Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)

1. Disclaimer

What I’m about to say are my ideas. They don’t necessarily represent those of the U.S. government, the U.S. Department of the Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the Naval War College. You got that clear? Complain to me if you’ve got problems.

All right, I’m going to talk about Mao. He’s an incredibly consequential figure. For the 20th century, he’s one of the most consequential political or military figures, and he’s also one of the most important figures in Chinese history of any century. He’s also a terribly significant military-political theorist.

This is not an endorsement of Mao. It is rather just an accurate description of his global and enduring importance. Think about China historically: it’s represented—I don’t know—a third of the world’s population, a third of the world’s trade. That’s a big slice of humanity. Moreover, Mao’s theories have been used by many enemies of the United States to take over failing states from within in order to assert dictatorial rule.

He is also probably the most brilliant and most famous psychopath in human history, and that is saying a lot. So here we go. This presentation is based on the first 8 volumes of Stuart Schram’s Collected Works of Mao. What Schram did is compare Mao’s complete works, as published in the 1950s, to whatever he could find as the earliest version of whatever it was.

Then he reinserted whatever had been cut in italics. So tonight, watch the italics. Mao didn’t put all of his best ideas in one place; he scattered them all over the place. What I’ve done for you all is prepare a jigsaw puzzle of all of these different ideas. In order to make it comprehensible to you, of all these random little tidbits, you have to have a coat rack to hang all the hangers, and that’s called a simple framework. I’ll get there.

In your own lives, when you’ve got all kinds of complicated things to transmit to others, you can look at what I’m doing tonight, and you can do it for other things as well. So here we go with good old Mao. And, oh, by the way, a lot of those 7,000 pages weren’t that interesting, so in a way, you owe me.

2. Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Thayer Mahan, Corbett

All right, these are major military theorists, just to run you through them. Clausewitz is the West’s major military theorist of bilateral conventional land warfare. Sun Tzu is Han civilization’s great theorist of how you maintain power in a continental empire, in a multilateral world, using coercion and deception.

The 2 fellows on the right are maritime theorists. In a way, they’re writing the missing chapters of Clausewitz, who doesn’t talk about naval warfare at all. The top one is Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Naval War College’s finest. What he’s writing about are the prerequisites for and strategic possibilities of maritime power.

The Briton underneath him there, Sir Julian Corbett, is writing about how a maritime power—that is, Britain—can defeat a continental power, that is, Germany or France. But all of them are writing about warfare between states, and Mao is a different event.

Mao has to do with triangle building. The term “trinity building” comes from Clausewitz. Clausewitz has this nice little passage where he’s talking about these abstractions—passion, creativity, and rationality—as being mainly, but not exclusively, associated respectively with the people, military, and government.

A state has full-up military and civil institutions that have some connection to its people, but an insurgent is going to be building these things from the ground up. So that’s what Mao is doing: he’s actually taking over the host from within by building a shadow government and eventually taking power.

Many in the decolonizing world after World War II were really sick of the West. They’d been colonized and didn’t want to hear anything about it. But it seemed as if the Soviets or the Chinese, the Communists, perhaps offered a better model, and many thought that the Chinese—Mao—offered the better model.

Why? Because the decolonizing parts of the world were also agricultural and underdeveloped, unlike Russia, which had quite an industrial base. They thought Mao was the more relevant guy.

All right, here’s Mao at his iconic moment. He’s proclaiming the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. China had been a broken state basically since 1911, when the last dynasty had fallen and the country had broken up into a multilateral civil war that he eventually wins.

I’m going to be talking tonight about Mao’s theories from the 1920s and ’30s, when he had the time to write, but there’s a lot more to Mao than just that. He had quite a track record.

Once he won the civil war, he imposed a social revolution. What’s that? It’s more than a political revolution. You’re not just replacing the government; you’re going to wipe out entire social classes. And I don’t mean, “Hey, here’s your one-way ticket out of here” kind of way. No, no, a social revolution is, “Here’s a mass grave. Dig it, and then you’re in it” kind of way.

If you look at these statistics of Chinese deaths in many of their wars—this is from much of the Maoist period, I think it’s 1945 to 1975—what you’ll notice is that the figures in white, I believe, are civilian deaths, not military deaths. It gets really quite ugly. There are more Chinese civilian deaths here than all deaths in World War II.

For those of you who think the Chinese are all great long-term strategists, you need to ponder these numbers. How is it possible to kill so many of your own? That’s generally not a mark of good strategy.

Moreover, most of them died during the Great Famine, which was the only nationwide famine in Chinese history. Why? Because it’s not caused by the weather. It’s caused by policies set in Beijing. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao put all the peasants on communes.

That meant the party was in control of the food supply—that is, who lives and who dies. You don’t get a meal, you’re very dead. In addition, he decentralized industry, and you can see these backyard furnaces pictured here. As a result of this, production collapses—agricultural and industrial.

But Mao keeps exporting food. Why? Because that’s his pocket change. That is a major source of government income if he wants to be able to do anything, so they keep exporting food. As a result, 40 million Chinese starved to death, primarily in rural areas and disproportionately peasant girls, the least valued members of society.

The statistic of 40 million deaths comes from this book by Yang Jisheng, who has written the definitive work. The English translation is but 1 volume; the Chinese original is 3. Yang worked as a journalist for many years, which gave him access to provincial archives, where he surreptitiously investigated the statistics of people who were starving to death, including his father, for whom he wrote this book to serve as an eternal tombstone.

So, on the one hand, Mao is the military genius who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when nobody else could, and they’d tried for the previous 40 years. On the other hand, he is the psychopath incapable of running an economy in peacetime.

Yet many Chinese revere him as a national hero. Why? Because in their minds, certainly among the Han, the preponderant group in China, one of the key things that their country should and must be is a great power. Mao, by reunifying China under the banner of communism and then fighting the coalition of all the major capitalist powers to a stalemate in the Korean War—or, in their minds, a victory—ended what they consider the era of humiliations that started in the mid-19th century and ended with the Communist Revolution.

3. The 1911 Revolution and the Civil War

So he’s a hero at home. All right, to understand Mao’s theories, I need to put them in the context of the wars that he fought. In 1911, the Qing Dynasty collapses. The country shatters into multilateral warfare among warlords, these provincial leaders. On this map, you can see the different colors and shadings; those are different warlord areas.

The Nationalist Party and the Communist Party form a united front in 1923 in order to eliminate these warlords. And so Chiang Kai-shek, who is the head of the Nationalist Party—a generalissimo, not just a general—has a nice artwork on his portrait. He is the man who’s leading the Northern Expedition to fight off all the warlords.

Except he stops midway near his power base in Shanghai, and he turns on the Communists, massacring them in droves. This is the White Terror. Why? Because he thinks that while he’s away fighting, they’re trying to take over his government. He’s correct.

So he keeps moving. There’s a nominal unification of China under Nationalist rule when this takes place. In addition, once he’s done with that, he wants to eliminate the Communists for good. And so he runs a series of 5 encirclement campaigns around their base areas, which are scattered in South China.

The primary base area—a base area is also called a Soviet—is the Jiangxi Soviet. On the 5th encirclement campaign, Chiang Kai-shek is finally successful. He sends them off on the Long March, way up north to desolate Yan’an. “Long March” is a real misnomer. It’s the Long Rout. The Communists lose 95% of their forces.

I believe in English, “decimate” means to lose 10%. Losing 95%, I think you need a whole new verb for what’s happened to you. But Chiang Kai-shek doesn’t wipe them out because he’s suffering from divided attentions.

When the West did the original—I mean, it was both the United States and Europe—the United States does its original “America First” thing with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, putting tariffs up to historic highs. And then everybody, of course, retaliates. Now everybody’s got high tariffs.

Well, here’s trade-dependent Japan, which has always cooperated with everybody, and suddenly they’re toast. Their solution is autarky, and they need an empire large enough to be autarkic. So that’s when they invade Manchuria in 1931. Chiang Kai-shek has all of a sudden lost this area from China that’s greater than Germany and France combined. It’s a mess. And so he has to balance what to do about the Japanese versus the Communists.

The Japanese don’t quit with Manchuria. They stabilize the place, make massive infrastructure developments, and transform it into the most developed part of Asia outside of the home islands. But they keep on going. It gets so bad that the Communists and the Nationalists form a Second United Front because they’re facing this lethal threat called Japan.

They organized that in December 1936 in what’s known as the Xi’an Incident. And the Japanese react viscerally because they look at it and think the Nationalists have gone over to the dark side because they’ve joined up with the Communists. This is when the Japanese escalate in 1937, go down the Chinese coast, and move up the Yangtze River.

But then they wind up stalemating. Once they get beyond the Chinese railway system, which isn’t that great in this period, the Japanese can’t stabilize the place, and the Soviets start adding more aid, and we add more aid. It’s a mess.

So the Japanese decide they’re going to cut Western aid to the Chinese. That’s where Pearl Harbor comes in. That’s what the attack on Pearl Harbor is all about: telling Americans to stay out of Asia, which, of course, we did just the opposite. And then the Nazis interpret their alliance with the Japanese broadly and declare war on the United States.

When that happens, you have a regional war that had already been going on over Poland in Europe, and this other war that had been going on since 1931 in Asia. They unify into a global world war. Mao understood that he was dealing with 3 layers of warfare—nested wars—that he was fighting a civil war against the Nationalists within a regional war against Japan.

And then, after Pearl Harbor, there’s going to be a global war that will eventually morph into a global Cold War. Most of his writings are written before Pearl Harbor, so he’s going to focus on the first 2 layers of what’s going on here. After World War II is over, Mao goes after the Nationalists full-bore, and the Japanese have already very much weakened the Nationalists. Mao wins the civil war.

