What I'm about to say are my ideas, they don't  necessarily represent those of the US government,  

the US Navy Department, the US Department of  Defense, or the Naval War College, you got  

that clear? Complain to me if you 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. And he's also a terribly  

significant military-political theorist. And 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 eight volumes of Stuart Schram's  Collected Works of Mao. What Schram did is  

he compared 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. And so what I've done for you all is  

prepared 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 like a coat rack to hang all the hangers,  

and that's called a simple framework, and I'll  get there, but 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 8,000, 7,000 pages weren't  

that interesting, so in a way, you owe me. 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,  multilateral world using coercion and deception. 

The two fellows on the right are  maritime theorists. In a way,  

they're writing the missing chapters of Clausewitz  that doesn't talk about naval warfare at all. 

The top one is Alfred Thayer Mahan, the  Naval War College's finest. And what he's  

writing about are the prerequisites for and  strategic possibilities for maritime power. 

And the Briton underneath him there, Sir Julian  Corbett, is writing about how a maritime power,  

i.e. Britain, can defeat a continental  power, i.e. 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  "triangle building" comes from Clausewitz.  

Clausewitz has this nice little passage here 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  their people, but an insurgent is going to  

be building these things from the ground up.  So that's what Mao is doing, is he's actually  

taking over the host from within by building a  shadow government and eventually taking power. 

Many of the decolonizing world after World  War II were really sick of the West. They'd  

been colonized, didn't want to hear anything  about them. But it seemed as if the Soviets  

or the Chinese perhaps offered a better  model, the Communists, 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 a military—excuse me,  

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 out 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 then, "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. So, 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 '45 to '75—what you'll notice, the  figures in white, I believe, are civilian deaths,  

not military deaths. And it gets really quite  ugly. There are more Chinese civilian deaths  

here than all deaths in World War II. And then 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: i.e, 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 one volume; the Chinese original is three.  

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 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 of  the Han, the preponderant group in China,  

one of the key things that their country  should and must be is a great power. And 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 mind a victory,  

that constitutes ending what they consider the  era of humiliations that started in the mid-19th  

century and ended with the Communist Revolution. So he's a hero at home. All right,  

to understand Mao's theories, I need to put  it in the context of the wars that he fought. 

So in 1911, Qing Dynasty collapses. The  country shatters into a multilateral warfare  

among warlords, these provincial leaders. On  this map, you can see the different colors and  

shadings; those are different warlord areas. But 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, massacres  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 while he's away.  He's correct. So he keeps on moving there. 

There's a nominal unification of China  under Nationalist rule when this takes  

place. In addition, once he's done with that,  then he wants to eliminate the Communists for  

good. And so he runs a series of five  encirclement campaigns around their base  

areas that are scattered in South China. The primary base area- a base area is also  

called a Soviet, is the Jiangxi Soviet. And on  the fifth encirclement campaign, Chiang Kai Shek  

is finally successful. He sends them off on the  long march up to, way up north in desolate Yenan. 

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- well it was both  

the United States and Europe, the United States  does its original America first thing with a  

Hawley-Smoot tariff, putting tariffs up to  historic highs. And then everybody, of course,  

retaliates. And now everybody's got high tariffs. Well, here's trade dependent Japan, that's always  

cooperated with everybody and suddenly they're  toast. And so their solution is autarky and they  

need an empire large enough to be autarchic. And  so then that's when they invade Manchuria in 1931. 

So 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, he's trying to balance what  

to do about Japanese versus Communists. The Japanese don't quit with Manchuria.  

They stabilize the place, they make  massive infrastructure developments,  

they transform it into the most developed  part of Asia outside of the home islands,  

but they keep on going. And it gets so bad  that the Communists and the Nationalists  

form a second united front because they're  facing this lethal threat called Japan. 

And 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  the Nationalists have gone over to the dark side  

because they've joined up with the Communists.  And this is when the Japanese escalate in 1937,  

go down the Chinese coast up the Yangtze River. Uh, and well, 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. And that's  where Pearl Harbor comes in. That's what the  

attack of Pearl Harbor is all about, is telling  Americans to stay out of Asia, which of course,  

you know, we did just the opposite. And then the Nazis interpret their alliance  

with the Japanese broadly to declare war on the  United States. So 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 `31 in Asia, they unify into  a global World War. Mao understood that he  

was dealing with three 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 two layers of what's going on here. 

