Peter Moller, The Sino-Russian War (New York: Academy, 1965)
… After the Mukden Incident of 1939 [1], it became clear – if it hadn’t been before – that the Manchurian rebellion could not be contained. The rebels had progressed from attacking symbols and institutions of the Qing government to attacking Russian troops, and they were doing so with Chinese arms. China’s support for the revolt was so overt as to not even be an open secret, and it rebuffed any suggestion that it stop supplying the rebellion with shelter and weapons.
Neither Russia nor China was eager to start a war immediately, because both felt they were unready. Russia was cautious about building up its troop strength in Manchuria, both out of fear that China might interpret it as an aggressive action and because it was wary of pulling too many troops away from the European and Caucasian borders. China, for its part, knew that its industrial plant still couldn’t match Russia’s, and didn’t want to get into a full-scale conflict before it had laid in a sufficient stock of riders and aircraft. But neither side showed much interest in avoiding war: the Court of Arbitration’s attempts to broker a settlement were received unkindly, and responses to border incidents became progressively more belligerent.
Ultimately, it was China who pulled the trigger first, with Ma Qi deciding to act before the Russian buildup became too difficult to dislodge. In September 1942, he got his chance when a Russian patrol in pursuit of rebels crossed the border and exchanged fire with Chinese troops. Within twenty-four hours, a compliant Great National Council voted unanimously to declare war, Chinese bombers struck Mukden and Harbin, and units of the Chinese army advanced onto Manchurian soil.
China’s general staff had planned a three-stage war. The first objective would be to seize the Manchurian plain, secure the passes across the Khingan mountains, and cut the bridges and rail crossings across the Amur. At the same time, Chinese bombers would destroy the Russian airfields in eastern Siberia. The second stage involved taking Vladivostok, thus cutting Russia off from resupply by sea, and advancing across the Amur to overrun the Trans-Siberian Railroad and establish a buffer against counterattack. In the final stage, China would attack through Mongolia to open a second front on the steppe, threatening Russia with the total loss of Siberia and forcing it to the peace table.
The actual course of the war was somewhat different. The first weeks went favorably for China: the heavily outnumbered Russian troops in Manchuria retreated northward, the major cities fell, and the Han Chinese population welcomed the Chinese soldiers as liberators. The extent of China’s knowledge of the Siberian airfields also took the Russian air force by surprise, and many of its long-range bombers were destroyed on the ground. But unexpectedly strong resistance in northern Manchuria, where the Qing and mixed Transbaikal Orthodox people [2] predominated, slowed the Chinese advance, and the bitter Manchurian winter set in before that advance reached the Amur. The Chinese forces continued to move forward, but the Russians were more used to winter fighting, and they bought time to bring more troops to the front.
These would not be enough in the short term: although Russia had introduced conscription in 1941, it had gone to full mobilization only after the war started, and it would take months to recruit and train a new army. The reinforcements made the Chinese advance costly, and in several cases, they only broke the Russian lines with human-wave assaults, but by February 1943, they had reached the Amur and completed the conquest of Manchuria.
The battle paused only briefly as more Chinese armies were brought to the front, and in late March, they crossed the Russian border. The advance toward the Trans-Siberian Railroad went somewhat faster at first, as the Russian armies that had been broken in Manchuria needed time to regroup. The battle for the lower Amur was worse, a nightmare of frozen swamps and shifting channels, but it was also one where the technical superiority of Russian riders and artillery mattered little. And while Vladivostok itself was heavily fortified, the countryside around it was not, so the eastward advance through the Wanda Mountains encountered little opposition, and the city was under siege by the time the rasputitsa forced a lull in the fighting.
But other things were not going China’s way. Russia had known for more than half a decade that it might have to fight a war against a power whose population centers and industrial plant were a long way from its own, so it had thrown its resources into developing long-range bombers and rockets. The Anastasias, which had been used so effectively in the Nile War and were used by both sides in the Sino-Russian War, were an outgrowth of that program, but by this time there were many others. In 1943, it was able to field experimental bombers with a range of 3000 kilometers and rockets that could deliver a 220-kilogram warhead over a 4000-kilometer range. Both had their disadvantages – the bombers’ range exceeded that of their fighter escorts by hundreds of kilometers, and the rockets’ accuracy left much to be desired – and in other circumstances, they would have stayed under wraps until better models were developed, but Russia was desperate to take the war to the enemy. The bombers, based in central Siberia and Yakutia, suffered heavy losses from Chinese antiaircraft fire, but raids and rocket attacks began to take a toll on the industrial cities of northern China.
