This sentence is vividly embodied in the modern history of the mainland, especially the northeast region, which was ravaged by Tsarist Russia, Japan, and a number of European and American powers.
Some people say that if the Russo-Japanese War had not broken out in the early 20th century, the entire three eastern provinces and even Beijing would have been occupied by Tsarist Russia and become a Russian-speaking "Yellow Russia" region. So, is there any truth to this statement? Let's talk about it today.
In fact, this view is more like an elaborate Japanese brainwashing tactic.
Tsarist Russia's evil deeds in the Northeast
In fact, this view is not alarmist, in fact, Tsarist Russia has coveted the territory of the three eastern provinces for a long time.
As early as the Kangxi period, Tsarist Russia fought a war with the Qing Dynasty, and after the war, Tsarist Russia relied on the information heard by two missionaries to overshadow Suo Etu, who came to negotiate.
They grasped the bottom line of the Qing Dynasty, and used the traps in international rules to deceive thousands of square kilometers of vast land.
Perhaps it was this experience that tasted the sweetness, and since then Tsarist Russia has been eyeing our homeland. By the middle of the ninth century, when the Qing Dynasty's national strength was declining, Tsarist Russia had a bad heart and constantly sent people to cross the Outer Xing'an Mountains to the mainland.
The result of this temptation was the signing of the Treaty of Aihui in 1858, when Tsarist Russia annexed more than 600,000 square kilometers of land north of Heilongjiang and blocked the northeast access to the sea.
Since then, the Qing Dynasty's territory has been frequently plundered by the Russians, and from 1860 to 1881 the two countries signed several unequal treaties, and nearly two million square kilometers of land fell into Russian hands.
The Russians of the chicken thieves also played a cautious eye in many sub-treaties, leaving a sentence "If there is a disagreement, the right of interpretation belongs to Tsarist Russia", which made us suffer a lot of hidden losses.
After occupying so much land, Tsarist Russia issued a rule: as long as the Tsarist Russians were willing to move to the northeast, they could get a large amount of land for free and be exempted from taxes.
As a result, a large number of Russians poured into the mainland to live, and later the Western powers frantically carved up China, and Tsarist Russia already had an advantage in the northeast, developing more rapidly, and seized the privileges of building railways and collecting customs duties.
Tsarist Russia not only built its own railways, but also did not allow the Qing government to interfere with their use of railways to transport equipment and troops, apparently in preparation for the future attack on the inland areas of the mainland.
In addition, the capitalists of Tsarist Russia also went to the northeast to establish the Sino-Russian Daosheng Bank, and frantically collected money in the local area.
They openly issued ruble banknotes called "Qiang stickers" on the land of the mainland, and demanded that train tickets and other transactions along the railway line must be settled with Qiang stickers.
After taking control of economic sovereignty, Tsarist Russia further carried out cultural aggression in the northeast, building schools, forming various societies, and founding many newspapers and magazines.
The Russian language was taught in these schools, and newspapers and magazines were sparing no effort to propagate the culture of Tsarist Russia and brainwash the people of the mainland, in order to cultivate a group of "new Tsarists" who identified with Tsarist Russian thought.
Whether you agree with Tsarist Russia or not, in the eyes of the other party, the people of the Qing Dynasty are just ants that can be pinched to death at will. In July 1900, two Russian warships exchanged fire with the Qing army on the banks of the Aihui River, resulting in one sinking and the other seriously wounded.
This result led the Russian garrison to mistakenly believe that the Qing army had launched an all-out counterattack against them, so the Russian governor of Amur Province took out his anger on innocent Chinese civilians.
Under the pretext of "protecting the road", they went to Hailanpao, a small village on the bank of the Heilongjiang River, to detain all the boats, and drove the local villagers to the police station like cattle, and all the houses and shops were looted by the Russian soldiers.
