Keep pulling the thread on Sarah Paine.
The total territory Russia took from the Chinese sphere of influence from the mid-19th century to the 1920s is greater than all U.S. territory east of the Mississippi River.
In the 1920s, Russia removed Outer Mongolia from China's sphere of influence and incorporated it into its own.
During the Opium Wars, Russia persuaded the Qing dynasty to sign the Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Treaty of Peking (1860), ceding large territories in Central Asia and its Pacific coastline to Russia.
After the first Sino-Japanese War, Russia, France, and Germany formed the 'triple intervention' to pressure Japan into returning the Liaodong Peninsula to China, only for Russia to promptly seize the territory for itself.
After the Northern Expedition reached Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek turned on his communist allies in the United Front and massacred them, an event Joseph Stalin used to discredit Leon Trotsky's theory of world revolution and consolidate his own power.
Fearing a two-front war after Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, Joseph Stalin successfully pressured the Chinese Nationalists and Communists to form a Second United Front to fight Japan, thereby bogging Japan down in China.
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union stripped Manchuria of its industrial base, taking 83% of its electrical equipment, 86% of mining equipment, and 80% of metalworking equipment back to Russia.
The Chinese Nationalists agreed to Outer Mongolia's independence in exchange for a promise from Joseph Stalin not to aid the Chinese Communists, a promise he promptly broke.
During the Chinese Civil War, Joseph Stalin advised Mao Zedong to halt his offensive at the Yangtze River in an effort to maintain a divided and weak China.
Joseph Stalin viewed the Korean War as a low-risk, high-reward strategy to weaken the United States and delay China's rise by 'fighting to the last Chinese in Korea'.
China's development of an atomic weapon in 1964 was a key step in its effort to free itself from Soviet influence.
During the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, the Soviet Union asked the United States for approval to launch nuclear or conventional strikes against China's nuclear facilities, which the U.S. denied.