So after the World War II is over, Mao goes after  the Nationalists full bore, and the Japanese have  

already very much weakened the Nationalists and  Mao wins the civil war. Okay, these are the wars. 

Now, I promised you a simple framework. Here's  the simple framework. Simple framework should  

have three to five things because that's all  about any of us could really handle on short  

notice. And so I got four here. And I'm going to use Clausewitz's  

definition of great leadership to analyze  Mao. According to Clausewitz, in a general,  

two 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'oeil. Coup is a glance, d'oeil is an eye,  

taking in a situation with a glance of  an eye. And the second is determination. 

Well, 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 is data analysis,  data collection and analysis. He truly understood  

the countryside because he collected all  sorts of data about it and analyzed it.  

And then I will go on to Mao, the operational  military leader, winning and fighting battles. 

And then 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. And if you  

look at his early biography, he's 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. After  the 1911 revolution for a little while  

he worked as a soldier, didn't like that. He joined and then dropped out of a series  

of vocational schools. He tried being  a, what was it? A merchant, a lawyer,  

I'm missing something else, a soap maker. Imagine  Mao, three stages of personal hygiene, whatever. 

It was not to be. But he eventually gets an Ed  degree, so he can 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.  And it's during the First United Front  

so he also joins the Nationalist Party. And he  has very important positions. If you look at,  

he's in the National Party, he's at their central  headquarters, and he's the minute taker. 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. And 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”. 

And if you look at the original organization  chart of the shadow Communist government,  

you'll see there are only what, six departments  there? One of them is a propaganda department. If  

you have no power, words are, is, 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.  

And I'll go through each three, all three. 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,  

this “always emulate Wu Man Yo”, lucky us. And  to 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. 

And so they go into local areas and they identify  local grievances for attention by the Communist  

Party, which when it fixes them or fixes somebody,  that will generate loyalties and allegiance. So  

these propaganda personnel would be identifying  local bullies to come in and deal with them,  

organize mass rallies. During battles they're  going to double as medics, after battles,  

they're going to propagandize POWs, between  battles, they are helping on troop morale.  

But what they're really doing is reporting back  to Communist Central exactly what's going on. 

And civil and military messengers differ. For  civil messengers, they would be activists,  

maybe in the local government, labor unions,  peasant organizations, women organizations,  

any number of these things. And it's  there, 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 Yenan, 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 that 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 spending so much time with  me?" That never occurred to Edgar. But it's hours. 

And he was a very fine writer, Edgar Snow.  What Edgar Snow writes, Red Star Over China,  

you can probably go to Barnes and 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 matching 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 is, "Down with imperialism  

and the Nationalist Party too," because you want  to smear your enemy in the civil war while you're  

at it there. But there are a whole series of these  slogans. And 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 eight  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 you have to manage the message,  and the way he did that is 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. 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 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 guerilla 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 to  cadres, to guerillas, to conventional soldiers. 

And there's got to be an educational pipeline  to do this. And if you look at this Northwest  

Counter-Japan Red Army University,  of the first 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. Okay, part one over: Mao the propagandist,  

I've covered that. Now I'm going to  go 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." And if you look at his, further  along in his biography, while the first United  

Front was still operative, he's heading the  Nationalist Party's Peasant Institute in  

Guangzhou and also their 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, does a whole  series of them between 1926 and 1933. And he's  

trying to figure who owns what, who works  for whom, who tills where, and inventories  

down to the last pitchfork and last chicken, as  he's trying to establish what is really going on  

on 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 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, it’s 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  for 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. And  

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. And 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. 

Okay, 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." Mao spent his- it’s still part  

of his early career- being right but being  a minority view. That he had certain views  

about military operations that were not shared  by Communist Central. And Mao kept following  

that dim light wherever it may lead, and events  eventually vindicated him. He survived a variety  

of encirclement campaigns, but then he had  some troubles. And here are his critics. 

Li Lisan was a labor organizer, he was the  de facto head of the Communist Party from  

1928 to 1930. And 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. 