The other obstacle Ma Qi faced was much closer to the ground: the guerrilla raids of Transbaikal Orthodox partisans in northern Manchuria and Siberia. These would tie up hundreds of thousands of troops and threaten Chinese supply lines, and in the process, they would become a Russian legend: people of mixed Slavic, Mongol and Chinese blood fighting for the motherland where the government’s troops had failed. And it was not lost on those who made these legends that the partisans came from the narodnik ethos and were far closer to the spirit of the Tolstoyan revolution than the current oligarchy was…
… The outbreak of war left Japan scrambling for a policy. The liberal government of Taro Mimura strongly favored neutrality, fearing that participation in the war would open the door to a return of right-wing militarism. At the same time, Russia and China offered rich incentives if Japan were to take their side. Both nations promised major trade concessions, and China also pledged to formally relinquish its claim to Formosa. These offers created a substantial war party in the cabinet, but they also ensured that the war faction was divided: Russia had less that Japan wanted, but a resurgent China was judged likely to pursue Formosa eventually no matter what promises it made now. At a time when Japan was considering whether to grant internal autonomy to its non-Japanese provinces, it was wary that this plan might lead to Chinese-sponsored separatism as had happened in Manchuria.
It would be neither Russia nor China, but Korea, that broke the impasse. Korea, too, wanted to stay out of the fight, but had allegiances pulling it both ways: as a nominal Chinese vassal, it was obligated to support China, but economic and increasingly cultural factors bound it to Russia. A growing faction in the Korean government supported full independence as a way to maintain its ties to Russia without having military obligations toward either side, and this faction put aside the memory of the Great War and looked to Japan to guarantee such independence. The idea of turning to an old enemy for aid was controversial in the Korean cabinet, but it eventually won out over the pro-China faction, and Korea sent a formal mission to Tokyo to request Japanese sponsorship.
The chance to compete with Russia for economic hegemony in Korea was one that united the militarist and mercantilist factions in the Japanese cabinet, and proved too much for the Mimura government to resist. In August 1943, Korea declared independence, renouncing its vassalage to China, and the Japanese Diet immediately approved a defensive alliance. For the time being, this had little effect other than a sharp drop-off in Chinese overtures to Tokyo, but it would eventually lead both Japan and Korea into the war…
… China’s offensive through Mongolia and central Siberia began in the summer of 1943, some months later than planned. It met a Russian counterattack coming through the same region at the same time. The Russian staff had decided that an immediate attempt to retake southeastern Siberia and Manchuria would be too logistically difficult, and instead settled on a flanking maneuver: the army would pour through the steppe to threaten the northern Chinese cities, hopefully forcing a withdrawal from Manchuria or even cutting it off from China proper.
The result was the largest battle in human history, if “battle” is a proper word for the running fight that occurred throughout the Mongolian steppe over a period of six months. Outer Mongolia – population less than one million – became the temporary home of more than five million soldiers and 14,000 riders. General Chatterjee’s description of the Battle of Darjeeling as “the first naval battle fought on land” went double for the struggle in Mongolia as riders clashed in brigade or even division strength.
Rider for rider and aircraft for aircraft, Russian equipment was superior, but again, quantity had a quality all its own, and China had enough numerical superiority to make up for the difference. After an initial period during which Chinese forces fell back before the unexpected Russian attack, they began to get the upper hand. By early 1944, it seemed that China would break through to central Siberia, which would push Russian forces out of any position from which they could threaten Chinese cities and, quite possibly, win China the war.
But in the meantime, two things were happening, one behind the scenes and one very much at center stage. Although China had started the war with more riders, aircraft and artillery pieces than Russia, its losses had been heavier and its smaller industrial plant replaced them more slowly. This took time to reach its full effect, because Russian industry was less militarized than Chinese, and because Russia’s government hesitated to grant the democratization that the trade unions demanded as the price of total commitment. But the exigencies of war, and the rebirth of Tolstoyan idealism among a population that contrasted the partisans’ and soldiers’ sacrifices with official corruption, made the government see the writing on the wall, and more and more new equipment was reaching the front.