Okay, these are the wars. Now, I promised you a simple framework. Here’s the simple framework. A simple framework should have 3 to 5 things because that’s about all any of us could really handle on short notice. And so I’ve got 4 here.

4. Clausewitz on Mao

I’m going to use Clausewitz’s definition of great leadership to analyze Mao. According to Clausewitz, in a general, 2 qualities are indispensable. First is an intellect that, even in the darkest hour—and Mao had many of those—retains some glimmering of inner light, which leads to truth. And second, the courage to follow that faint light wherever it may lead.

The first of these qualities is described by the French term coup d’œil. Coup is a glance, d’œil is an eye: taking in a situation with a glance of an eye. The second is determination. Mao had these things in numerous areas.

I’m going to first discuss Mao the propagandist—that’s how he starts out. And then I’ve got what I say here is Mao the social scientist. But what he was really good at was data collection and analysis. He truly understood the countryside because he collected all sorts of data about it and analyzed it.

Then I will go on to Mao, the operational military leader, winning and fighting battles. At the end, I’ll talk about Mao the grand strategist, integrating all elements of national power. So that’s my game plan. That’s the simple framework. And away we go.

All right. Mao began his public service career as a propagandist. If you look at his early biography, he was born in 1893 to a prosperous but not particularly well-educated father who tilled his own land. Mao hated his father, and he hated farming, so he left as soon as possible.

5. Mao the propagandist

After the 1911 Revolution, for a little while he worked as a soldier, but he didn’t like that. He joined and then dropped out of a series of vocational schools. He tried being a merchant, a lawyer—I’m missing something else—a soapmaker. Imagine Mao: 3 stages of personal hygiene, whatever. It was not to be.

But he eventually got an education degree, so he could go off and be a primary school principal. Okay, imagine setting your child off to the psychopath doing show-and-tell. And then he joins the Communist Party.

It’s during the First United Front, so he also joins the Nationalist Party. He has very important positions. If you look at it, he’s in the Nationalist Party, he’s at their central headquarters, and he’s the minutetaker. So he’s the fly on the wall, listening to everything.

And then he’s a stand-in for the head of the propaganda department, which is probably where he learned a great deal about the importance of propaganda. Here’s what he says early on: “The Communist Party can overthrow the enemy only by holding propaganda pamphlets in one hand and bullets in the other.”

If you look at the original organization chart of the shadow Communist government, you’ll see there are only, what, 6 departments there? One of them is a propaganda department. If you have no power, words are your initial way into gaining power.

I’m now going to use a framework from my wonderful colleagues, Mark Genest and Andrea Dew. This is theirs, about analyzing strategic communication in terms of messenger, message, and medium. I’ll go through each of the 3.

What you see here is a propaganda poster. It’s a woodblock print. That’s the medium, and it’s a very easy way to reproduce pictures back in the day. The message is about a model laborer: “Always emulate Wu Man Yo,” lucky us, and do all the nice things he does with whatever is going on there. So that’s what that is.

Now, messengers were the delivery system, the broadcasting system, for the Communist Party. So you’ve got the Communist Party, but you’ve got to reach an audience, and that’s what these messengers are doing.

They go into local areas and identify local grievances for attention by the Communist Party, which, when it fixes them—or fixes somebody—will generate loyalties and allegiance. These propaganda personnel would identify local bullies for the Communist Party to come in and deal with, organize mass rallies, double as medics during battles, propagandize prisoners of war after battles, and help with troop morale between battles.

But what they’re really doing is reporting back to Communist Central exactly what’s going on. Civil and military messengers differ. Civil messengers would be activists, maybe in the local government, labor unions, peasant organizations, women’s organizations, or any number of these things. It’s your broadcasting system to reach a population and mobilize it.

Military messengers are a little different. Every single military unit had about a 20-member propaganda team. That’s a lot of people. According to Mao, “The propaganda work of the Red Army is therefore first-priority work of the Red Army.”

This is very different from soldiering in the West. This is not how it would work. Also, Mao had his international broadcasting system. These would be foreign journalists.

While Mao was holding court up in Yan’an, he invited many of these journalists up there. Edgar Snow was by far the most famous. Why? Because he was the first one in and then he was the last one out. He had really long interviews with Mao, and when he was a young man, he never asked, “Why does this A-list political leader spend so much time with me?” That never occurred to Edgar. But it was hours, and he was a very fine writer, Edgar Snow.

What Edgar Snow writes, Red Star Over China, you can probably go to Barnes & Noble and pick up a copy there. It’s been in print ever since, and it’s the original footnote in Chinese history because no one knew anything about Mao. And so then everybody starts citing Edgar Snow, and then we cite everybody and everybody and everybody. But actually, it only goes back to Edgar Snow.

So Mao got his word out. Mao thought, “You want to keep the message simple. You want to make it epigrammatic so that people can understand it rapidly.” In his day, this meant having catchy slogans, the equivalent of newspaper headlines, to provide a lens for people to understand events, rather like tweets in our own day.

So, when the White Terror occurred, when Chiang Kai-shek is turning on the Communists in the first United Front, the slogan was, “Arm the peasants.” And then, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the new slogan was, “Down with imperialism and the Nationalist Party too,” because you want to smear your enemy in the civil war while you’re at it. But there are a whole series of these slogans.

Here, Mao is one of the most popular poets in China, certainly of the 20th century. He could write really simple couplets. If you look here, I think it’s a total of 8 characters, so that someone who’s semiliterate can make their way through this poem.

On the other hand, he wrote really complicated things because he needed to garner the support of intellectuals initially, before he’d educated enough peasants and workers to take over. Intellectuals prize poetry, and they also prize what’s called grass writing, which is that unintelligible Chinese stuff that’s under there. But if Mao set these poems to tunes that everybody knew, people could sing them on the Long March and elsewhere and learn them that way.

So, he’s an incredibly accomplished man. He also understood that you have to manage the message, and the way he did that was through political mobilization. Part of that is, you’ve got to tell people what the policy objective is, which for him was abolishing imperialism, feudalism, and the landlord class, and then presenting a strategy for how to get there.

And here are the media that he used: not only the written and spoken word, but also the dramatic arts in order to get the message out. He also used an institutional medium of education. And here is Mao, the primary school teacher, in his element. Most of the people in his armies were illiterate, but Mao knew all about how to reach them.

There are a lot of political commissars. What are they? Political and military commissars come in a pair. The military commissar is the military professional who actually knows about the fighting. The political commissar is the one with the direct line to the secret police who will cap the military commissar if there are any problems whatsoever.

So, Mao’s got an elaborate network to get the message out, offering all kinds of social services to people, not only medical care but also education for peasant children. And he also educated their parents. This is for the first time in Chinese history. He did it during the winter slack season.

Now, the Nationalists had also tried to improve education, but once the Japanese invaded full-bore, they had to drop it because the Nationalist conventional armies are the ones that are fighting off the Japanese conventional armies. The Communists are a guerrilla movement, and they’re operating behind enemy lines.

So, as the Nationalists are dragooning people into their armies, the Communists are busy offering social services, and I’ll get to land reform. And so, for the peasants, before too long, it becomes a no-brainer whom they’re going to support.

Mao also emphasized professional military education because he needs to turn peasants into cadres, into guerrillas, and into conventional soldiers. And there’s got to be an educational pipeline to do this. And if you look at this Northwest Anti-Japanese Red Army University, of the four original departments, political work is one of them. This is not professional military education the way it’s done in the West; it’s a separate thing.

Part one is over: Mao the propagandist. I’ve covered that. Now I’m going to talk about Mao the social scientist. And here, he says, “The peasant problem is the central problem of the national revolution. If the peasants do not rise up and join and support the national revolution, the national revolution cannot succeed.”

6. Mao the social scientist

And if you look further along in his biography, while the first United Front was still operative, he’s heading the Nationalist Party’s Peasant Movement Training Institute in Guangzhou and also its Central Commission on the Peasant Movement, learning a great deal about it. But once the White Terror hits, he needs to get out of Dodge fast, or they’ll kill him. And that’s where he flees to Jiangxi Province, to the Jiangxi Soviet, where he is going to become the political commissar of the 4th Army. He’s also going to be in charge of land reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work.

All right, for Mao, he’s doing data-driven survey after data-driven survey. He does a whole series of them between 1926 and 1933. And he’s trying to figure out who owns what, who works for whom, who tills where, and he inventories down to the last pitchfork and last chicken as he’s trying to establish what is really going on in the countryside. And he does.

What he concludes is that 6% of the rural population owns 80% of the land, and 80% of the population owns only 20%, and his solution is going to be revolution. And he goes further into the statistics, and he identifies 70% as poor peasants, 20% who are like his father—they till their own land, they’re middle peasants—and then there are the exploitative 10% who don’t get their hands dirty with anything.

And what Mao is trying to figure out is how you can incentivize 80% of those people into actively taking part in the revolution. This is the key. And what he wants to do is take the bottom of the social pyramid and mobilize it to crush the top of the pyramid.

The way he’s going to do this is by determining class status through a land investigation movement, which he says is a violent and ruthless thing. We’re going to talk about class, approval of class status, confiscation of land, and redistribution of land in order to invert the social pyramid. He’s got a real plan for doing it.

He argues that land reform is just essential for peasant allegiance. This is how you’re going to get it, to draw these hundreds of millions into supporting the Communists. But you’ve got to do it sequentially: you’ve got to propagandize first, and then you’re going to distribute land later. A little bit later.