And so Li Lisan tries to, with  the Nanchang uprising in 1927.  

Total disaster. And he tries 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 is 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 is in the  Jiangxi Soviet, and he thinks a smart strategy is  

to lure the enemy into your own terrain, which  is favorable to you, let them get exhausted,  

then you spring the trap and you annihilate them. Communist Central in Shanghai thought this was  

nuts, that you shouldn't be ceding territory  at all. So Mao, for the longest time, he’s off  

in Jiangxi, they were off in Shanghai, they were  a long way apart, and so Communist Central can’t  

do anything about it- Mao does his own thing. So the communist Central sent Xiang Ying to  

Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally, and you can  imagine how this works for his later career- not  

well. He fires Mao and this is where his strategy  winds up producing the Long March, the Long  

Retreat, in which they lose 95% of their people by  trying to defend territory, so people began to get  

it, that Mao may have known what he was doing. Then, on the Long Retreat, Mao chose as his  

terminal point of retreat, like  where you’re going to wind up,  

as up in Yenon, way up north, deep in Muslim  and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border. 

Mao thought that was essential because they're  the big benefactor. Whereas this gentleman,  

Zhang Guotao, who was the military commissar  of the Fourth 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. 

And 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. So,  Mao had proven himself prescient and right and  

determined. He had kudoi 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 completely different in that department. Mao is looking at the world, and he believes the  

linchpin of the social order are landlords. He's  going to detonate them and try to destroy them. 

He talks about the violence of all of it,  that you're going to get the peasant masses  

to overthrow these landlords, and that  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 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. And he talked  

about defeating Japan in three stages. He said “defeating Japan requires three  

conditions: first is progress by China”, i.e, the  civil war, “which is the basic and primary thing;  

the second is difficulties for Japan”, i.e, the  regional war, “and the third is international  

support”, the big friend. I'm going to talk  about each of these three things in turn. 

So, in order to win the civil war, Mao  believes you need base areas, these Soviets,  

where are they located? Often on the boundaries  of provinces, in very difficult terrain,  

where provincial authority, let alone  national authority, simply does not extend. 

Mao thought that there were certain  prerequisites for a good base area.  

One is strategic terrain. It's got to be  defensible so that the weaker communist  

forces can 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 is Mao's idea of what you need 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 are three kinds of territory: there's  base areas, there is enemy-controlled areas,  

and then there is the interface in between, which  is where guerilla forces are going to be roaming. 

So he was all about deploying the Red  Army to the comparatively safe base area,  

they'll protect that. You might send guerilla  detachments to some of the guerilla areas,  

but really only really small things would  you ever send into enemy territory. Moreover,  

he has prerequisites to fight. There are six  possible prerequisites; you've got to have at  

least two before you fight. The most important  one is that people have to actively support you.  

You probably need a base area to pull this off. He said that the last three things about enemy  

weak points, enemy exhaustion, enemy  mistakes, those things could appear  

quite rapidly. But you better choose your  terrain very carefully; terrain is immutable. 

He also said that if you're weak the way  the Communists were, you had to follow a  

strategy of annihilation. What you do is you  annihilate one small enemy unit at a time,  

and the cumulative effects will eventually change  the balance of power. Only someone who is really  

strong can tough out an attrition strategy. He's also about triangle building  

in these areas. So, little guerilla detachments  go out into the interface. If it works out  

well and it looks like they can start either  a new base area or expand an existing one,  

that's what they're going to be up to. So, these guerilla forces are either a  

disposal force, which you could send them out  to do risky things, and if they get wiped out,  

it doesn't endanger base area defense, or they can  become a nucleus of a new base area. So in small  

guerilla groups, party members are toughened,  cadres trained, the party government,  

mass organizations are consolidated. If  they're successful, then you bring in the  

Red Army to do higher-level institution building  and either greatly expand an existing base area,  

or you're forming a new one, is what’s going on. Mao had two military services, we always think  

of army, navy, air force—that's  not what it was for him. It was  

guerilla forces versus conventional forces. And guerilla forces are operating in the  

rear of the enemy so that there's no stability or  security. In fact, there isn't even a front line;  

it's just so amorphous. And so what guerilla  forces are supposed to be doing is exterminating  

small enemy forces, weaken larger ones,  attack enemy lines of communications,  

establish bases, and force the enemy to disperse,  but they're doing all this in combination with  

conventional forces. Because here's the thing:  you think about Mao and his guerillas, 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 guerilla 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, like, if it all goes south, where do  you go? And his terminal point of retreat for  

the Long March was up in Yenan. 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, six points for attention, and a  

couple of additional points were enforced through  1949, when the Communists win the civil war.  