And at the same time, the Uighurs and Mongols rebelled behind the lines. That, too, had been a long time building: these peoples had faced persecution for years due to their perceived ties to Russia [3], and during the battle in and around Mongolia, this escalated to full-scale expulsion. With their backs against the wall, they felt they had no choice but to fight. Their uprising tied down more Chinese divisions at the time they were needed most – and the large Uighur refugee community in Turkestan was finally able to convince that nation, which had vacillated since the early days of the war, to come in on Russia’s side.
Nor were the Turkestanis the only ones to join the fray. Ethiopian volunteers, many of them veterans of the Nile War, had streamed into Russia from the beginning, and by now there were several divisions’ worth. Among the Ethiopian officers was Grand Duke Alexei, a younger son of Tsar and King Mikhail, and his arrival marked the first time a member of the imperial family had set foot in Russia since the revolution. His appearance in the fez and zouave trousers of an Eritrean colonel caused a stir in the capital, although most of the admiration was reserved for the way he and the other Ethiopians acquitted themselves in the Mongolian mountain fighting.
The battles in the mountains were hard, but they succeeded in blunting the Chinese advance, and by the spring of 1944, Russia was on the offensive in Mongolia. And it was then, also, that poor intelligence multiplied China’s troubles. Russia was considering three possible ways to retake eastern Siberia and Manchuria: bite the bullet and push east through difficult country against well-dug-in Chinese troops; land troops at Vladivostok and attempt a breakout; or land in northern Korea and enter Manchuria on a broad front from there. The Russian ambassador in Seoul began negotiating passage rights in case the third option was approved. Korea was, in fact, inclined not to grant such rights lest it be drawn into the fighting, but its ties to Russia made it hesitant to refuse outright, and a miscommunication led the Chinese embassy to report that Seoul was on the point of agreeing to the Russian landing. Without waiting for confirmation, Ma Qi responded by ordering a pre-emptive invasion of Korea – which, under the terms of its pact with Japan, brought the Japanese army into the war.
The period that followed, from mid-1944 until 1946, would be known in Russia as the Long March and in China as the Long Retreat. This was, in many ways, the most destructive stage of the war, as Russian and Japanese bombs fell on China’s cities and China retaliated with rocket and bombing attacks on the Japanese home islands. The countryside of Xinjiang, Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia suffered devastation as the Chinese armies fell back, trading space for time to raise troops and build more riders and aircraft. There was heavy fighting in the northern Korean mountains, pulling Chinese troops from the north and intensifying the already-bitter conflict in northern Manchuria; by late 1945, the partisans were in effective control of several mountainous regions and had declared a Republic of the Amur.
The autumn of 1946 began the endgame, as China counterattacked with a huge army raised from the central and southern provinces, the largest ever assembled to that date. The offensive had some initial success: Russia had reached the outskirts of Shaanxi and Tianjin, its supply lines were long and its troops were heavily outnumbered. Russian air superiority was also somewhat reduced by a new type of aircraft that China used for home defense. The Chinese air corps, taking a leaf from the Great War-era French Navy’s book, had sought to oppose strength with speed, and while Russia put its resources into developing more powerful and longer-range rockets, China threw its efforts into prototype jet aircraft. In early 1946, the first operational jet fighters came off the assembly line, capable of far greater speed than Russian bomber escorts, and they provided the Chinese troops with cover as they pushed Russia back through Inner Mongolia.
As winter set in, however, the Chinese advance stalled: their own supply lines were lengthening, they didn’t have enough jet fighters to stop the increasingly intense bombing raids, and their ranks were thinned by saturation bombardment that they no longer had enough artillery or short-range rockets to answer. The countryside was hostile, and they felt the pinprick of thousands of partisan raids, and growing concern about a Japanese breakthrough to Manchuria required troops to be pulled away from the front.
Ma Qi’s response was to announce that yet another army would be recruited – but by this time, with more than ten million soldiers and even more civilians dead, the Chinese people had lost their patience with the war. Patriotism, the successful seizure of Manchuria and the Great Renewal apparatus [4] had kept the population mobilized thus far, but now that ended as more and more of the emperor’s supporters in the civil service and security forces turned against him. The end came in early March 1947 when elements of the police and the Beijing garrison joined with opposition factions to seize the capital and, after Ma Qi was killed during the fighting, formed the Government of National Salvation. The following day, the new government, whose control over the outlying provinces and the main army was yet uncertain, sued for a cease-fire.
