Russification Of China!

What if Soviet Russia forced the Chinese to start speaking Russian, in the name of communism? Would they have been able to do this, the way the Russian Empire imposed Russian on Siberia?
 
The total indigenous population of Siberia is about two orders of magnitude less than that of China. So no.
 
The Soviets had no capacity or intention to give such an order, nor the Chinese any reason to follow such an order. Indeed, any Chinese government who ordered hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens to give up their various languages for a European one would quickly find that it had destroyed its nationalist credentials and would likely have brought an immediate coup from within its senior ranks.
 
The Soviets had no capacity or intention to give such an order, nor the Chinese any reason to follow such an order. Indeed, any Chinese government who ordered hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens to give up their various languages for a European one would quickly find that it had destroyed its nationalist credentials and would likely have brought an immediate coup from within its senior ranks.
Wonder why England was able to impose its language on its Celtic neighbors, then
 
What if Soviet Russia forced the Chinese to start speaking Russian, in the name of communism?
They wouldn't, it's a wildly unreasonable demand that would have a minimal benefit even if an ASB made it possible for it to be fulfilled in a remotely practical manner.
Would they have been able to do this, the way the Russian Empire imposed Russian on Siberia?
Russia imposed the Russian language on Siberia by virtue of annexing it and turning it into a Russian settler colony. This is not a viable option for China, a far more populous, sophisticated, and united society.
Wonder why England was able to impose its language on its Celtic neighbors, then
Because England spent centuries exercising economic and political dominance over all of them due to its superior size and wealth, to the point that it ended up directly annexing all of them, and the spread of English into those countries, although in part the result of state policy, was also the natural result of people gravitating to the prestige language of business and government over the course of generations. In contrast, the USSR never dominated (or was ever able to dominate) China the way England dominated anyone else in the British Isles, and so even a sensible policy of promoting Russian as the language of business and administration would fail to unseat Mandarin from its role as the prestige language of the country, let alone some insane edict demanding everyone immediately abandon their old languages in favor of the exclusive use of Russian that would probably start the Sino-Soviet split early if Moscow was deranged enough to stick to it. I think it is perhaps possible that you could get Russian into a similar position to that which English enjoys in China today, as a widely taught language that is useful for people who intend to travel or do business abroad, but that's about it.
 
They wouldn't, it's a wildly unreasonable demand that would have a minimal benefit even if an ASB made it possible for it to be fulfilled in a remotely practical manner.
Russia imposed the Russian language on Siberia by virtue of annexing it and turning it into a Russian settler colony. This is not a viable option for China, a far more populous, sophisticated, and united society.
Because England spent centuries exercising economic and political dominance over all of them due to its superior size and wealth, to the point that it ended up directly annexing all of them, and the spread of English into those countries, although in part the result of state policy, was also the natural result of people gravitating to the prestige language of business and government over the course of generations. In contrast, the USSR never dominated (or was ever able to dominate) China the way England dominated anyone else in the British Isles, and so even a sensible policy of promoting Russian as the language of business and administration would fail to unseat Mandarin from its role as the prestige language of the country, let alone some insane edict demanding everyone immediately abandon their old languages in favor of the exclusive use of Russian that would probably start the Sino-Soviet split early if Moscow was deranged enough to stick to it. I think it is perhaps possible that you could get Russian into a similar position to that which English enjoys in China today, as a widely taught language that is useful for people who intend to travel or do business abroad, but that's about it.
Very informative, thank you
 
The most you might get post 1900 is if the Soviets decided to annex, East Turkmenistan, Mongolia and Manchuria and turn them into ssr's but I don't know how successful that might be but it would work a lot better then trying to enforce Russian on all of China.
 
The Siberian analogy is absurd. We are talking about hundreds of millions of people here, not scattered tribes that can be displaced by Russian settlers. And of course Stalin was explicit that linguistic differences would last for a very long time. In fact, he doesn't even advocate Russian as the ultimate language of a Socialist world: what will happen will be "hundreds of national languages, out of which, as a result of a prolonged economic, political and cultural co operation of nations, there will first appear most enriched unified zonal languages, and subsequently the zonal languages will merge into a single international language, which, of course, will be neither German, nor Russian, nor English, but a new language that has absorbed the best elements of the national and zonal languages." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1950/jun/20.htm

This is for the distant future, anyway. Until then, each Socialist nation's culture is to be "Socialist in content and national in form"--"form" including the language used.
 
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Loophole possibility: Sino-Soviet split somehow escalate into full scale war as the Soviets drop a few thousand nukes on the PRC and "conquers" the radioactive ruins. Changing the language of a few thousand cancer stricken survivors is much easier...

If that POD is a tad too late have a Twilight of the Red Tsar style USSR going nuke happy on the PRC...

Though I suspect this isn't in the spirit of the OP or what he wants.
 
Loophole possibility: Sino-Soviet split somehow escalate into full scale war as the Soviets drop a few thousand nukes on the PRC and "conquers" the radioactive ruins. Changing the language of a few thousand cancer stricken survivors is much easier...

If that POD is a tad too late have a Twilight of the Red Tsar style USSR going nuke happy on the PRC...

Though I suspect this isn't in the spirit of the OP or what he wants.

No, I was thinking more peaceful language change.
 
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