Why? You don't want to alienate the peasantry. These are the people that 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 three had suffered,  respectively, abandonment, execution by  

the nationalists, and commitment to a Soviet  psychiatric ward. Not fates for the faint-hearted. 

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 times. 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 times. 

Mao also offered minorities the previously  unofferable, which was self-determination.  

What the minority people didn't get is that a  promise made in a really desperate civil war,  

with a regional war overlaid, once you win  those things and you can turn your guns on  

those trying to secede, that promise may be  unenforceable. 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 a Communist Party to  erode them from within, and eventually, it'll have  

a shattering effect. He said, also, part of this  disintegrating the enemy has 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 is: don't do that. 

So, what he did when you capture people,  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  

one. "Second, its enemy is really strong." Point  two. "Thirdly, the Red Army is weak. And fourthly,  

there's an agrarian revolution going on." And  from this, he concluded that revolution was  

definitely possible, but it's going to take a long  time. So he didn't kid himself about quick wins. 

He's going to come up with a  strategy for protracted warfare.  

And 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 towards the communists,  

just simply regardless of what the communists  do, but based on what the Japanese are doing,  

they're going to gravitate towards the communists. Also, the Japanese had grossly underestimated the  

Chinese. And 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 paradigm  

theory is his three stages of people's war.  The first stage is the strategic defensive.  

It's the "prevent defeat" phase. The last phase, phase three,  

is the strategic offensive, the "delivery  victory" phase. In the first phase,  

you're focusing on the peasantry. In the last  phase, you're annihilating the enemy army. 

And if you look at activities that go on in each  phase, the activities of phase one and two never  

cease. Rather, you add additional activities  as competence increases. So, in phase one,  

you're doing popular mobilization, base area  building, triangle building, guerrilla warfare. 

And then, as you get more of these things, then  you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try  

your hand at a little conventional warfare, reach  out with diplomacy. And then if you go further  

in stage three, then you're talking positional  warfare, and you're going to have the war-winning  

battle. And how do you get from the phases? Well, the transition from phase one to two  

is basically you have a critical mass of base  areas, cadres, armed forces that you can move  

into phase two. But the problem of being in  phase two is what had looked like isolated  

acts of banditry in phase one to the incumbent  government, now the incumbent government gets it,  

that they're facing an insurgency bent on  regime change, and the regime changes strategy. 

So the communists are no longer under the  radar, but they're in the crosshairs. And  

it's dangerous because they're weak and the enemy  is strong. So when you transition to phase two,  

initially it is quite dangerous. And here's Mao writing about these  

problems and saying, "Look, in these stages  one and two, the enemy is trying to have us  

concentrate our main forces for a decisive  engagement," i.e. decisive in their favor,  

they'll win the war because they'll annihilate us.  And 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 three,  

you need a big friend. Why? Because phase three  is conventional warfare, which requires infinite  

supplies of conventional armaments that requires  an industrial base to produce it, and somewhere  

like China lacks 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 three, 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 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 is 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 one,  

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 is "kill all, burn all,  

loot all," which is what they did. And it wiped  out loads of communist base areas in North China. 

So, 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. And Mao understands these different layers. So,  

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 in that as  well. Because he's using that to strengthen the  

communists during all of this rural mobilization.  So, when Japan's defeated and the communists,  

when 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, of  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 they're thinking about  elements of national power, love this little  

framework: DIME. D is for diplomacy, I is  intelligence, M for military, E for economics,  

as being critical elements of national power. It's better than only looking at the military  

elements, at least you got three more things. But  if you look at Mao, this is not a cookie-cutter  

event. This is a different society, different  national 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 all the things that I’ve told  you about, makes his version of Marxism much  

more applicable to these countries, the newly  independent countries after World War II,  

of 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 times on the importance of women. He was calculating and cunning on how he was  

