken 1944, “bigger than England,” full of gold), and the cumulative haul since 1858 is “greater than all US territory east of the Mississippi. This is not your normal land grab.”
• The balancing entry: Russia did hand the Japanese stockpiles and railway training to the Communists — “essential aid” that transformed a guerrilla movement into a conventional force for the civil-war showdown. But Stalin’s advice to Mao in 1948 to “take a break at the Yangtze” — he might have wanted a divided China — was ignored, and Mao started figuring out “the Russians don’t want a strong China.”

6. Korea: fighting to the last Chinese

• Once Chinese tunnel systems guaranteed UN forces would never again approach the Soviet border, Stalin saw a low-risk, high-reward machine: weaken the US, retard Chinese development, and isolate China so thoroughly that “it’s going to tie China to Russia ever more firmly” while Russia rebuilt. “What’s not to love about fighting to the last Chinese in Korea?” The war ends when Stalin dies — “finest day of his life.”
• Paine’s extension: today is “the Korean War in reverse” — China dribbling out aid while Russia gets wrecked in Ukraine, suffering high death rates among only-children families. From Xi’s chair: “the longer this goes on, the better. Just let Putin keep working his magic and I get to sell him stuff.”

7. The split: “the one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary”

• Post-Stalin grievances compounded — Mao’s claim to lead international communism, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence, the refused joint sub base, the withdrawn atomic-bomb plans — going public in 1960. Asked whether the split was inevitable had Stalin lived, Paine: yes — the grievances would still exist, and “dictators’ deaths profoundly weaken their systems… you’re guaranteed a cat-fight royale,” which is also “what one waits for with Putin.”
• China’s 1964 bomb freed it from “Soviet bondage”; Mao immediately presented “an account for this list of stolen territory.” After the 1969 Zhenbao/Damansky clash, Russia asked Washington: “Would it be okay if we nuke these people?” We’re like, “No.” Mao’s takeaway — “the one that wants to nuke you is your primary adversary” — reshuffled the board and handed the US the swing role, while garrisoning the Chinese border became near-bankrupting for a fraction-sized Soviet economy.
• On Dwarkesh’s opening puzzle — why shared communism couldn’t prevent war over river islands — Paine’s answer: the ideologies are interchangeable skins (“tsars change out to communism, China changes out Confucianism”) over an unchanged principle: “who’s going to run Asia and then Eurasia,” a mutually exclusive proposition with a shared address.

8. Russian identity is territory; the Eastern Europe template shows how the empire runs

• Russians measure greatness “not in wealth” but “in vast territorial extent and the ability to run roughshod over others” — always asking who threatens them, never “do you suppose we pose a threat to anybody else?” Hence the vanished neighbors (Novgorod, the Central Asian Khanates) and the vivisected ones (Poland, Ukraine, Finland). The NATO stampede “is not some conspiracy, it’s just what the Russians have done to them.”
• The bloc-building template, illustrated by Vyshinsky in Romania and Voroshilov in Hungary (where 10% of the population faced tribunals after the 1947 elections): control the power ministries, monopolize coercion, redistribute land to buy allegiance, and wrap it in the fiction of elections. Contrast with the Marshall Plan — which “passed overwhelmingly in Congress” and which “you could never get through Congress now.”
• Putin himself “has risen to power on a diet of hot wars” — Grozny leveled, Georgia 2008, 7% of Ukraine in 2014 “at very little cost. And Russians think that’s great!” — discarding the Soviet veterans’ addendum: no hot wars, only proxies. The last leaders who broke it (Andropov, a non-veteran, into Afghanistan) got Stinger missiles for their trouble.

9. Two nightmares, and China’s lessons from Gorbachev

• The asymmetry that structures both regimes: “Russia’s nightmare scenario is other people invading Russia. China’s nightmare scenario is the collapse of China” — the luàn (乱) of civil-war chaos, plus the Soviet precedent that communist regimes can shatter. The unsolved conundrum: “if you no longer believe the economic theories on which communism is based, how do you justify one-party rule?”
• China’s takeaways from Gorbachev killing the patient: “don’t hesitate to deploy the tanks”; economic reform, never political; sinify minorities so no ethnic fault lines pre-exist a breakup (Paine’s stated rationale for the ongoing Uyghur genocide); and prioritize CCP monopoly over economic efficiency — “that helps explain some of Xi Jinping’s growth-depressing choices.”
• The fallback ideology is jingoistic nationalism — textbooks rewritten after Tiananmen to target “evil Japanese, evil Americans” — but “nationalism is a very heady drink. If you imbibe too much, it clouds the judgment,” repels minorities, coalesces frightened neighbors, and “impedes the de-escalation of unforeseen international dust-ups.”

10. Stalin’s genius, hindsight traps, and the blunders to fear

• Dwarkesh’s pushback on Stalin as improbably deft geopolitician draws Paine’s best answers: long-lived dictators likely have “EQs that are off the charts” (“when you come in the room, they just gut-feeling know whether they’re going to cap you or not”), plus overlapping security agencies funneling superior information. And China was a “cooperative adversary” — weak institutions made it easy to script into acts “antithetical to their interests,” unlike Hitler’s Germany. Stalin ran the same appeasement script on both Axis powers; it worked on Japan, but with Germany “you’re a menu item for Hitler.”
• Her epistemics, worth keeping: in retrospect you “reverse-engineer… a plausible story” that “may not even be the right story, but it yields the correct answer” — while the future stays opaque, per the Russian proverb: someone else’s mind is darkness. Her hedged read on Putin: “I could be wrong, but I believe Putin wants not only all of Ukraine… but also the Baltic states and he wants to keep on going.”
• Dwarkesh’s frame the audience should carry: the Chinese Civil War may be the most important under-noticed event of the 20th century — so which huge-population countries (India, Nigeria) are we ignoring now? And the closing warning against American self-harm: killing the alliance system with gratuitous trade wars, then facing China alone — “Japan tried this go-it-alone strategy… when China was a failed state, and it wrecked Japan.” Pericles, on the eve of Athens’ unrecovered blunders: “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.”