Definition of "czarist"

Had China been partitioned in the years immediately following 1895,* Czarist Russia would have obtained an area north of the Yellow River which constitutes nearly 40 per cent of the entire Chinese territory. But from 1900,** the United States stood opposed to the partition of China by advocating the Open Door Policy.

1957, Chung-cheng (Kai-shek) Chiang, “Beginnings”, in Soviet Russia in China: A Summing-up at Seventy‎, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, page 12