going to use minorities and POWs. He  had proven his kudoi 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,  

that wasn't so successful. And why? Syngman  Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately  

did land reform, and this glues loyalty of  soldiers to the leadership doing this. Maybe that  

is not the only factor, but an important factor  for 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 which 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,  

that 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—do they have all four of these  

things or can you remove any one of them? Another idea from Mao is luring the enemy  

in deep. Mao had done that very successfully  in the first three 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, the `45 to `49 event,  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 he 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 in  the Korean War, and Mao springs a trap. MacArthur  

didn't realize that 350,000 Chinese troops had  been infiltrated around him. Oops, missed that. 

It did not work out well. But for the  US Navy, now, it needs to think about,  

what about being lured into the South and East  China Seas and then the Chinese pulling 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 one railway system that  gets you south out of Manchuria. 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 one 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 '48 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. And  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 those  

three cases is 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 three  stages of people's war. Mao presents them as  

sequential: you go from one to two to three, and  tada, you win. And they're cumulative, right? 

You do certain things, and then you get to  phase two, 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 there's an even  better way to use it. It's like a metric of how  

an insurgency goes up and down, so that ISIS may  be on the cusp of going into stage three. I don't  

know that they ever really—well, possibly, with  all the equipment they got initially—or whether  

then they get knocked back to stage one, 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 these 7,000 pages—and I don't  

recommend it—one is 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. It goes on and on. Studying the differences  and connections between dualities is a 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 and 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 translator into English of Sun Tzu  who has a distinguished military career,  

and also, he went on to get a DPhil—it's  like a PhD—from Oxford in military history. 

If you look at his career, he's in China during  the Japanese escalation of the Sino-Japanese  

War. He's back in China, does another tour at the  end of the Chinese Civil War. He gets top marks  

in the military's Chinese language exam. Oh, look at these details: Navy Cross,  

Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross.  He's a distinguished man, and for 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, it's like, oh,  

I don't know, I can't remember the words, like,  I don't know, "contested ground," 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 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.

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: that peasants would take off the harvest,  

wouldn't attend to the crops, but they're going  to make iron in their backyards. They're going to  

shoot the sparrows and have a locust infestation. How do we square this shrewdness in the  

beginning and these idiocracy-level  ideas in the Great Leap Forward? 

Well, first of all, you need to think about  what his objective is, which number one  

is to stay in power, right? And number two  is probably 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 is 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 about 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 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 like in Britain,  Winston Churchill: a great wartime leader, but  

he's booted out of office right after that war. If  you think about 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. And 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—because 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. 

But when I compare him to other,  even other communist leaders. 

Which ones? So if you look at Stalin,  

for example, yes, he causes the Holodomor,  right? Three million people die, but- 

Uh, 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’s instances  in the 20s 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. [gun gesture] 

True, but the level of… [noose gesture] 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's a  much later event. Russia also has all sorts of  

institutions and things that China was lacking. So already, Stalin has many more tools at his  

disposal than what the Chinese communists are  going to have. Also, the kind of warfare. Think  

about the warfare in China. You got 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, 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  thing. 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,  

based on your dealings with Americans. This country had a civil war. It ran,  

what, four or five 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,  

who gets… 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, Chinese Civil War. So,  

if that kind of bitterness and unsettledness is  still present in this highly institutionalized,  

wealthy country, this one, 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 of,  

when these battles were happening, I  imagine if somebody came up to him and said,  

"We're winning these battles," and it's a total  fabrication, they're 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. Okay, there's, no. Mao doesn't become canonized  

as Mao, or- I'm mixing metaphors- the  Emperor of China until victory in the  

Korean War. So in the early period... Oh, Mao is supposed to have written  

this book called On Guerrilla Warfare. It is not  written by Mao. It took time to figure it out,  

for outsiders. It's written by Peng Dehuai and  others, his generals. And so 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. And so it's not until after the… 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. Okay. 

So 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 to expand their  

territory. Both of them end up with the smallest  territory they've had in a long time. Britain  

starts the war- or not starts, but enjoins the  war- in order to defend Poland. Poland ends up  

in totalitarian occupation afterwards,  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?  Is Stalin just a master strategist here? 