He had a very bureaucratic way of redistributing land. The approval of class status, he said, is a life-and-death decision for the person in question. It starts out with a vote at the local level, and then it goes through many layers of party approval before being sent back to the local level to announce who’s going to get the land and who’s going to take a bullet.

And then Mao leverages the enthusiasm of this movement among the people who are going to get the land—the other people, not so much. He’s going to leverage this enthusiasm to get people to join the party and also to join the army.

Mao is planning to collectivize all land. That’s what the Communists are going to do. But he says, “Look, the system of landlords and tenants cannot be completely destroyed yet.”

Because he needs the peasants to join him, and the peasants desperately want land. So Mao gives it to them, and he gets a great deal of support for doing this. But he also keeps the rich peasants around, too. This is a deleted portion in the collected works: “because rich peasant production is indispensable.” Until he wins the civil war and can then turn the guns on them. And he’s also got a duplicitous program for the middle peasants.

It’s a big bait and switch. It looks like you’re going to get—see, you got the land? Well, now you do, and now you don’t, because at the end, they’re all going to lose their land. In order to reform, to get the land, Mao is talking about a Red Terror to get it. While he was still with the Nationalists, he wrote a report on the peasant movement in Hunan, where he’s talking about taking all the land from the landlord class and shooting them. That won’t cut it with the Nationalist army because their officers are landlords.

So, as part of his program, it’s not just land reform and educating people—warm and cuddly. It’s also coercion. That’s Mao the social scientist. Enough of him. Now we’re going to do Mao the military leader. You’ve probably heard this chestnut from Mao: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

7. Mao the military leader

Mao spent his early career being right but holding a minority view: He had certain views about military operations that were not shared by Communist Central. Mao kept following that dim light wherever it might lead, and events eventually vindicated him. He survived a variety of encirclement campaigns, but then he had some troubles. Here are his critics.

Li Lisan was a labor organizer. He was the de facto head of the Communist Party from 1928 to 1930. After the White Terror on the Northern Expedition, Moscow had told its communist buddies in China that the next thing to do was to take the cities. So Li Lisan tried to do that with the Nanchang uprising in 1927. It was a total disaster.

He tried it again in 1930 with the Changsha uprising, another disaster. That got him into exile in Russia, and according to Mao, “Comrade Li Lisan did not understand the protracted nature of the Chinese Civil War.” Li Lisan was trying to fight a decisive, war-winning battle far too early. You try to do that, and you can get yourself ruined.

Here’s another critic, Xiang Ying. Mao was in the Jiangxi Soviet, and he thought a smart strategy was to lure the enemy into your own terrain, which was favorable to you, let them get exhausted, then spring the trap and annihilate them. Communist Central in Shanghai thought this was nuts, that you shouldn’t be ceding territory at all. For the longest time, Mao was off in Jiangxi and Communist Central was off in Shanghai. They were a long way apart, and so Communist Central couldn’t do anything about it—Mao did his own thing.

So Communist Central sent Xiang Ying to the Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally. You can imagine how this worked for his later career—not well. He fired Mao, and this is where his strategy wound up producing the Long March, the Long Retreat, in which they lost 95% of their people by trying to defend territory. People began to get it: Mao may have known what he was doing.

Then, on the Long Retreat, Mao chose his terminal point of retreat—where they were going to wind up—as up in Yan’an, way up north, deep in Muslim and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border. Mao thought that was essential because they were the big benefactor. Whereas this gentleman, Zhang Guotao, who was the political commissar of the Fourth Front Army, thought, “Nonsense, we’re Han Chinese; we want to be in Han lands.” So he wanted to go into western Sichuan, which he did.

He suffered a series of defeats over 1935, and as a result, he was never as important ever again, and eventually defected to the Nationalists. Mao had proven himself prescient, right, and determined. He had coup d’œil and determination, and people eventually recognized that.

All right, Mao and Clausewitz define war somewhat differently. Clausewitz has this famous line: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Mao says, “No, no, war is politics by other means. It is something that is used to achieve political ends.” So far, that’s not incompatible.

But then here’s Mao’s twist: “A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another.” Clausewitz is not about class warfare at all. In fact, his wife is always trying to wine and dine the aristocrats, so they’re completely different in that department. Mao is looking at the world, and he believes the linchpin of the social order is landlords. He’s going to detonate them and try to destroy them.

He talks about the violence of all of it: You’re going to get the peasant masses to overthrow these landlords, and this will require terror in rural areas. But this is absolutely necessary, and of course this is what the Nationalists absolutely would not tolerate. Mao also understood that he was operating in a period of nested wars, and that the ones that were ongoing were the civil war with the Nationalists and then the regional war with Japan. Pearl Harbor comes a little later.

He talked about defeating Japan in 3 stages. He said, “Defeating Japan requires 3 conditions: first is progress by China”—that is, the civil war—“which is the basic and primary thing; the second is difficulties for Japan”—that is, the regional war—“and the third is international support,” the big friend. I’m going to talk about each of these 3 things in turn.

So, in order to win the civil war, Mao believed you needed base areas, these Soviets. Where were they located? Often on the boundaries of provinces, in very difficult terrain, where provincial authority, let alone national authority, simply did not extend. Mao thought that there were certain prerequisites for a good base area. One was strategic terrain: It had to be defensible so that the weaker communist forces could defend it against conventional Nationalist or conventional Japanese armies.

So that’s key: Pick your terrain carefully. Also, you need to have a strong Red Army presence there to make it work. You need numerous organized workers and peasants. You’ve got to have some local support there. And then you need a good party organization. This was Mao’s idea of what you needed for a base area.

He believed that you needed to match your military unit—the type of military unit—to the territory. He said there were 3 kinds of territory: base areas, enemy-controlled areas, and the interface in between, which was where guerrilla forces were going to be roaming. So he was all about deploying the Red Army to the comparatively safe base area; they would protect that.

You might send guerrilla detachments to some of the guerrilla areas, but really only small things would you ever send into enemy territory. Moreover, he had prerequisites for fighting. There were 6 possible prerequisites; you had to have at least 2 before you fought. The most important one was that people had to actively support you. You probably needed a base area to pull this off.

He said that the last 3 things—enemy weak points, enemy exhaustion, and enemy mistakes—could appear quite rapidly. But you had better choose your terrain very carefully; terrain is immutable. He also said that if you were weak, the way the Communists were, you had to follow a strategy of annihilation. What you did was annihilate 1 small enemy unit at a time, and the cumulative effects would eventually change the balance of power. Only someone who was really strong could tough out an attrition strategy.

He was also about triangle building in these areas. Little guerrilla detachments would go out into the interface. If it worked out well and it looked like they could start either a new base area or expand an existing one, that’s what they were going to do. So these guerrilla forces were either a disposable force, which you could send out to do risky things—and if they got wiped out, it didn’t endanger base-area defense—or they could become a nucleus of a new base area.

In small guerrilla groups, party members were toughened, cadres trained, and the party, government, and mass organizations consolidated. If they were successful, then you brought in the Red Army to do higher-level institution building, either greatly expanding an existing base area or forming a new one. That’s what was going on.

Mao had 2 military services. We always think of army, navy, and air force—that’s not what it was for him. It was guerrilla forces versus conventional forces. Guerrilla forces were operating in the rear of the enemy, so there was no stability or security. In fact, there wasn’t even a front line; it was just so amorphous.

What guerrilla forces were supposed to be doing was exterminating small enemy forces, weakening larger ones, attacking enemy lines of communication, establishing bases, and forcing the enemy to disperse. But they were doing all this in combination with conventional forces.

Because here's the thing: you think about Mao and his guerrillas. Well, actually, here's what Mao really says: “Regular forces are of primary importance because it is they who alone are capable of producing the decision”—like winning the war. “There is in guerrilla warfare no such thing as a war-winning battle.” The relationship of the two is really important.

Mao also thought that you needed to establish a fire escape if you had a base area. If it all goes south, where do you go? His terminal point of retreat for the Long March was up in Yan’an. He thought it was important to figure those things out in advance.

Mao also cultivated an unprecedented group of allies, never before assembled in Chinese history: not only peasants, but women, minorities, youth, intellectuals, and the enemy army, most creatively. For cultivating the allegiance of peasants, it wasn't just education and land reform; it was also army discipline. This is where the Three Rules of Discipline, Six Points for Attention, and a couple of additional points were enforced through 1949, when the Communists won the civil war. Why? You don't want to alienate the peasantry. These are the people who are forming your cadres, your guerrillas, everything. So maintain army discipline. Don't mess with it.

Mao also took an incredibly forward-looking view about women. Here he is with his fourth wife, the actress. The other 3 had suffered, respectively, abandonment, execution by the Nationalists, and commitment to a Soviet psychiatric ward. Not fates for the faint-hearted.

8. Mao the feminist

But Mao calculated that women are about half the population. They're miserably treated, so they're naturals for wanting a revolution. They're a force that will decide the success or failure of the revolution. He calculated correctly, and he was way ahead of his time.

He also understood that in a guerrilla war, you're sending all the guys off fighting, and you've got to be building base areas and things. This is where women came in to do those activities. As a result, he offered women the unthinkable, which is: “Men and women are absolutely equal. Women have the right to vote, be elected, and participate in the work of the government.” He's just way ahead of his time.

Mao also offered minorities the previously unofferable, which was self-determination. What the minority people didn't get was that a promise made in a really desperate civil war, with a regional war overlaid, may be unenforceable once you win those things and can turn your guns on those trying to secede. You can ask the Tibetans and Uyghurs how it all worked out.