Innocent civilians were taken to the Heilongjiang River in batches, and the Russian soldiers forced the Chinese to cross the river, but those who resisted were hacked alive, and the civilians who went into the water could not escape drowning.
In the four massacres, the Russian army slashed and drowned thousands of Chinese civilians, and an official transcript left by a Russian officer said:
"The full testimony of eyewitnesses convince people that this is not actually a river crossing, but the killing and drowning of Chinese."
The real impact of the Russo-Japanese War
From the above introduction, it can be seen how desperate and crazy their actions were, so there was a remark that if the Russo-Japanese War had not stopped the arrogance of Tsarist Russia, I am afraid that not only the northeast region, but even the city of Beijing would have become a "colony" of Tsarist Russia.
This statement seems reasonable, but in fact it is more like a sophistry by little Japan to put gold on its face, and the source of the Russo-Japanese War can be traced back to the Sino-Japanese War.
At that time, Japan forced the mainland to sign the "Treaty of Shimonoseki" and pocketed Penghu, Taiwan, and the Liaodong Peninsula.
So Tsarist Russia pulled Germany and France together, put pressure on Japan to force it to spit out the territory of Liaodong, of course, in the end it was our Qing Dynasty that was injured, and spent 30 million taels of silver to redeem the territory that belonged to it.
It was convenient for its own Pacific Fleet to gain a foothold, and Tsarist Russia took advantage of this to forcibly "lease" the two ports of Lushun and Dalian. Japan did nothing good before leaving, massacring the Chinese in Lushun City, leaving only thirty-six alive.
In a blink of an eye, in 1900, the Eight-Nation Coalition invaded the land of China, and at the same time that the multinational troops fought all the way from Dagukou to Beijing, Tsarist Russia also took action.
On the pretext of building the Eastern Railway, they sent 180,000 troops to "protect the railway workers", and these troops marched together in six routes, burning, killing and looting the land of Northeast China.
By October 6, the six-way Russian army would join Tieling, and the entire three eastern provinces had fallen into the hands of Tsarist Russia.
After the Eight-Nation Coalition retreated, Tsarist Russia refused to leave, and Japan was not happy at this time, after all, the three eastern provinces were a springboard for their invasion of the mainland, and they could not give them away.
It just so happened that Britain was short of money in the five elements in those two years and urgently needed to suck blood from the mainland, so Britain supported Japan and supported it to fight a Russo-Japanese War.
Japan also did not get any gains, and fought with the enemy with both defeats and was unable to fight again, and it was at this time that there was a revolution in Tsarist Russia, and the two countries boycotted the war and went to the negotiating table and signed the Treaty of Portsmouth.
It is equivalent to saying that without notifying the Qing Dynasty, Japan and Tsarist Russia re-divided the northeast region, and Tsarist Russia gave the southern half to Japan, and at the same time strengthened its control over the area east of the Ussuri River and north of the Heilongjiang River.
The number of Russian immigrants in the northeast alone has skyrocketed from 34,000 to more than 200,000, and the most important settlement is Harbin, which is home to Tsarist buildings such as Sophia Cathedral.
At that time, Tsarist Russia not only did not retreat, but was also preparing to annex the "North Manchurian" region. At a special cabinet meeting in December 1910, the hawks directly singled out the horses, arguing that "this is the most favorable time for us to annex North Manchuria in accordance with the agreement we have signed with Japan." ”
However, this may trigger opposition from countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, so the cabinet did not pass it in the end. According to historical records, Japan did not drive Tsarist Russia out of the Northeast at all, and it did not have that strength at that time.
Therefore, "the Russo-Japanese War prevented Tsarist Russia from annexing Northeast China" and "the Japanese Imperial Army is kind to China and the Chinese people" and other remarks are not credible.
In fact, Tsarist Russia's attempt to invade the mainland was not defeated by Japan, but by the communist revolution and the people's struggle.
Tsarist Russia invaded and died in the revolution
At the same time as Tsarist Russia invaded the mainland, the masses of people in the northeast never stopped resisting and fighting.