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

So great, it's a personal success for him. The  numbers of Russians who were destroyed in that  

are incredible. So, okay, 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. I think the lesson is the last thing you want to  

do is fight a world war, but as Britain discovered  in World War II, if Hitler's insistent, 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. 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 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 go, "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... Can anyone do a crystal ball  

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 contingency,  

of why 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 because, 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's got 8 billion. Uh,  

be cautious. What's key on this maritime order,  the big insurance policy of it all, is our allies  

and institutions. This is the great gift of the  Greatest Generation, of having created the UN,  

which is how many millions of lives have been  saved from polio vaccines and other things  

that come through the UN? Do not dismiss these  organizations, they've done a lot. Or the EU. 

Work through these things, and listen  to your allies. They will have insights,  

and there is power in allies. Tell me, who China's  allies are? The crazy man in Korea who can't even  

feed people in the 21st century. Although he  certainly feeds himself, but that’s a whole- 

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 does 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 one-hundredth 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? 

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, modern economies before the war. They had no problems with educational institutions  

going all the way up, judicial institutions, they  had competent police forces, competent… They had  

parliaments and other things. So that 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. 

And 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. And also, we had really competent foreign service  

officers in China in this period. Why? They're the  children of missionaries. And so they spoke fluent  

Chinese and had a deep understanding of China. And they were saying it's hopeless, that there is  

no way Chiang Kai-shek's going to win this thing  because he's hated by the peasantry, which he was,  

because for the reasons I've told you. If he's  busy dragooning them into his armies because he  

feels he has no choices, whereas the Communists  are giving them land and educating them, you  

better believe who the peasants are supporting. And the missionaries, they were then caught up in  

the McCarthy purges and were just about ruined.  Lost their jobs in the State Department and  

elsewhere, only to be exonerated 10, 15, 20 years  later when they've already lost their careers  

and 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 a case that later on  

they realized it was hopeless and so then  they stopped supporting Chiang, but, but- 

It's 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 he was- I mean, the Communists  almost seemed like hopeless underdogs. 

It was just thought that Chiang is going to  win and therefore we don't have to support him. 

No no no no. They were constantly  

goading the Nationalists to form some sort of  ceasefire, do some sort of coalition government,  

when in fact what it should have done is like,  no, you have to make sure that you keep China. 

No, it was considered hopeless. This is  called making a net assessment of not  

what you want it to be, but an accurate  one. They believed it was not feasible. 

Even in 1945, 46? You're talking hundreds  

of millions of people. We can't even  deal with Afghanistan today. With what,  

20 million people? It's not feasible. It's at the  end of World War II. American GIs are sick of it,  

and as are their parents, of fighting more wars. We didn't have to send GIs,  

we just had to not cut off support. Europe has been leveled and there's  

this absolute fear that the Communists are going  to move into Europe, which actually counts for  

Western economies in those days. The Italian and  French Communist parties were incredibly strong,  

so all the focus of limited resources  is going to make sure that Europe  

settles 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, but anyway 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 War for Asia, there's a passage where you say  

there are so many sort of 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. 

Yes. 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 just didn't matter. 

I don't know- it's just not politically  feasible. I mean, talk about it? 

Put yourself back in those days. You've already  done a three-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. It was none of  this nine-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. I mean, 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  

all the Soviet Union. And then it's got quite a  coastline, but the Soviets had blockaded that, so  

nothing's getting in that way. The only way, given  the Chinese railway system, is that literally one  

train line connects Manchuria to South China. So, it means Chiang Kai-shek's movements are  

incredibly predictable. So one argument you  could make, and people have, and I don't know  

the answer, none of us does, is that, hey, that  was the big error. So if that's the big error,  

the mistake- and this is a common  one that Americans make so this is  

worth talking about- is Americans often don't  look at warring parties to understand 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, and 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  they're never going to cooperate the two  

of them. Or I suspect what was going on in Iraq  and Afghanistan, so 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 of 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 do a coalition  government with the communists  

and the nationalists. It's a non-starter. 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, and these horrible  wars, and being quite irresponsible during the  

Great Depression, and just ignoring everybody  else's problems, didn't want to hear about it.  