All right, so Mao's strategy: he had a strategy of disintegrating the enemy army, and let me tell you how that one worked. In every county, you select a large number of workers and peasant comrades, people below the radar, and then you insinuate them into the enemy army to become soldiers, porters, and cooks. You can use women to do this as well.

Talk about people who are below the radar. You're creating a nucleus of the Communist Party to erode the enemy from within, and eventually, it'll have a shattering effect. He also said that part of disintegrating the enemy had to do with leniency.

Sun Tzu advocates: never put your enemy on death ground. Death ground means that you just have no hope, that you're a dead person if you don't fight. So your only hope is to fight. If you put someone on death ground, they tend to fight with incredible willpower. And Mao says: don't do that.

So what he did when you capture people was propagandize a little, recruit the willing, but release the unwilling, so that the comparison of Communist leniency and Nationalist brutality becomes absolutely stark in this otherwise pitiless war.

Okay, that's the civil war. Now we're going to go to the second problem, which was Japan—the regional war. Mao made a really thoughtful assessment of what were the key characteristics of China that would determine what kind of military strategy he would use. And this is his assessment.

He said, “Okay, China is a large, semi-colonial country. It's an undeveloped country.” Point 1. “Second, its enemy is really strong.” Point 2. “Thirdly, the Red Army is weak. And fourthly, there's an agrarian revolution going on.” From this, he concluded that revolution was definitely possible, but it was going to take a long time. So he didn't kid himself about quick wins. He was going to come up with a strategy for protracted warfare.

He thought that Japan had certain weaknesses that the Communists could leverage. For instance, the Japanese had inadequate manpower to garrison a country the size of China. This meant that guerrillas could roam far and wide behind Japanese lines.

Also, the Japanese were brutal, just gratuitously brutal, and they're outsiders. This means that the peasantry are naturally going to gravitate toward the Communists, simply regardless of what the Communists do, based on what the Japanese are doing. They're going to gravitate toward the Communists.

Also, the Japanese had grossly underestimated the Chinese. As a result of underestimating the Chinese, they made errors. When they made errors, they started quarreling among themselves and making more errors, and the Communists could leverage these things.

Mao's most famous paradigmatic theory is his 3 stages of people's war. The first stage is the strategic defensive. It's the “prevent defeat” phase. The last phase, phase 3, is the strategic offensive, the “deliver victory” phase. In the first phase, you're focusing on the peasantry. In the last phase, you're annihilating the enemy army.

If you look at the activities that go on in each phase, the activities of phases 1 and 2 never cease. Rather, you add additional activities as competence increases. So in phase 1, you're doing popular mobilization, base-area building, triangle building, and guerrilla warfare.

As you get more of these things, then you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try your hand at a little conventional warfare, and reach out with diplomacy. Then, if you go further in stage 3, you're talking about positional warfare, and you're going to have the war-winning battle.

And how do you get from phase to phase? The transition from phase 1 to phase 2 is basically when you have a critical mass of base areas, cadres, and armed forces that you can move into phase 2. But the problem of being in phase 2 is that what had looked like isolated acts of banditry in phase 1 to the incumbent government is now understood by the incumbent government: they're facing an insurgency bent on regime change, and the regime changes strategy.

So the Communists are no longer under the radar; they're in the crosshairs. It's dangerous because they're weak and the enemy is strong. So when you transition to phase 2, initially it is quite dangerous.

And here's Mao writing about these problems and saying, “Look, in these stages 1 and 2, the enemy is trying to have us concentrate our main forces for a decisive engagement”—decisive in their favor. They'll win the war because they'll annihilate us.

Of course, this is what General Westmoreland was trying to do in the Vietnam War, getting the North Vietnamese to concentrate so he could blow them off the map. And of course, they'd read their Mao and didn't do that nonsense. Mao was saying you only fight when you're sure of victory.

Also, in order to get to phase 3, you need a big friend. Why? Because phase 3 is conventional warfare, which requires infinite supplies of conventional armaments. That requires an industrial base to produce them, and a country like China lacked this industrial base.

So good old Soviet Union played this role the world over. And so this is the secret sauce of people's war: if you want to get to phase 3, you need a big buddy. That's where the Soviet Union came in.

And so this is why Mao determines that Yan’an is going to be his terminal point of retreat. He's fighting his way through to the Soviet Union. No kidding, you've got to have the conventional arms to fight this stuff.

What's interesting about Mao's description of people's war is that it actually applied not so much to the war with Japan, which he claimed it applied to, but rather to the civil war with the Nationalists. And here's the key: Mao didn't actually fight the regional war against Japan. The Nationalists did.

The Nationalists did every bit of the conventional fighting except 1, and that's the Hundred Regiments Campaign that Mao fought in North China in 1940, and he was smeared.

The Japanese responded with a “Three Alls” campaign, which was “kill all, burn all, loot all”—which is what they did. It wiped out loads of Communist base areas in North China. Mao never tried that ever again, and he certainly didn’t write about it in his collected works. Don’t talk about failures there. So it’s interesting.

What he’s talking about really applies to the civil war. Mao understands these different layers. As the Nationalists are busy fighting the Japanese and actually being destroyed by them, the Communists are pretending that they’re fighting the Japanese. They’re later going to take credit for it and say, “We won against the Japanese,” which is nonsense.

There was also the United States involved in that, because Mao was using it to strengthen the Communists during all of this rural mobilization. When Japan’s defeated and the civil war resumes full bore, he’s in a good situation. Okay, that’s it on Mao, the operational military leader at the operational level.

Now let’s put it all together as Mao the grand strategist, linking all elements of national power into a coherent strategy. These are Mao’s instruments of national power: the peasantry, propaganda, land reform, base areas, institution building, warfare, and diplomacy. The US military, when it’s thinking about elements of national power, loves this little framework: DIME. D is for diplomacy, I is for information, M for military, and E for economics, as critical elements of national power.

9. Mao the grand strategist

It’s better than only looking at the military elements; at least you’ve got 3 more things. But if you look at Mao, this is not a cookie-cutter event. This is a different society, and different elements of national power are available. You’ve got to get to the other side of the tennis-court net to see what the other team is doing.

Mao is famous for all these reasons, but also for his Sinification of Marxism, where he makes his version of Marxism much more applicable to these countries—the newly independent countries after World War II—and how they put things together. He positions himself to replace Stalin, who dies in 1953, as the leader of communism.

Mao was prescient on numerous levels. He was certainly prescient about the centrality of the peasantry. He was way ahead of his time on the importance of women. He was calculating and cunning in how he was going to use minorities and POWs. He had proven his coup d’œil and determination with his military strategy.

He also anticipated when the Japanese war in China would stalemate, and he also anticipated, more or less, when the United States was going to get into the war in Asia. He’s the great Sinifier of Marxism. Mao produced all kinds of concepts and paradigms that are useful for insurgents who are trying to take over the host from within. I’ve listed a variety of them here, and I’m going to go through them in turn. These are the things that the counterinsurgent then has to counter.

All right, rural mobilization. This is obviously a big deal in Mao. If you compare—and I’m going to be doing a lot of comparisons with the Vietnam War and the Korean War because they’re communists and all these things—you can see Mao’s rural mobilization was very successful in China. The North Vietnamese rural mobilization was also really good. South Korea, not so much.

Why? The leader of North Korea was trying to mobilize the peasantry in the south, but that wasn’t so successful. And why? Syngman Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately did land reform, and this glues the loyalty of soldiers to the leadership doing this. Maybe that’s not the only factor, but it’s an important factor in why the Korean War turns out differently.

Base areas. Mao says those are really important. The North Vietnamese used them to great effect. They had all kinds of areas in the south and then on the borders of South Vietnam. North Korea, not so much. It couldn’t form base areas in the South.

Why? It’s a peninsula that the US Navy cut off. It’s also cold. So where are you going to flee if you want to do a base area? I think it’s up a mountain in South Korea, and that will get cold in the winter, and you’ll probably freeze to death.

I believe al-Qaeda means “the base.” I believe that’s the correct translation. So if you’re thinking about ISIS, or whatever’s left of it, you can go back to Mao’s ideas about base areas: you need a particular kind of geography that’s good for the defensive. You’ve got to have a big party organization, a lot of local support, and you have to have military forces there.

Does al-Qaeda—well, it’s going to be ISIS or something—have all 4 of these things, or can you remove any 1 of them?

Another idea from Mao is luring the enemy in deep. Mao had done that very successfully in the first 3 encirclement campaigns, and then he was removed from command, so he wasn’t doing that anymore. Again, in the final phases of the Chinese Civil War, from 1945 to 1949, Mao lures the Nationalists deep into Manchuria.

The Nationalists are a South China phenomenon. I showed you the map. Chiang Kai-shek starts in the south and goes way up north, so he’s weakest in the north. Mao lures him way up there in Manchuria, and then he springs a trap and destroys Chiang Kai-shek’s armies up there. Then the entire civil war wraps up within a year of that.

Mao also lured good old General MacArthur, who fancied himself a great Asianist, in the Korean War. MacArthur goes all the way up to the Yalu River, right on the Chinese border, and Mao springs a trap. MacArthur didn’t realize that 350,000 Chinese troops had infiltrated around him. Oops, missed that. It did not work out well.

But the US Navy now needs to think: What about being lured into the South and East China Seas and then the Chinese springing the trap? There are places you don’t need to go. The Chinese may have to go there, but maybe you don’t have to.

