Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

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. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-russo-chinese * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sarah-paine-how-russia-sabotaged-chinas-rise/id1516093381?i=1000734455820 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Iz0Fi2wxLDpSEyfHft01E?si=quCUygx8Txq5r8VC1xZUJg 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 * Mercury 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 https://mercury.com * Labelbox 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 https://labelbox.com/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 – How Russia took advantage of China's weakness 00:23:46 – Reversal of the balance of power 00:34:39 – Russian imperialism 00:46:10 – China’s and Russia's existential problems 01:05:42 – Q&A: Sino-Soviet split 01:23:29 – Stalin's lessons from WW2