Russia ran the same 'derail the rising neighbor' playbook against China roughly ten separate times across a century, each instance extracting territory or advantage while China was distracted by internal or external crisis.
Paine walks through examples in sequence: the 1858/1860 treaties signed while China fought the Opium Wars and internal rebellions simultaneously; the 1895 Triple Intervention where Russia helped block Japan's Liaodong claim only to annex the same territory itself; the 1919-20s Karakhan Manifesto that promised to return seized Chinese territory but was quietly walked back once the Bolsheviks won their civil war; arms and advisers to the First United Front on condition Communists infiltrate the Nationalist Party; funding both sides of the Chinese Civil War in the 1930s to keep Japan tied down; and finally stripping over 80% of Manchuria's industrial equipment plus 640,000 Japanese POWs as slave labor in 1945, while also detaching Outer Mongolia from the Chinese sphere.
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The doctrine underneath all of this is two 'rules of continental empire': never fight a two-front war, and never allow a great power on your border - achieved by destabilizing rising neighbors, absorbing failing ones, and maintaining buffer states.
Paine argues this explains both Russian and Chinese behavior toward their own peripheries, and frames Putin's approach to Ukraine ('destabilize the rising, ingest the failing... wait for the opportune moment to pounce and absorb') as a direct continuation of the czarist and Soviet template rather than a novel strategy.
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Stalin's 1948-53 China and Korea policy exemplifies the doctrine in action: he told Mao to halt the Communist advance at the Yangtze to preserve a divided, weaker China, and then prolonged the Korean War specifically to bleed the US while delaying China's development, calling it 'fighting to the last Chinese.'
Mao ignored the Yangtze advice and pushed south anyway. Paine says Stalin's calculation on Korea was low-risk and high-reward for Russia: China's isolation from the war would tie it more firmly to Moscow while the US wasted resources, and only Stalin's 1953 death ended the stalemate.
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The Sino-Soviet split was driven less by ideology than by the structural reality that two continental empires sharing a long border cannot both be 'king of the roost' - the trigger was the 1969 Zhenbao/Damansky Island border clash, after which the Soviets asked the US whether it would object to a nuclear strike on China's weapons program.
The US said no both times Russia raised it (nuclear and conventional strikes on Chinese nuclear facilities), which Paine says is what convinced Mao that Russia, not America, was China's primary adversary - permanently reordering both countries' alignments and letting Nixon and Mao cooperate against a common Soviet threat.
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China's first successful atomic bomb test in 1964 was the pivot that let Mao stop deferring to Moscow and openly demand the return of territory Russia had annexed since the 1858 Treaty of Aigun - a claim covering more land than everything east of the Mississippi.
Paine says Mao's post-test demand ('we have not yet presented an account for this list of stolen territory') sent Russian officials into a panic and marks the moment China stopped acting as a Soviet client and started acting as a rival great power.
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Both regimes' legitimacy rests on a manufactured 'big lie' that they are anti-imperialist liberators rather than the 20th century's most prolific territorial predators, and both fall back on jingoistic nationalism once their founding ideology stops working - a shift Paine calls dangerous because nationalism is 'a very heady drink' that clouds judgment and alienates minorities and neighbors.
She traces this to the Bolsheviks' Karakhan Manifesto (claiming Russia would return seized Chinese territory, then quietly reneging), and to China's post-Tiananmen 1980s textbook rewrite that replaced class-enemy propaganda with anti-Japanese, anti-American nationalism once Communist ideology lost credibility domestically.
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Dictatorial systems handle succession badly by design, because concentrating all power in one person precludes any stable transition mechanism, guaranteeing what Paine calls a 'cat-fight royale' after each leader dies.
She cites Stalin's death opening space for the Sino-Soviet rift, and the rapid Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko succession crisis of the early 1980s, as evidence, and predicts the same dynamic awaits Russia whenever Putin eventually dies or is removed.
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Democracy is structurally incompatible with both communism (free elections expose the regime's economic failure) and empire (occupied minorities vote to leave), which Gorbachev discovered when perestroika and glasnost triggered Soviet collapse instead of reforming it - a lesson the Chinese Communist Party drew explicitly, concluding 'don't hesitate to deploy the tanks' rather than attempt political liberalization.
Paine contrasts this with the CCP's continued economic reform appetite alongside zero political liberalization, and says China's forced Sinification of its own minorities (part of the rationale she gives for the Uyghur genocide) is a direct reaction to watching how ethnically-organized Soviet republics used their nominal autonomy to secede once central control loosened.
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In today's Russia-China 'bromance,' China now holds all the leverage - nine times Russia's population and GDP - and is using the Ukraine war to buy Siberian resources (oil, and eventually water from Lake Baikal, which holds over 20% of the world's surface fresh water) at increasingly favorable terms while Russia depletes itself.
Paine predicts Russia risks becoming a Chinese client state on the model of North Korea's dependence on China, with Beijing paying 'less and less' for Russian resources the more cornered Putin becomes in Ukraine, inverting the position Russia held over China for most of the prior century.
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Paine's prescription for the US and its allies is to keep the two rivals' primary theaters from aligning (Putin's Ukraine fixation and Xi's Taiwan fixation sit at opposite ends of Eurasia), maximize allied prosperity rather than launching trade wars on them, and let continental rivals exhaust each other rather than intervening directly - which she says is how the West won the first Cold War.