Another one is terminal point of retreat. I’ve talked about Yan’an being a really good one, and that worked. Then, when the Manchurian campaign initially wasn’t going well for Mao, he retreated up to Siping, which is a little bit north, and that worked well enough.

But when Chiang Kai-shek tried to pick these Manchurian cities as a place to retreat in Manchuria, bad news. There’s only 1 railway system that gets you south out of Manchuria. Do you suppose the Communists don’t know about it? They encircled the Nationalists in these cities and destroyed them there.

So when you’re thinking about insurgents and things, think about, well, if you knock them out of 1 area, where might they go next?

Another concept from Mao is disintegrating enemy forces, which is what happens to the Nationalists. Think about it: Chiang Kai-shek had been fighting since the 1920s, forever and ever, and he fought the Japanese—they’re brutal. The United States had trouble fighting the Japanese, and Chiang Kai-shek fought them alone for a long time before we joined the war.

And yet, he loses a battle in 1948 in Manchuria, and that’s it. The rest of the country wraps up. So what was going on there? Or the South Vietnamese: they’d been fighting forever, and then the whole place just wraps up.

The same thing happened with Japan in World War II. They’d been fighting all over the place forever, fighting us brutally. And then in 1945, we don’t even have to invade the home islands. Think how unusual that is. The Germans fought every street on the way to Berlin; the Japanese quit. This is about disintegrating the enemy and why it happens.

But what you can say in all 3 cases is that the warfare had been going on for an incredibly long time, and it was ruinous. The places in question were ruined, so don’t expect that to happen too fast.

Of course, Mao’s big contribution was his 3 stages of people’s war. Mao presents them as sequential: you go from 1 to 2 to 3, and ta-da, you win. And they’re cumulative, right? You do certain things, and then you get to phase 2, and you’ve had this cumulative effect of destroying enemy forces. You get even more accumulating casualties on the other side, and finally, you win.

A student of mine said that’s actually not a great way to look at it, or that there’s an even better way to use it. It’s like a metric of how an insurgency goes up and down, so ISIS may be on the cusp of going into stage 3. I don’t know whether they ever really did—well, possibly, with all the equipment they got initially—or whether they then got knocked back to stage 1, where you wonder whether they still exist anymore, and come back and forth.

Anyway, that was that person's take. I thought I'd pass it along to you. All right, I have one last thing to talk about. Mao—when you read his 7,000 pages, and I don't recommend it—you're struck by all these dualities.

I think it goes back to yin and yang analysis, which is very prominent in traditional Chinese thinking. So, if you look at Mao discussing triangle building, it's in terms of the presence or absence of factors, presence and absence being opposites. So you're going from the absence of political power to the seizure of political power, from the absence of the Red Army to the creation of the Red Army.

10. Yin and Yang analysis

It goes on and on. Studying the differences and connections between dualities is the task of studying strategy, and it's really everything: to defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance. It goes on and on, and it's all about correctly orienting yourself between these opposites.

So, “Oppose protracted campaigns and the strategy of a short war. Uphold the strategy of a protracted war in a short campaign,” and I'm starting to lose it. You've got to put everything in the context of each other: losses, replacements, fighting, resting, concentration, and dispersion. I'm thinking, “I don't get this. Mao's bipolar disorder.”

So I went to this gentleman, Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith. He is the only English translator of Sun Tzu who had a distinguished military career, and he also went on to get a DPhil—it's like a PhD—from Oxford in military history. If you look at his career, he was in China during the Japanese escalation of the Sino-Japanese War. He was back in China and did another tour at the end of the Chinese Civil War.

He got top marks in the military's Chinese-language exam. Look at these details: Navy Cross, Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross. He's a distinguished man, and upon retirement, he decides he's going to go get the Oxford degree, and he writes the translation of Sun Tzu.

He is the only translator of Sun Tzu who translates “死地” as “death ground.” Other people—I can't remember the words—translate it as “contested ground” or something else. But I'm guessing that when he chose those words, “death ground,” it's because when he was thinking about it, it might well have conjured up his memories of what exactly it was like to be on Guadalcanal or New Georgia.

He has provided insights. Oh, also, the other thing to mention about him is that he's really modest. I had to dig around to find these biographical details. They're not on the cover of his book, which is where they should be.

And his service to his country continues to this day because it's his translation that continues to educate officers over 40 years after his death. But here's his take: “In every apparent disadvantage, some advantage is to be found. The yin is not wholly yin, and the yang is not wholly yang. It is only the wise general,” said Sun Tzu, “who is able to recognize this fact and turn it to good account.”

And of course, Mao could, and he did. But in peacetime, choices are not binary; they're graduated, and evolution is much more conducive to economic development than revolution.

11. Q&A begins

So here's something I'm confused by. You were talking about Mao as a shrewd commander, somebody who had studied not only the military but had also compiled these rigorous records of farm life and agriculture. And then you fast-forward to when he's in power, and you go to the Great Leap Forward, and some of the things that he was doing, you just can't imagine that somebody thought this was a good idea.

Peasants would take off the harvest, wouldn't attend to the crops, but would make iron in their backyards. They were going to shoot the sparrows and have a locust infestation. How do we square this shrewdness in the beginning with these Idiocracy-level ideas in the Great Leap Forward?

Well, first of all, you need to think about what his objective is. Number one is to stay in power, right? And number two is probably the Communist Party in power and his visions of revolution. So that's one thing.

Then you're worried about the welfare of people as if that's the primary objective. It most certainly is not. And then he may have assumed that it came along with these things, and that's a whole problem with communist ideology: people don't believe it because they know it's wrong; they believe it because it's right.

There's a whole problem with that, with labor theories of value and things. It turns out there are things called services that are also valuable. So the basic theory that he's implementing is incorrect. It just takes the communists a little while—some of them haven't figured it out—but it takes them a little while to figure out there are parts that don't work.

But there's a whole other piece to him. If you think about our own world, how much expertise does any individual have? It's amazing that the man reunited a continent, and he did all those things. Then to expect him to run a peacetime economy is crazy. But of course he wants to do it so he stays there.

Or if you think about Britain and Winston Churchill: a great wartime leader, but he's booted out of office right after the war. If you think about the different capabilities of people, don't expect one individual to do everything. So that's a whole other problem.

When Mao is running stuff from afar—this is a country with how many people? It hadn't hit a billion then, but it's hundreds of millions, and it's been shattered by warlord rule forever. So how are you going to extend central control to the countryside? Really tricky.

I suspect that's why he puts them on communes, because it lines up with communism, but it also lines up with party control. Because if you put all this vast population—most people are peasants—on communes, then you control whether they eat or don't. You truly control them.

So it's those factors. It's so big when you start putting a policy in place from Beijing, and then how that actually fans out over the whole country—it's got to be a mess. Different localities and things.

12. Why was Mao worse than Stalin?

But when I compare him to other Communist leaders—

Which ones?

So if you look at Stalin, for example, yes, he causes the Holodomor, right? Three million people die, but—

Details, yeah.

But that was an intentional famine where he was trying to root out the kulaks. The Great Leap Forward was—he wasn't trying to kill tens of millions of Chinese. And there are instances in the 1920s where Stalin threatens to resign, and people close to him, Molotov and others, say, “You can't do it because nobody else can run the government like you can.”

Yeah, right. True, but the level of—

Yeah?

Stalin was a devoted communist, and that led to many deaths. But he didn't seem deluded in the same kind of way that Mao was.

Well, first of all, Russia is quite a developed country compared to China. And if you think about it, Russia had been industrializing since the late 19th century, and China was a much later event. Russia also had all sorts of institutions and things that China was lacking.

So already, Stalin had many more tools at his disposal than what the Chinese Communists were going to have. Also, think about the kind of warfare. Think about the warfare in China. You had the Taiping Rebellion, only the biggest of the peasant rebellions of the 19th century, and I can't remember if it was 20 or 30 million people. That's a large number, right? Because I think World War II is supposed to be like 55 million.

So there are a whole series of these peasant rebellions in the 19th century that go on for, I don't know, 25 or 50 years. One's here, one's there. By the end of it, they've basically devastated parts of every province.

Then you overlay this with the warlords coming in and all of that. Overlay that with the Communist-Nationalist conflict. Overlay that with the Japanese. You're talking about a massively trashed country.

And think about it. I'll give you another example. For Americans in the room—and for others who aren't Americans, you'll have to base it on your dealings with Americans—this country had a civil war. It ran, what, 4 or 5 years? It was mostly in the South.

Northerners came, joined armies, and then went to the South. The institutions of government didn't change in Washington. They certainly did in the Confederacy. But those were new things, right? Because they were trying to secede.

And the losing side of that war still hasn't gotten over it. Right? So if that's what's going on here, and that thing wasn't nearly as brutal as the civil wars...

At the end of the Civil War, Lee's army is allowed to go home. They aren't shot on sight, which would be the kind of thing that went on in the Russian Civil War and the Chinese Civil War. So, if that kind of bitterness and unsettledness is still present in this highly institutionalized, wealthy country, you better believe China's a mess. So then, when you're wondering why Mao can't surf that wave, no one can.

Just to linger on this—uh-oh, new exit strategy—even if he's not a specialist on agriculture, and even if China is a hard country to govern, he was somebody who was shrewd in the sense that, when these battles were happening, I imagine if somebody came up to him and said, "We're winning these battles," and it was a total fabrication—they were, in fact, losing these battles—he would have been quick enough to realize, "Listen, this is just wishful thinking. I realize you're just trying to make me feel good, but this is a lie, and I'm not going to stand for it." Whereas, if you go to the Great Leap Forward, millions of Chinese are dying, and they come to him and say, "The grain harvests have never been higher." And he's like, "Great, let's export our grain." And there's this ability to have this basic discernment of what is actually going on. That situational awareness is gone.

