Sarah Paine: belief

Transcript context

…This is a quote from Sun Yat-sen, who was the first and short-lived leader of the Chinese Republic in 1912. He says, “We regarded the Russian defeat by Japan as a defeat of the West by the East. We regarded the Japanese victory as our own victory.” Now, we know that just 10 years prior, China and Japan had fought a war together. We know that in 20 years, there's going to be a brutal invasion of China by Japan where millions of Chinese will die. Help me understand why during this period, at least to the Chinese revolutionaries and reformers, it seems like Japan is the power to emulate. First of all, he's the founding father of modern China. It's one of the few things that the Taiwanese and the PRC agree on, that he's the founding father of modern China and it's positive what they think about him. Remember when I told you in the Russo-Japanese War how they're paying for everything in Manchuria, that the Chinese actually thought that it would be a good thing. Also understand that when the Manchus lose… In Chinese, the war is called the Qing-Japanese War, the Manchu-Japanese War. The Japanese are defeating the Manchus, who you may not particularly like if you're a Han nationalist. You can relate to that. The Japanese got in and out of that thing. That's the key. The really, really, ugly, brutal stuff is going to happen in the Second Sino-Japanese War where the Japanese do things that are unforgivable. The problem for the First Sino-Japanese War is that it's detonating Confucianism. What's it going to replace that with? Sun Yat-sen is going to do nationalism and work it that way. I think that's the big answer, but you're quite right that as things went on, as it sinks in that Japan is the dominant player in Asia… Because first you have a war and that's happened, but you're focusing on all your civil wars and other stuff. It hasn't sunk in that this is not an exception. It's going to go on for a century. I suspect that it's gradual for the Chinese to get really upset about Japanese in particular. It's what they did in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It's unbelievable, because when they start losing, they get brutal. Something that wasn't emphasized in the lecture, but it seems quite important in explaining why Japan was able to be so dominant in this period, is that despite the fact that it has a much smaller population. China at this time is 400-450 million people. Russia is 130 million. What's going on in Japan? The Meiji reforms, what specifically are they enabling? If you look at the fraction of GDP that China is spending on defense… The country sort of imploded, so it's less than 1%. Russia is also not spending nearly as much of its output on defense. Japan in the preceding 10 years is spending 5% of output on defense. In 1904 it’s spending 10% of output on defense. That ability to marshal… It's a smaller place, but you can marshal the whole of resources towards this defense effort. It seems very important to understand.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.