ABSTRACT
The relationship between the two vast empires astride the Eurasian heartland has been troubled for centuries, despite certain superficial similarities in size and political-economic structure. The Mongol Golden Horde successfully invaded Russia in the thirteenth cen tury, burning Moscow and taking Kiev, and they continued to rule southern Russia and extort tribute for the next two hundred years, leaving a historical legacy of dread. Russia would lag China developmentally for the next several centuries, with a population that did not reach 13 million until 1725 (compared to China’s brilliant civilization and ca. 150 million people), and the first visitors to Beijing in the modem era (beginning in the mid seventeenth century) were obliged to prostrate themselves (koutou) before the Qing em peror. Yet the decline of the Manchu Dynasty coincided with Russian industrialization following the defeat of Napoleon, and Russian appetites for trade and territorial expansion led to increasing infringement on imperial China. The Russian imperialist strategy was that of a “free rider”: Russian forces typically pressed their claims only when China was preoccupied by more urgent threats. Thus in 1854-1859, while China was engulfed by the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), General N. N. Murawjew and twenty thousand troops occupied the delta and north shore of the Amur/Heilong River and the maritime provinces without firing a shot. During the second Opium War, Russian forces made further opportu nistic inroads, formalized in the 1860 Sino-Russian Treaty of Beijing. During the Yakub Beg Rebellion in Xinjiang, Russian troops occupied part of the Yili region, formalized in the Treaty of Livadia (later modified slightly in China’s favor in the Treaty of St. Peters burg). Completion of the Trans-Siberian railway and the decline of the Qing offered fur ther opportunity for cheap acquisitions, and in 1898 Russia made Port Arthur and Dalian imperial treaty ports, occupied Manchuria in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, and ex tended its sphere of influence over China’s northeast in 1905. After encouraging the Mongols to rebel in 1910, Russia established a protectorate over Outer Mongolia in the midst of the 1911 Xinhai revolution.