No. Mao doesn't become canonized as Mao—or, I'm mixing metaphors, the emperor of China—until victory in the Korean War. In the early period, Mao is supposed to have written this book called On Guerrilla Warfare. It is not written by Mao. It took time for outsiders to figure that out. It's written by Peng Dehuai and others, his generals.

There were many people's ideas that went into winning the Civil War. It is not just Mao. And then he winds up purging these people later. During the Korean War, he's busy purging everybody massively because you can use it as a big excuse, right? We got this war; we don't want to hear from these people. And so he has purged more and more and more and more people, so that there are fewer and fewer counterarguments.

It's a real case against dictatorship. For all the chaos of party politics, you're at least forced to confront the counterargument. It is a healthier situation to be in.

Let's go back to the end of World War II. If you look at basically all the main actors, none of them get even most of what they want. Some of them get the exact opposite of what they want. Germany and Japan initiate the war to expand their territory. Both of them end up with the smallest territory they've had in a long time.

Britain joins the war in order to defend Poland. Poland ends up in totalitarian occupation afterward, and the British Empire disintegrates. But Stalin ends up with the borders of the Soviet Union vastly expanded. China becomes Communist. How do we make sense of this? Is Stalin just a master strategist here?

I believe there's the detail of how many tens of millions of Russians died in that thing.

So, great, it's a personal success for him.

The numbers of Russians who were destroyed in that are incredible. So, for dictators, yeah, they can have personal successes. I think, more, it's in these horrible wars that dictators can rise. Also, Great Depressions provide hothouse conditions for dictators.

13. Yalta satisfied no-one

I think the lesson is that the last thing you want to do is fight a world war, but as Britain discovered in World War II, if Hitler insists, you're stuck. It might be a lesson for our own day. Isn't this Ukraine's problem? They didn't want to fight a war. What are you going to do? Putin launched it. We don't exactly want to fight a war. Well, what are you going to do? Let Putin do whatever he wants forever, however long he wants?

The reason you all are prosperous is that there's a global maritime order in which people obey rules because it is so much cheaper to obey rules. Because what do you do when people break the rules? You hire a lawyer. It's not protection money or starting to blow up each other's buildings and destroying wealth at an incredible clip, which is what you're seeing going on in Ukraine.

So these things are consequential. None of us makes all the choices, and when other people make bad choices, you're stuck responding to them.

Before Mao, before the Communists completely won the Civil War, did people anticipate truly how terrible the Communist power would end up being in China?

I doubt it. I think Communism was a new thing, right? So you've got it going on with the Russians. I mean, the Nationalists were telling us that it would be like this, and we looked at them and said, "What could be worse than the Nationalists?" Because they were in a desperate situation with all that the Japanese were doing, and then they get blamed for it all. Yeah, there can be something worse than that, which we call Communists. But I don't know that anyone could have predicted it.

Can anyone, with a crystal ball, know what the world's going to be like in 10 years? It seems, when you read the history books, that it had to be that way, and yet in our own lives, we know it's contingent—things turn out as the aggregate of all of our choices. How would you ever calculate that?

I wonder if there's a lesson in there that America should be more open about supporting corrupt, somewhat autocratic regimes, especially when they're facing fanatical ideologues, because things really can get much, much, much worse.

I think Americans need to worry about overextension. Any country has to worry about overextension. We have finite resources. Also, you're talking about sending your fellow Americans to go get themselves killed, and that's quite something to ask someone to make that kind of sacrifice. It had better be worth it.

There are 300 million Americans, while the world has 8 billion. Be cautious. What's key to this maritime order, the big insurance policy of it all, are our allies and institutions. This is the great gift of the Greatest Generation: having created the UN, through which how many millions of lives have been saved from polio vaccines and other things?

Do not dismiss these organizations or the EU; they've done a lot. Work through these things and listen to your allies. They will have insights, and there is power in allies.

14. Corrupt allies, ideologue enemies

Tell me, who China's allies are. The crazy man in Korea who can't even feed people in the 21st century. He certainly feeds himself, though. It's incredible. Who are China's friends? I mean, Iran, a theocracy? I mean, talk about passé. Who does theocracies anymore? Okay, the Iranians. Good on them.

After World War II, the Soviets are giving the Communists in China tremendous amounts of leftover weapons from the Japanese and a bunch of other goods, supporting them tremendously. At the same time, Truman is wishy-washy and imposes an actual arms embargo on Chiang Kai-shek in 1946.

The Marshall Plan for Europe is 13 billion to help build up defenses against Communist appeal. At the same time, Truman has to be forced in 1948 by Congress to give a couple hundred million to China—literally 1/100 of what was given to Europe. And by that time, it's too late for Chiang Kai-shek.

If you look at that record, it seems like we abysmally messed up after World War II in helping the Nationalists stay in power, right?

15. US indifference to the Nationalists

Do not exaggerate the capabilities of any one country, for openers. But I think it's really important to distinguish between nation-building and nation-rebuilding. If you're rebuilding, which is what happens in Japan and Germany, they already had full-up institutions and modern economies before the war.

They had educational institutions going all the way up and judicial institutions. They had competent police forces. They had parliaments and other things. So when you give Germans some cash, and Japanese as well, they know exactly how to recreate things and rapidly produce modern institutions.

You're talking about China. They never had these institutions. There is no indigenous expertise. Oh, and by the way, what's the illiteracy rate in China compared to Japan?

Whoa. No one reads in China, and everyone reads in Japan.

It's not quite that bad. We've had this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we decide we're going to do the de-Ba'athification thing, and then we think the police are going to still show up and work. Except, no, that's not how it works. They haven't got these institutions.

And so it's not feasible. A Marshall Plan in China would not have worked. Also, we had really competent foreign service officers in China during this period. Why? They were the children of missionaries, so they spoke fluent Chinese and had a deep understanding of China.

They were saying it was hopeless, that there was no way Chiang Kai-shek was going to win this thing because he was hated by the peasantry, which he was, for the reasons I've told you. If he was busy dragooning them into his armies because he felt he had no choice, whereas the Communists were giving them land and educating them, you better believe who the peasants were supporting.

The missionaries were then caught up in the McCarthy purges and were just about ruined. They lost their jobs in the State Department and elsewhere, only to be exonerated 10, 15, or 20 years later, when they had already lost their careers. Who knows how they raised their families?

I thought it was the case that George Marshall, who was the envoy to China—the diplomat—I thought it was the case that later on they realized it was hopeless, and so they stopped supporting Chiang.

At the time, different people realized it at different times. But the reason they didn't support Chiang as much as they should have was because they thought the Communists almost seemed like hopeless underdogs. It was simply thought that Chiang was going to win, and therefore we didn't have to support him.

No. They were constantly goading the Nationalists to form some sort of ceasefire, to form some sort of coalition government, when in fact what they should have done was say, "No, you have to make sure that you keep China."

No, it was considered hopeless. This is called making a net assessment—not of what you want it to be, but an accurate one. They believed it was not feasible, even in 1945 or 1946. You're talking about hundreds of millions of people. We can't even deal with Afghanistan today, with what, 20 million people? It's not feasible.

It's the end of World War II. American GIs are sick of it, as are their parents, and sick of fighting more wars. You were there for the duration. There was none of this 9-month tour, a year tour here and there.

We didn't have to send GIs. We just had to not cut off support.

Europe had been leveled, and there was this absolute fear that the Communists were going to move into Europe, which actually counted for Western economies in those days. The Italian and French Communist parties were incredibly strong, so all the focus of limited resources was going to make sure that Europe settled out. We don't have infinite resources.

I feel like you could do better than 1/100th of the Marshall Plan to keep China from turning Communist. And look what the consequences were: Vietnam—we had to fight; Korea—we had to fight; Cambodia—the genocide there.

But you can't solve all these things. There are things that are not feasible.

I'm going to linger on this because—

You're an optimist.

But anyway, maybe you're right. You've got my take on it, and I can't prove I'm right. That would be my take.

I remember in your book, which is to your right, The Wars for Asia, there's a passage where you say there are so many individual, contingent things that led to the Communists taking power.

Yes.

If any of these factors was off—

Yes.

The outcome might have been different. Of all these factors, the fact that American support, or lack thereof, was not one of them—it just seems like it was a super-contingent thing. But also, America not being as strong as it should have been just didn't matter. I don't know; it's just not politically feasible. Talk about it.

Put yourself back in those days. You've already done a 3-year tour in World War II because, in those days, you started serving whenever it was in the war, and you weren't coming home until the war was over. There was none of this 9-month tour, a year tour here and there. You were there for the duration.

So you get home, and then you're told, "Go make nice to the Chinese and go get yourself killed there." How is that going to fly in your family? Probably poorly.

Again, you don't have to send the GIs there. You can just not do an arms embargo on them.

I think it was so minor. By then, it's too late.

The great question is, some would argue that in 1946, when Marshall tells Chiang Kai-shek to halt his advance—this is when he's doing quite well—and when I mentioned that the terminal point of retreat for the Communists was up in Siping, Manchuria, some would argue that Marshall should never have done that. He should have let the Nationalists go all the way up, and that would have changed the outcome of the Chinese Civil War.

You could make an argument that that might be true.

Here's the counterargument, and I don't know the answer. If you look at a map of China, or imagine one, Manchuria is way up. It's like a salient into Communist territory because it's bordering the Soviet Union. It also has quite a coastline, but the Soviets had blockaded that, so nothing was getting in that way.