She closes by quoting Pericles - 'I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy's devices' - and warns that cutting science funding and alienating allies through gratuitous trade wars would squander America's two structural advantages (its alliance system and its innovation edge) at exactly the wrong moment.
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The 'cooperative adversary' concept - an adversary with weak institutions that is comparatively easy to manipulate into self-defeating choices - explains why Stalin could script a century of Chinese decisions but failed completely against institutionally strong Nazi Germany, misjudging the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the same way he had successfully played China.
Paine argues Stalin ran the identical 'let border friction slide to avoid a two-front war' script against both Japan (over Manchuria in 1931) and Germany (over Poland in 1939) - it worked against Japan, which turned south into China instead of north into Russia, but failed catastrophically against Hitler, who invaded anyway in 1941.
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Books referenced
Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler - Paine says Stalin needed to have read it to understand that he was 'a menu item for Hitler' and that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would not hold, unlike the same divide-and-delay script that worked against Japan.
Techniques and frameworks
Rules of continental empire - Paine's core framework: continental powers avoid two-front wars and great-power neighbors by destabilizing rising neighbors, absorbing failing ones, and keeping buffer states between themselves and rivals; a later Soviet-era addendum was 'no hot wars,' which Putin has now discarded.
Cooperative adversary - A weak-institution adversary that is comparatively easy to script into acting against its own interests; Paine says this explains why Stalin could repeatedly manipulate Republican-and-Communist China but never managed the same trick against institutionally strong Nazi Germany.
The big lie - Both the Karakhan Manifesto (Bolshevik Russia claiming to renounce imperialism toward China) and modern claims that NATO expansion caused the invasion of Ukraine are, per Paine, deliberately implausible propaganda that works precisely because it is so brazen.
Pillars of legitimacy - Paine's framework for one-party rule once the founding ideology fails: ethical rule, economic prosperity, and territorial expansion, the last of which is the only pillar the Chinese Communist Party has left, explaining its bet on jingoistic nationalism.
Summary
This is a solo lecture, delivered to a live San Francisco audience, in which military historian Sarah Paine argues that Russia has systematically sabotaged China's rise for over a century, and that understanding this history is essential to reading the current Putin-Xi relationship correctly. She frames both countries as classic continental empires that follow the same unwritten rules: avoid two-front wars, never tolerate a great power on your border, and destabilize or absorb your neighbors rather than let them consolidate. Working through roughly ten historical episodes - the 1858-60 treaties extracted during China's rebellions, the 1895 Triple Intervention, the Karakhan Manifesto's broken promises, Soviet arms tied to Communist infiltration of the Nationalist Party, dual funding of both sides in the Chinese Civil War, and the wholesale stripping of Manchuria's industrial base in 1945 - she builds the case that Russia's "friendship" with China has, in practice, meant scripting Chinese decisions to Russia's benefit at nearly every turn.
The lecture's second half traces the reversal: Stalin's death, China's 1964 nuclear test, and the 1969 Zhenbao Island border clash that convinced Mao Russia, not America, was China's primary threat. This realignment let Nixon and Mao cooperate against Moscow and set up the structural conditions - China's post-1978 reforms compounding at double-digit growth while the Soviet Union stagnated under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko - that flipped the power balance entirely. Paine pairs this with a broader argument about legitimacy: both regimes rely on a "big lie" that casts themselves as anti-imperialist victims rather than the century's most prolific territorial predators, and both have fallen back on jingoistic nationalism as their founding ideologies (Russian Orthodoxy, then communism; Confucianism, then communism) lost credibility - a shift she calls dangerous because nationalism "is a very heady drink" that clouds judgment.
In the Q&A, Dwarkesh presses on why ideology didn't cement Sino-Soviet solidarity, on Stalin's specific decisions (sparing Chiang Kai-shek in 1936, halting Mao at the Yangtze, prolonging the Korean War), and on why Stalin succeeded at manipulating China but failed against Hitler. Paine's answer centers on her "cooperative adversary" concept: China's weak institutions made it easy to script, while Nazi Germany's strong ones did not bend to the same tricks. She also pushes back hard on Dwarkesh's suggestion that China might simply buy Siberian resources from Russia through ordinary trade rather than conflict, arguing the real story is China extracting steadily worse terms of trade from an increasingly desperate Putin - the same dynamic, in reverse, that Russia once ran on China.
The episode closes on contemporary implications: China now holds nine times Russia's population and GDP, Putin has abandoned the Soviet-era taboo on "hot wars," and Paine predicts Russia risks sliding into a North Korea-style dependency on Beijing. Her policy advice for the US and its allies is explicitly the one that won the first Cold War - keep rival theaters from aligning, maximize allied prosperity instead of launching trade wars on friends, and let continental rivals exhaust themselves rather than intervening directly - closing with a quote from Pericles warning that self-inflicted blunders are more dangerous than any adversary's schemes.
Notable Quotes
"The Russians repeatedly derail the rise of China by scripting the Chinese to do things that are remarkably detrimental to Chinese interests, but pretty good for Russian interests." - Sarah Paine
"Do you suppose we pose a threat to anybody else? They never turn it around that way. Except Russia has posed existential threat to its neighbors forever." - Sarah Paine
"If the lie is big enough, people will believe you." - Sarah Paine, on the Soviet and Chinese Communist Party propaganda tradition
"Who deals with a bully alone? Always gang up on them." - Sarah Paine
"I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy's devices." - Sarah Paine, quoting Pericles