Later, the heroes of the three eastern provinces formed a "loyal army" of tens of thousands of people under the slogan of "resisting the Russian invaders and recovering the country" to fight against the Russian invaders in the Tonghua and Hailong areas.
Before the start of the Russo-Japanese War, there were still a large number of "redbeards" attacking and harassing the Tsarist army, but at that time, the Tsarist army was equipped with advanced equipment, and the struggle did not achieve remarkable results.
A spark can start a prairie fire, and although the frontal struggle does not prevail, the people's struggle has played a decisive role. The brutal rule of Tsarist Russia was not only a victim of the people of the mainland, but also of ordinary workers in their own countries.
Because of the same enemy, the workers of the two countries slowly developed a "comradeship", and in 1907 the Tsarist workers at the Harbin General Factory decided to organize a general strike to commemorate the January Revolution two years earlier.
Somehow the news reached the ears of the railway authorities, and more than a dozen Russian workers who had organized a strike were arrested that night.
The workers on the mainland could not stand it anymore and joined the remaining Tsarist workers in the strike to demand the release of the arrested workers and to achieve victory.
From then on, the workers of Tsarist Russia regarded the workers of our country as their own and often came to spread Bolshevik ideas to us, and the consciousness of the workers on the mainland was constantly raised, and they gradually developed into the vanguard of the national liberation process in the future.
When the October Revolution broke out in 1910, the mainland workers in the northeast once again stood with the workers of Tsarist Russia, and many Chinese workers took the initiative to join the ranks of the Soviet Russian Red Army and fought fiercely against the White Bandit Army of Tsarist Russia and the Japanese invasion of Russia that went to support them.
In 1918, mainland workers along the China Eastern Railway went on strike again, refusing to allow the military supplies of the White Bandit Army to pass.
More than 10,000 Czech rebels stationed in Vladivostok did not reach Siberia in time, and the gains of the October Revolution were successfully preserved.
The efforts of the workers of both countries were taken seriously by the newly established Soviet Russian government, which resolutely opposed the crimes of Tsarist Russia in invading China and occupying large colonies, and renounced Tsarist colonial rights and interests in the northeast, and never mentioned the annexation of the northeast again.
It can be seen from this that what really prevented Tsarist Russia from continuing to invade the mainland territory was not the Russo-Japanese War that carved up the mainland territory at all, let alone the Japanese who had ill intentions towards the mainland.
The fact that the Northeast has been able to remain in the embrace of the motherland is a great achievement made by the heroic people of the Northeast in persisting in the struggle against aggression.
What do you think differently about this?
Resources: https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=RkYMyaebi8WL7ZgjRF7eMheDuL4d-WZ8vTKpZGb14J7KUhfu8EJ08OwS72DaKC7zwryJZia_B8qHVXscIvAGg33BCbc2L22UZbV9QFwO023F3j1B9sGm4UbRgjaRKqHB25j9hga1Yl22iJC0NDohWw==&uniplatform=NZKPT&language=CHS
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=RkYMyaebi8UxjTXOOx1RHVtFs-dAz0sv2VpU3T3vUiRk1wvGbFBLlZu4gfZagK6YiU-TOSLv3xjkEoU4CWF68LblYhM2gpDA0Pg4ySBtlJTikpBgQ8V835kxe7JXYgD0Dyu68RuoDmasa3qNbfMMXQ==&uniplatform=NZKPT&language=CHS
https://kns.cnki.net/kcms2/article/abstract?v=RkYMyaebi8USnM-JJMMJ14DU0G4a4AlbpqY5u2_M5f8ozwK6Y61a6BYc87pc9fjx6gGlVtWxFISjoDppRBnu3CIWzXWtX5rBxv-yYDkWkBexDP3i91ZWuqmiBnx6KC25wlk5lAa6Ygw=&uniplatform=NZKPT&language=CHS