The only way, given the Chinese railway system, was literally 1 train line connecting Manchuria to South China. So it meant Chiang Kai-shek's movements were incredibly predictable.

One argument you could make, and people have, and I don't know the answer—none of us does—is that that was the big error. The mistake, and this is a common one that Americans make, is worth talking about: Americans often don't look at warring parties to understand that if they are primary adversaries, there is no way you're going to make them make nice.

So the United States had trouble for years trying to get Pakistanis and Indians to cooperate. It would want to give aid to both of them and just didn't get it. As long as they're primary adversaries, you aid one, it infuriates the other, and the two of them are never going to cooperate.

Or I suspect that's what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. You want to have a democracy, and you want to have all the parties represented. Well, if they all want to obliterate each other, the last thing they want to do is have representation from the other side, right?

So if you have parties that want to exterminate each other, the idea of getting them to cooperate is impossible. So don't try it. That would be the lesson from this thing. We kept trying to form a coalition government with the Communists and the Nationalists. It's a nonstarter.

But the United States was a very isolationist country and didn't have the attitude of a great power until after World War II. In World War I, we felt dragged into it. After these horrible wars, we were quite irresponsible during the Great Depression, just ignoring everybody else's problems and not wanting to hear about them. And then we got a World War II out of that, and then we rethought that whole proposition.

If you had to speculate, suppose the Nationalists win. In Taiwan, because they're forced to, they have a very pro-American policy. But if they had won on mainland China, would it have been similar, where mainland China just turns into Taiwan, or would it have been different?

No, I'm sure it would have been different. One of the reasons Taiwan is Taiwan is that after they lost the civil war and were on the island of Taiwan, they did a big after-action analysis of what went wrong. They decided it was corruption and land reform that they needed to fix.

But they couldn't do land reform on the mainland because that's their officer corps. When they came to Taiwan, they could then redistribute Taiwanese land, which they did, and it was bloody, because the Taiwanese didn't want their land redistributed.

The Taiwanese were given bonds, and they thought those bonds would be like the pieces of paper that were issued on the mainland—i.e., worth nothing—but actually, over time, they became quite valuable. Land reform was bloody in Taiwan, but today Taiwan has a very equal income distribution.

16. Imagining a Nationalist mainland

And what is the explanation for this? You just had these tallies of numbers up showing how many deaths there were from different events. The famine obviously makes sense; a lot of people would die. But you just go down the list, and there are so many things where a couple million people die. It's like 1 out of 10 items that happen within a span of a couple of decades.

It's famine. If you have warfare, you have famine. It's not mostly bang, bang, you're dead. That goes on too, but it's starvation when you disrupt things in this way.

Why didn't the Communists have the same troubles that the Kuomintang had in terms of not being able to pay its soldiers? It was the same China, right? It wasn't a developed economy.

Oh, I think it’s because everyone’s on board. The peasants have got their land. The only way they’re ever going to keep it, they think, is by supporting the Communists.

Mao isn’t living any kind of luxurious life. That was another thing: you have these rich officer corps, and the Nationalists are flaunting their wealth among absolutely starving people. That’s another reason why they’re hated.

Whereas the Communists never had those people, so no one’s flaunting their wealth. You saw the pictures of Mao and his beloved there, in the incredibly baggy clothing. No one’s got luxury wear or anything.

Although after they won, Mao was famously a fan of luxury, right? In a way, I think Stalin would sleep on his couch in his office.

Yeah, I don’t know the details on Mao. Mao had other things that had to do with little girls, but anyway.

Okay, you were just mentioning China, this period of turmoil. There are constantly insurgencies and chaos, and then we go to all the turmoil that Mao causes. When he gets into power, tens of millions of people are dying, and yet there’s never a major insurgency after he takes power. There’s never a coup that works.

Oh, Communists are good at this. When the North Vietnamese won, what did they promptly get? Famine. In Vietnam, I think you have kind of 3 harvests. How do you ever have famine in that place? But yeah, they did.

This is the “brilliance” of communism: this commissar system and the party system, and how they set up their government. It’s incredibly effective at maintaining power. It’s very effective at seizing power during warfare and maintaining it thereafter, but it does not deliver prosperity. It delivers compounding poverty.

Take a look at North Korea. It’s a mess, but the man’s in power.

Why don’t the high-level officials in the CCP, after they see the impact of the Great Leap Forward—the Liu Shaoqis and the Deng Xiaopings—why don’t they—

They did.

17. Communists cling to power

Well, he wasn’t running day-to-day affairs. But in terms of making sure he’s never in a position to do something like the Cultural Revolution in the future?

They try. This is when you get Peng Dehuai, who was the general in charge of the forces during the Korean War and was also from the Long March generation. He had lost several of his siblings to starvation over the course of these civil wars.

He and Liu Shaoqi pulled the plug on Mao. Then Mao is demoted from one of his positions, and that’s when you get the Cultural Revolution, because Mao is on his way out of power from these guys.

So what does Mao do? He gets out of Beijing, and he rallies the youth, the Red Guards. These are the children who’ve been educated in communist education about how wonderful the Communists are and how beloved Chairman Mao is.

Chairman Mao tells the teenagers that they should be in charge. Think about teenagers: not much life experience, but telling them they’re in charge. Then they start out by killing off their teachers, right? They have teachers they probably don’t like, and it’s incredibly empowering.

Then they start working their way up the educational system and fan outward. It’s like a semi-civil war. This is when Lin Biao comes in, who is a military leader, and Mao is going to use him to restore order.

But after Mao has ousted all the people who are going to get rid of him, that’s what the Cultural Revolution is about. It is ruinous for production, right? You’re gutting your educational system. All the people who gave the hard grades, who may have actually known something, they’re gone.

From Mao’s perspective, didn’t the Cultural Revolution work extremely well? Because—

For him, yeah. Not for China. He launches it because he sees Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin and what he had done, and he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him after he dies.

Today, the portrait of Mao hangs in the square, and he’s revered in a way that Hitler or Stalin aren’t revered in their countries, despite killing more people.

Well, though, I think Stalin’s having a bit of a comeback with Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is starting to mimic more of the centralized system. He’s going to recentralize his economy in ways that start looking like the old one.

When people say things like, “Xi Jinping is acting like Mao,” how do you react, knowing how Mao actually behaved?

Xi Jinping apparently reveres Mao. My understanding of Xi Jinping’s education is that his dad was a very high-level Communist leader who was purged but not killed, and sent to sort of the interior north somewhere in China.

When Xi was in the “Down to the Countryside” movement, where a lot of kids were sent to really horrible places, he was sent, I think, where his dad was, or where protectors who liked his dad were. So it wasn’t as bad as it could be.

But he was not well-educated because he couldn’t be in that period, right? It was during the Cultural Revolution. He may have degrees from places, but the institution in question during the Cultural Revolution wasn’t delivering an education.

So he’s a believer in communism. Don’t ever kid yourself that the Communist Party of China doesn’t believe in communism now. They think they’ve modified some of the economic stuff under Deng Xiaoping, but now they’re recentralizing it right back the way it was.

18. Xi and Mao

Given the fact that he personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution, I think there’s a story that, at some point, because his dad was denounced, he was denounced, and he tried to come back to their home to get fed by his mother, and his mother had to turn him away. This happens to him during the Cultural Revolution.

How do you explain these CCP officials who personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution being pro-Mao?

Stalin was abused as a child, and then he’s incredibly abusive. Hitler was abused as a child. Why would you expect—

I use the word sociopath or psychopath; both apply to him. Don’t think he’s going to have any tender mercies for anyone. His own son is—

Oh, he abandoned various sets of kids who starved to death and died. One son, he put right up in Korea, where he could get killed, and he promptly did.

And Stalin—that was another great one. The Nazis captured Stalin’s son and wanted to trade him for something. Stalin said, “Nah, nah, nah.”

How do people in China today think about Mao? Why aren’t they more pissed off? You look at these numbers.

I’m guessing—I’m not Chinese—but I think all of us need to be proud of things. Of course, one thing to be very proud of if you’re Chinese is Chinese civilization. These enormous achievements in philosophy, in the sciences, and in all kinds of arts—it’s incredible.

But many Chinese also want to feel proud of their leaders, and so Mao is incredibly consequential. I think it’s also really hard to look at the dark side of your own country.

This country has slavery; it is our original sin. We have not gotten over it. The part of the United States where slavery was most deeply embedded to this day has the deepest problems dealing with that.

If Americans who are rich and have everything have trouble with these things, why would we think—this country has so much that is just obvious to be proud of: the wealth, innovation, and recent innovations. Then we claim we won all these wars all by our lonesome, and of course we had allies. Come on.

But I think that’s part of it: understanding that Chinese history has been so sad. If you ever go to a Chinese movie, you hear the erhu, whatever the instrument is. It’s just so sad and melancholy.

Whereas American movies are all happy. Millions of people die, but the good guys live, right? It’s always a happy ending. In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, he says, “Oh, honey, they were all bad.”

I want to try out an idea on you.

You’ve tried many. What’s the latest?

One could claim that Mao, being so terrible and being this strong counterexample, is what the reformers needed in order to create China’s post-Mao growth.

In the sense that if you were to really abandon communism and pursue pro-growth policies, you needed, viscerally, the Cultural Revolution as a counterexample, the Great Leap Forward, to say, “No, we’ve got to try something else.”

Possible. Definitely possible, because of all the people who were ruined by it. But I think there’s another one: you should give the Taiwanese great credit.