Russia was initially minded to decline, with its generals and political leaders wary of any peace negotiations that began with China still holding part of eastern Siberia and most of Manchuria. But Japan was eager to end the war, knowing that the longer the conflict lasted, the greater the chance that resurgent militarism might sweep away its liberal gains. And the Russian public wasn’t nearly as keen to fight on as the leadership: parents didn’t want their sons to join the five million who had already died, and the trade unions and narodniks viewed continued war as an excuse to delay the national elections that the government had promised. The Russian government also had to face the fact that it was nearly bankrupt, and that its creditors, who wanted peace, were in a position to exert great leverage. In early May, after almost five years of war and destruction, the guns fell silent…
… St. Petersburg’s reluctance to stop fighting while China still had boots on Russian and Manchurian soil proved prescient. With the Qing imperial family having disappeared during the war, there was no dynasty to lend legitimacy to Russian dominance of Manchuria, and nobody relished the war that would have to be fought to restore that dominance, much less to maintain it against the will of the pro-Chinese majority. China was thus able to keep its sovereignty over Manchuria, meaning that even with the recognition of Korean independence, the peace settlement actually increased its nominal territory.
“Nominal,” however, was a key word. Although subject to China, the southern two thirds of Manchuria would be autonomous and demilitarized, and Russian civilians would have the same rights there that they did before the war, meaning in practice that Russia would still have great economic and political influence. Northern Manchuria would be controlled by the Republic of the Amur, with only the barest shred of Chinese sovereignty, becoming a de facto extension of Russian Siberia although its inhabitants’ independent streak would prove as troublesome to Russia as to China. And in the west, an autonomous State of Xinjiang and State of Mongolia came into being, the former of which would have close ties to Turkestan and the latter to Russia proper. This was far from a partition of China – these regions’ historic political, cultural and (in Mongolia’s case) religious ties to China meant that their status as Chinese vassals was more than a formality – but at the same time, Russian soft power and economic influence would extend to vast new territories in Central Asia…
*******
Amélie N’Deye Moreira, The International Century (Univ. of Dakar Press, 2005)
… While Russia and China slugged it out across a broad swath of Asia, the rest of the world looked on appalled. The conflicts in India, Latin America and the Nile Valley had given a taste of how much more destructive warfare had become since the Great War, but now that lesson was brought home. In a war that was largely between two nations, the Great War death toll had been equaled or even exceeded; estimates of the military and civilian casualties in the Sino-Russian War would reach more than 35 million. And more than that, the rise of strategic bombing, beyond anything done in the Nile War, meant that civilians were a greater percentage of the dead. The Indian war had proven that a modern army intent on deliberately increasing civilian casualties could cause untold carnage, but so many civilians dead as a mere incident of war without widespread famine was something unprecedented.
This, along with the events of the Bloody Forties in East Africa and continuing troubles elsewhere in the world, made many wonder what might happen if another global conflict broke out. This concern was only accentuated in 1950 when, on an uninhabited atoll in the Marshall Islands, Germany detonated the first fission bomb. The full impact of atomic warfare was not yet known – it would be years before the effects of radiation poisoning on those who observed the detonation were noted – but even with what was known at the time, this was a weapon that could wreak unprecedented destruction on cities and armies alike.
It was in this atmosphere that The Second Great War, by Russian general Anatoly Volkov and Chinese general Zhang Zemin, was published. Both officers were veterans of the Sino-Russian War who had formed an unlikely partnership afterward in the cause of peace. Their book, which was part novel and part documentary, imagined a global war that began in 1960 with an incident on the Russo-Polish border and escalated into a three-sided conflict in which all major powers took part. Volkov and Zhang, building on the military technology of recent wars, described a conflict in which rockets carried fission bombs across oceans and continents, strategic bombing extended from cities to the countryside (targeted at “industrialized food production”), and improvements in artillery and air power meant that the half-life of combat infantrymen in intense fighting was no more than a few days. By war’s end in 1965, more than ten percent of the world’s three billion people were dead, and many countries had been reduced to nineteenth-century living standards.
There had already been a movement, at the time of the Sino-Russian peace talks of 1947-48, to expand them into a wider collective security framework, and The Second Great War, which became a worldwide best-seller, gave this movement added impetus. During the early 1950s, the call for a global collective security conference was taken up by one after another of the great powers, by many of the rising ones, and by a growing number of non-governmental actors. In one widely-publicized ruling, the Belloist imamate of Bornu stated that it was every government’s duty to meet and seek peace, and the same sentiment was expressed in various forms by mass movements on six continents.