And then we get a World War II out of that,  and then we rethink 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 in the 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 be different. One of  the reasons Taiwan is Taiwan is after they  

lost the civil war and they are on the island  of Taiwan, they did a big after-action analysis  

of what went wrong and they decided it was  corruption and that it was land reform that  

they needed to fix those things. But they couldn't  do land reform on the mainland because that's  

their officer corps. But when they come to Taiwan,  they can more than redistribute Taiwanese land,  

which they do and it's bloody. Because the  Taiwanese don'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 in the mainland, i.e worth nothing, but  actually after time they became quite valuable. 

Land reform was bloody in Taiwan, but today  Taiwan has a very equal income distribution. 

And what is the explanation for -- you just  had these tallies of numbers up of how many  

deaths through 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,  

and it's like one out of ten 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? I mean, it  was the same China, right? It wasn't a developed  

economy. So why didn't they have trouble  paying their soldiers and retaining them? 

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 and Mao  

isn't living any kind of luxurious life, there's  no -- that was another thing. You have these rich  

officer corps and the Nationalists flaunting  their wealth among absolutely starving people.  

And 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 is famously a fan  of luxury and has -- right? In a way that 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, constantly there’s insurgencies and  

chaos, and then we go to all the turmoil that Mao  causes, all the people, 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 do they promptly  get? Famine. And in Vietnam, I think you have  

kind of three harvests, like how do you ever  have famine in that place? But yeah, they did. 

This is the “brilliance” of communism is  this commissar system and the party system,  

and how they set up their government, it’s  incredibly effective about maintaining power.  

It's very effective about seizing power  during warfare, 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. 

Well they- he wasn’t running day-to-day  affairs. But in terms of making sure he's  

never in a position to, in the future, do  something like the Cultural Revolution? 

They try. This is when you get Peng Dehuai, who-  he was the general in charge of forces during the  

Korean War, and also Long March generation. He  had lost several of his siblings to starvation  

over the course of these civil wars. And he and  Liu Shaoqi pulled the plug on Mao, and 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. So 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. And 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. 

And it's like a semi-civil war. And  then this is when Lin Biao comes in,  

who is a military leader, and Mao is going to  use him to restore order, but after he's ousted  

all the people who are going to get rid of him,  that's what the Cultural Revolution is about. 

And it is ruinous for production, right? Doing all  this. And 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 didn't want the same thing to happen to  

him after he dies. And today, look, 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. And Vladimir Putin  

is starting to mimic more of the centralized...  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? 

Oh, Xi Jinping apparently reveres Mao. My  understanding about Xi Jinping's education  

is his dad was a very high-level Communist leader  who was purged but not killed, and sent to sort  

of interior north somewhere in China. And so when Xi was on the, what is it,  

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's during  the... 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. 

Given the fact that he personally suffered  during the Cultural Revolution... I think  

there's a story that at some point, because his  dad is announced, he was announced 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? 

I mean, 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. 

I mean his own son is… Oh, he abandoned various  sets of kids who starved to death and died and  

one son, he put him right up in Korea where  he could get killed, and he promptly did, so. 

Oh 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 know, 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, 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. 

And the part of the United States where  slavery was most deeply embedded to this  

day has the deepest problems dealing with that.  So if Americans who are rich and have everything  

have trouble with these things, why would we  think- and this country has so much that's  

just obvious to be proud of, the wealth and  innovation and things, a recent innovation and  

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, is understanding  the… 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, and what is it,  

in Arnold Schwarzenegger in 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 one of the  

four Asian tigers that went from a very poor  country to an absolutely wealthy country. I  

think it's around 1990-ish where Taiwan  is—I think this statistic is right, I'll  

try this—it's got 1/50th the population of the  mainland, it's got 1/250th of the land mass of  

the mainland, and it has about 40% of the GNP. And if you're 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. And that's Taiwan's problem to this day,  

is that they are a rebuke to everything  the Communist Party is. There used to be  

this racist notion that "Oh, Han Chinese and  democracy, incompatible, can't do that." Well,  

China—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 can't—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... when Hitler is killing  the Jews, he doesn't make them first say,  

"Listen, you know, we were responsible for  World War I," which he falsely claimed,  

"and we renounce our Semitic ways," or something. And with the Cultural Revolution, with 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's just going to kill them all.  