Taiwan did an after-action report. They’re 1 of the 4 Asian Tigers that went from a very poor country to an absolutely wealthy country. I think it’s around 1990-ish when Taiwan is—I think this statistic is right, I’ll try this—1/50th the population of the mainland, 1/250th of the landmass of the mainland, and has about 40% of the GNP.

And if you’re the PRC mainland looking at this, how embarrassing. The losers of the war have won the peace and put you to shame for how incompetently brutal you are. That’s Taiwan’s problem to this day: they are a rebuke to everything the Communist Party is.

There used to be this racist notion that Han Chinese and democracy were incompatible: “You can’t do that.” Well, Taiwan has proven that wrong.

And look at Taiwan. They have, what is it, their chip foundry? Incredible. No one can duplicate it, right? Impressive. Tell me something that China has that no one can duplicate, except for crazy stuff.

What I find disturbing about communism in comparison to—I mean, maybe even especially Chinese communism—is that when Hitler is killing the Jews, he doesn’t first make them say, “Listen, you know, we were responsible for World War I,” which he falsely claimed, “and we renounce our Semitic ways,” or something.

With the Cultural Revolution and Chinese communism, there’s a very important aspect where the victim must participate in their own victimization. They must be the one to say, “I’m guilty,” in a way that didn’t seem necessary in other kinds of regimes.

Oh, well, Hitler’s just trying to annihilate people, so he didn’t care what they were going to tell him. He was just going to kill them all. He was into destroying every last Jew there was, right? Plus Gypsies and some other people. So that’s a separate thing.

China has a long tradition of education. I mean, what’s Confucianism about? It’s the scholars at the top, right? In Japan, it’s the general—the shoguns—at the top. In China, the soldiers are at the bottom of the social pyramid, and it’s all about educating people.

And then the entire imperial system—how did you get mobility? There was a way to gain mobility: take the imperial exams, and if you pass them and do well, you’re off and running. There’s also a tradition of re-educating people.

19. Making victims victimize themselves

You could shoot everybody, you could, but that’s not the Chinese tradition. A lot of the people dying are dying from starvation. So, people like Deng Xiaoping—if they’d been in Russia, Stalin would just have killed them. Stalin killed all the old Bolsheviks, right? There was no chance to come back, whereas the Chinese will put people in prison and try to re-educate them, and then let them out afterward. It’s a tradition of educating people—a different culture, different approaches to these things.

If you look at—you were mentioning Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of the Communists, where he just massacred thousands of them.

Oh, yes. He’s a soldier.

Whereas other people, even other nationalists, wanted to accommodate the Communists more, especially early on. He has 1 quote: “The Japanese are a disease of the flesh, but the Communists are a disease of the soul.” So, what was the nature of his anti-communism? Because in retrospect, obviously, we don’t endorse the means, but he was right about that understanding of what would happen with the Communists in power.

He was interested in communism, and he sent his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, to Russia to study. Actually, his son was a hostage up there. He married a Russian. That’s 1 of the reasons you don’t have a Chiang dynasty, because these children are not 100% Han, right? Their mother’s Russian.

However, as he learned more about it—because initially he was interested in that—he was interested in playing with fascism as well, and in how you organize society. He studied in Japan and knew a great deal about how the Japanese had done things. I think he had military education there as well.

But then he starts realizing how dangerous they are. He was accurate. He did not want to fight the Japanese at all. He was forced to by Chinese students, among others, and by a lot of the urban elite that he depended on, who were horrified with what Japan was doing.

But Chiang Kai-shek knew you only take on 1 enemy at a time. You’ll become overwhelmed if you do, and he believed that he really needed to accommodate or put the Japanese aside, fight the Communists, get rid of them, and then hope the United States would get involved or something, so that he could deal with the Japanese separately.

But he faced so much popular pressure that’s when the Xi’an Incident takes place, at the end of ’36, where he agrees to form the Second United Front. He realizes he’ll be overthrown by popular hatred of the Japanese, because people think they have to fight the Japanese. So he didn’t have his choices on military strategies at the end there.

When you read Western journalists who are covering the Communists in China sympathetically—people like Edgar Snow—and this is not just true of China: Walter Duranty covering up the Holodomor in Russia—what’s going on psychologically? How do you understand their naivety here?

I don’t know about the other guy, but I do know about Edgar Snow. Edgar Snow is in the Depression. He’s from the Midwest. He’s a bored young man who wants an adventure, so he goes off to China. This is typical.

He’s in these cities where he’s seeing nationalist corruption, and it’s evident there. Mao is looking for a foreign journalist. There had been a guy, Jack Reed, who’d written about the Russian Revolution. Back during the Russian Revolution, he’d really popularized it, and I suspect—but I don’t know—that Mao probably needed his own Jack Reed. Edgar Snow seemed the perfect guy because he’s a very good writer. You want someone who could write well, and he’s young and naive.

20. Journalists' naivete

Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of China, was married to 1 of the Soong sisters. Another 1 of the Soong sisters was married to Chiang Kai-shek, and a 3rd one was married to a banker. But anyway, it’s the Communist one who put Mao onto Edgar Snow, I think.

So someone goes to Edgar and says, “Hey, you want to come up to Yan’an to interview the big man?” And Edgar goes, “Sure.” They infiltrate him through Japanese lines and all the rest of it. And there’s Mao, the big man, spending hours with the 30-year-old—or I don’t even know if he was 20 years old. I can’t remember how old he was.

Edgar Snow doesn’t get it. Why is Mao spending all this time with me? And he’s taken by it. Mao’s, of course, showing him all the good stuff, right? So Edgar Snow is seeing all the happy peasants who’ve got the land, and they’re cooperating in the guerrilla movement and this and that.

He is the last person to get out of Yan’an. And then the Japanese, in the war, just shut it down, so nobody’s got any more information about Mao ever. So Edgar Snow writes his book, Red Star Over China.

Oh, yeah, he does the Mao interviews, and then he has Mao correct them.

And his translator corrected them back and forth, which isn’t the normal thing. Over the different editions of Red Star Over China, more and more of it gets eliminated. The original version has all kinds of pictures of people Mao subsequently purges, so those pictures go away. All references to those people go away, and they’re no longer in the index.

Edgar Snow goes along with this. For the rest of his life, he publishes books that are variations on a theme of this book because it’s the only thing that makes him important. Before he dies—

Is he discredited?

No. Mao wanted him—it was right when Nixon was reopening China—and Mao desperately wanted Edgar Snow to cover that. Edgar Snow got pancreatic cancer, and he was living in Switzerland. He’d run into trouble during the McCarthy era, as you can well imagine, for good reasons, actually.

So Mao sent his personal physician to attend to Edgar Snow. But pancreatic cancer still kills, and it killed him. So, no. This was even though people Edgar Snow knew had been purged during these various campaigns and during the Great Famine. He denied all of it till the very end because this is what made him important, and so that’s what he was to the end of his life: “Me, me, me, me, me.”

When you had the slogans up about what Mao is telling the peasants, or the different slogans he would come up with, it’s not tremendously sophisticated stuff.

It’s like one line that’s catchy or something. Like a tweet.

Yeah. Still works.

Why was this enough? You can just write one line and that—

It’s not enough. I think if you’re talking about someone who has no power, the one thing they’ve got are words. And so this is how it turns out: “strategic communication,” or whatever the jargon is for it, is terribly important.

And we’re finding it now, right? We’re wondering what is actually fake news, what’s disinformation, what’s accurate, what’s not, what’s deliberately inaccurate, who’s posting it, and where. It’s powerful. You can see in the current election how important information is.

Mao and the Communists play it well, and the Russians absolutely understand how to do this. They’re really good at understanding both sides fighting, and then you feed information both ways so that they’re just at each other’s throats and becoming more and more dysfunctional.

21. Visiting China then and now

Oh, yeah. When was the last time you were allowed to go into the archives in China?

Oh, it wasn’t a question of being allowed. I got a fellowship—it was supposed to happen right after Tiananmen, and that got closed down. Tiananmen was in June of 1989. So the fellowship was delayed for half a year, and then we went for all of 1990.

And so I used different archives, but then I did other things. I had 2 children, and I stayed at home with them. I was the spouse that didn’t travel so that there would be stability in little people’s lives.

And now I would no more visit China—you’ve got to be kidding. The archives have shut down now. And then the Russian archives—it was, again, it was early Gorbachev when the archives were opening. They’re slammed shut now.

It’s funny to hear you say, “I wouldn’t visit China now.” So in 2 weeks, I’m going to go to China. My next question—

Have fun.

—my next question was going to be: What is your advice?

Keep your mouth shut. Be a good guest. And don’t bring any computer equipment that you ever intend to use ever again and link with anything.

Yeah. When you’re in these archives and you’re studying all these atrocities that happened, if you look at the numbers themselves, it might be fair to call it genuinely the worst thing that ever happened in human history in terms of the pure number of deaths. That’s a hard record to match if you look at everything else that’s happened in human history.

Viscerally, what’s the reaction just going through record after record of this kind of—

Oh, it’s just tragedy. It’s the human condition. And don’t think that China is unique in this. The West has butchered itself; Westerners have butchered each other. In fact, it’s the West that industrializes warfare.

Before, you had to go at it with spears, and that slowed people down. So it’s human, sadly. Humans have a great capacity for creativity and doing wonderful things, and then they have a great capacity to do awful things. So let’s do one and not the other.

That seems like a pretty good place to close. Sarah, this was—I mean, I don’t want to say “fun” because we’re talking about Mao here, but it—

Great topic.

It was interesting. You want to save your reputation.

Great. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Thank you for coming.