In 1953, the movement bore fruit with the announcement of the World Conference on International Relations. Like the conference that ended the Great War, this one would take place in Washington, partly because the United States was the largest neutral power but chiefly because of the organizing and logistical role of the United States Department of Peace. This department, created as a bully pulpit for Jane Addams after her Peace Party presidential bid in 1916 [5], had lapsed into a sinecure after Addams’ departure, and had become an adjunct to the State Department focusing on educational and cultural exchanges. Its incumbent secretary, however, was of a more activist mind, and had pledged its staff, facilities and budget to organizing and hosting the conference. In a not entirely surprising fashion, this also ensured that the United States would have considerable influence at the talks.
The conference opened on November 15, 1953 with great fanfare and publicly expressed goodwill. Finding agreement would prove harder. As had happened at the first Washington Conference, idealists of all stripes descended on the meeting to lobby for their causes: the American capital was the scene of demonstrations for world government, total disarmament, a universal language and a myriad of similar visions. These had relatively little traction inside the conference hall, although proposals for a world parliament and army were debated: traditional conceptions of sovereignty had steadily eroded during the twentieth century, but the erosion had not gone that far. The world’s nations were not ready to give up their sovereignty altogether; instead, the crucial question was how far they would be willing to pool that sovereignty in order to prevent a global conflagration.
At length, the conferees reached consensus on two matters. First, recognizing the usefulness that the Court of Arbitration had shown in resolving disputes short of war and in overseeing the peacemaking process where war had not been avoided, it was agreed that the court would henceforth have mandatory jurisdiction over all international disputes, and that such disputes could be taken up by the court even before being referred by the parties. The treaty establishing mandatory jurisdiction, which was initially signed by 62 countries, pledged all signatories to enforce the court’s rulings, and also obligated them to contribute troops to a permanent peacekeeping force. This force in itself could not guarantee enforcement of the court’s decisions – it was too small to threaten even a regional power, let alone a global one – but it gave the court a standing resource to provide aid once its rulings had been accepted and prevent terrorists or splinter factions from sabotaging them.
The second treaty was born out of recognition that a court, which necessarily ruled on a case-by-case basis, could not be the only international authority. Something more was necessary to take up emerging issues that were more political than legal in nature and that could not be resolved solely by reference to law. For that matter, many of the conferees were alarmed at the political role the court had taken in such matters as the Venetian Legatum, and wanted an assembly of governments to balance that role.
This assembly would be the Consistory, which was less a legislature than a permanent embassy of every country to every other. Delegates, who would serve for five-year terms, would have plenipotentiary power to negotiate treaties, which would be subject to ratification by their governments but would also become customary international law if supported by three fourths of the members. It was envisioned that the Consistory would become a permanent international talking shop, with staff available for research and drafting, and that it would become the forum where consensus would be developed on worldwide and regional issues.
What was remarkable about the Consistory, by the standards of the time, was its proposed membership. Because it was designed to be a forum for agreeing on multilateral treaties, every entity capable of making treaties was eligible to take part. This included not only traditional states but the free cities and autonomous provinces that had their own international presence, regional agencies such as the Nile Authority, and the Court of Arbitration itself. Participation was granted even to certain previously unrecognized collectives: the world Roma organization that had been building since the 1920s [6], and at the insistence of Salonika and the Ottoman Empire, the world Jewish diaspora. More than a hundred of the entities on the original membership list were not states – a far cry from the 11,000 that have offices in the Consistory headquarters today, but a symbol of the growing recognition that participation in world affairs was not limited to nations.
The conference did not usher in an immediate era of peace and harmony. The new institutions it created, and the new strength it gave to old ones, were not accepted everywhere, and there would continue to be war and oppression, especially since little was done to regulate civil conflicts. But if not a harbinger of universal peace, it was at least a step in that direction, and succeeding decades would show how valuable its fruits were…
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[1] See post 4806.
[2] See post 3449.
[3] See post 4969.
[4] See posts 3449 and 4969.
[5] See post 3324.
[6] See post 4496.
Without a Cold War like OTL, between two nuclear superpowers, the techno-optimism of the mid-20th may continue unabated.