So that's just complete—he's into destroying  every last Jew there is, 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? It's—in Japan,  

it's the general, the shoguns at the top.  In China, the soldiers 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 mobility: take the imperial exams and  

if you pass them and do well, you're off and  running. So, and there's also a tradition of  

re-educating people. You could shoot everybody,  you could, but that's not the Chinese tradition. 

The loads of people dying is, a lot of it’s  starvation. So, people like Deng Xiaoping,  

who, if you'd been in Russia, they’d just-- 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 you let them out afterwards. It's a  tradition of educating people, 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. Whereas- 

He’s a soldier. Whereas other people, even other nationalists,  

wanted to accommodate the Communists more,  especially early on, and he has one quote that  

“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 the means we don't endorse,  

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 one of the reasons you don't have a Chiang  dynasty because these children are not 100% Han,  

right? Because their mom's Russian. However, as  he learned more about it, because initially he's  

interested in that, he's interested in playing  fascism as well, and how you organize society. 

He studied in Japan, 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. 

And he was forced to by Chinese students,  among others, and 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 one enemy at a time. You'll  become overwhelmed if you do, and he believed  

that really he needed to kind of accommodate or  put the Japanese aside, fight the Communists,  

get rid of them, and then he's hoping the  United States will get in or something that  

then he could deal with the Japanese separately. But he faced so much popular pressure that 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, thinking 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? 

Oh I don't know about the other guy, but I  do know about Edgar Snow. So Edgar Snow is  

in the Depression. He's from the Midwest. He  was a bored young man. He wants an adventure,  

so he goes off to China. This is typical. And 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  however many days of the Russian Revolution,  

back during the Russian revolution he’d really  popularised it and I suspect, but I don't know,  

that Mao probably needed his own Jack Reed,  and 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. 

So what was it? Sun Yat-sen,  the founding father of China,  

is married to one of the Soong sisters.  Another one of the Soong sisters is married  

to Chiang Kai-shek. And there's a third one  who's married to a banker. But anyway, it's the  

communist one who puts Mao on, I think, to Edgar  Snow. So someone goes to Edgar and says “Hey,  

you want to come up to Yenan 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 busy man, who's spending hours  

with the 30-year-old, or I don't even know if he  was 20-year-old. I can't remember how old he was. 

And Edgar Snow doesn't get it. Like, why is he  spending all this time with me? And he's taken  

by it. And Mao's, of course, showing him all the  good stuff, right? So Edgar Snow's seeing all the  

happy peasants who've got the land, and they're  cooperating in the guerilla this and that. And  

he is the last person to get out of Ye’nan. And  then the Japanese in the war just shuts it down so  

nobody's got any more information about Mao ever. So Edgar Snow writes his book, Red Star Over  

China. He gives the drafts to Mao-  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. And then over  the different editions of Red Star Over China,  

because I've actually read them and followed the  changes, more and more of it gets eliminated. The  

original version has all kinds of pictures of  people that Mao subsequently purges, so those  

pictures go away. All references to those people  go away, and they're no longer in the index. 

And Edgar Snow goes along with this. And for the  rest of his life, he is publishing books that are  

a variation on a theme on 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- Mao desperately wanted Edgar  Snow to cover that, and Edgar Snow got pancreatic  

cancer, and he was living in Switzerland. He'd  run into trouble with the McCarthy era, as you  

can well imagine, for good reasons, actually. And so Mao sent his personal physician to  

attend to Edgar Snow. But pancreatic cancer  still kills, and it killed him. So, no,  

and this was even though people Edgar Snow knew  had been purged during these various campaigns  

and also 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's- 

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 on what is actually fake  news, what's disinformation, what's accurate,  

what's not. What's deliberately inaccurate?  Who's posting it? 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, this is their- 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  being more and more dysfunctional. 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 right- it was supposed to happen  

right after Tiananmen, and that got closed down.  That was, Tiananmen was in June of '89. 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, like I  had two 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 two 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 happen,  

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 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. So instead of-  before you had to go at it with spears, and that  

slowed people down. With industrial equipment... So it's human, sadly. Humans have great capacity  

for creativity and doing wonderful things,  and then they have 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, 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.