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

1. 0:00 – 0:47

   Intro

   1. SPSarah Paine0:00

      One of the most important figures in Chinese history of any century, Mao is the military genius who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again. He is also the most brilliant psychopath in human history. That's Taiwan's problem to this day. They are a rebuke to everything the Communist Party is. How embarrassing. The losers of the war have won the peace and put you to shame for how incompetently brutal you are. The communists lose 95% of their forces. Decimate means to lose 10%. Uh, losing 95%, I think you need a whole new verb. 40 million Chinese starve to death. 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? Uh,

2. 0:47 – 3:13

   Disclaimer

   1. SPSarah Paine0:47

      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've got problems.

   2. NANarrator0:56

      (laughs)

   3. SPSarah Paine0:56

      All right. (laughs) I'm gonna talk about Mao. He's an incredibly consequential figure. He's, uh, 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 and political theorist. And this is not an endorsement of Mao. It is rather just an accurate description of his, uh, global and enduring importance. And 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, uh, in order to assert dictatorial rule. He is also probably, uh, the most brilliant and, uh, most famous psychopath in human history, and that is saying a lot, so here we go.

   4. NANarrator1:58

      (laughs)

   5. SPSarah Paine1:58

      All right. This presentation is based on the first eight volumes of Stuart Schram's Collected Works of Mao, and what Schram did is he, uh, compared Mao's complete works as published in the 1950s to whatever he could find is the earliest version of whatever it was, and then he re- re-inserted whatever had been cut in the italics, in italics. So tonight, watch- watch the italics. And 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 is, uh, kind of come, for you all pre- prepare like a jigsaw puzzle of all of these, uh, different ideas, and then in order to make it comprehensible to you, of all these random little- 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. So... (laughs)

   6. NANarrator3:10

      (laughs)

   7. SPSarah Paine3:12

      All right. These are

3. 3:13 – 9:31

   Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Thayer Mahan, Corbett

   1. SPSarah Paine3:13

      major military theorists, just to, uh, 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 fellas 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- 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 policy, uh, possibilities for maritime power. And the Britain underneath him there, uh, 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 is- 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 gonna 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. And, um, many, uh, 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 pro- perhaps offered a better model to communists, and many thought that the Chinese with Mao offered the better model. Why? Because, uh, the decolonizing p- parts of the world were also agricultural and underdeveloped, unlike Russia, which had quite a military, uh, excuse me, an industrial base, and so 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, and, uh, there's a g- I'm gonna be talking tonight about Mao's theories in the ni- 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 re- revolution. You're not just replacing the government, you're going to wipe out entire social classes, and I don't mean in a, "Hey, here's your one-way ticket out of here," kind of way. No, no, a social revolution is a, "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, and this is from much of the Maoist period, I think it's '45 to '75, what you'll notice, the figures in, uh, white I believe are civilian deaths, not military deaths, and, uh, 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? 'Cause 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, agriculture and industrial, but Mao keeps exporting food. Why? Because that's his pocket change. That is, uh, 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 starve to death, primarily in rural areas, and disproportionately peasant g- chi- girls, the least valued members of society. Uh, the, the s- the statistic of 40 million deaths comes from this book by Yang Jisheng, who's 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 invested this, investigated the statistics of people who were starving to death, uh, including his father, for whom he wrote this book to serve as an eternal tombstone. So, on the one hand, Mao is the military genius who puts Humpty Dumpty back together again when nobody else could and they'd tried for the previous 40 years. On the other hand, he is the psychopath, incapable of running an economy in peace, in peacetime. Yet, many Chinese revere him as a national hero. Why? Because in their minds, certainly of the Han, the preponderant, uh, 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 ban of, uh, uh, banner of communism, and then fighting, uh, the coalition of all the major capitalist powers to a stalemate in the Korean War, or in their mind a victory, uh, that constitutes ending what they consider the era of humiliations that started in the mid-nineteenth centuries and, and with the Communist Revolution. So he's a hero, uh, 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

4. 9:31 – 14:27

   The 1911 Revolution and the Civil War

   1. SPSarah Paine9:31

      warfare among warlords of these provincial leaders, and 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, uh, Chiang Kai-shek, who is the head of the Nationalist Party, a generalissimo (laughs) , not just a general, 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. 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 th- 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, base area is also called a soviet, is the Jiangxi Soviet. And on the fifth encirclement campaign, Chiang Kai-shek is finally successful and he sends them off on the Long March up to way up north in desolate Yan'an. Long March is a real misnomer. It's the long route, and the communists lose 95% of their forces. I believe in English decimate, lose, it means to lose 10%. Uh, 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 Ame- uh, well, it was both the United States and Europe, and the United States does its original America First thing with a holy smooth tariff, uh, putting tariffs up to historic highs and then everybody, of course, retaliates, so 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 autarkic, 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, he has to, he's trying to balance what to do about Japanese versus, uh, communists. The Japanese don't quit with Manchuria. They stabilize the place, they m- 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, uh, nationalists form a second united front because they're facing this lethal threat called Japan, and they, uh, organize that in December 1936 in what's known as the Xi'an Incident, and the Japanese react viscerally, 'cause they look at it and the nationalists have gone over to the dark side, 'cause they've joined up with the communists, and this is when the Japanese escalate in 1937 and go down the Chinese coast, up the Yangzi River. Uh, and while-... but that then they wind up stalemating. Once they get beyond the Chinese railway system, which w- isn't that great in this period, the Japanese s- can't stabilize the place and the Soviets at 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 Har- Par- Harbor is all about, is telling Americans to stay out of Asia, which of course, you know, we did just- just the opposite. And then the Nazis, um, 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 and Europe, and this other war that had been going on since '31 in Asia, they unify into a global world war. Mao, uh, 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 gonna be a global war that'll eventually morph into a global cold war. Most of his writings are written before Pearl Harbor, so he's gonna focus on the first two layers of what's going on here. So after, uh, the World War II is over, Mao, uh, uh, goes after the nationalists full bore, and the Japanese have already very much weakened the na- nationalists and, uh, Chiang Kai- uh, 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 f- three to five things, 'cause 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

5. 14:27 – 15:47

   Clausewitz on Mao

   1. SPSarah Paine14:27

      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, "retained 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, 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 myri- in numerous areas. He was, uh, I'm gonna 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 i- is data analysis, data collection, and analysis. He truly understood the co- the country side because he collected all sorts of data about it and analyzed it. And then I will go on to Mao the operational military leader, w- winning and fighting battles, and then at the end I'll talk about Mao the grand strategist, integrating all, uh, 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

6. 15:47 – 24:35

   Mao the propagandist

   1. SPSarah Paine15:47

      tilled his own land. Mao hated his father, (laughs) 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, uh, joined and then dropped out of a series of vocational tr- schools. He tried being a s- what was it? A merchant, a lawyer. Am I missing something else? A soap maker. Imagine Mao, three stages of personal hygiene and whatever. It was not to be, but he eventually, uh, gets an ed degree so he can go off and be a primary school principal. Okay, imagine setting your child off, uh, with, oh, uh, to the psychopath doing show and tell. Uh, it's not... (laughs) 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 a 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 the, in one hand and bullets in the other." And if you look at the original, uh, organization chart of the Shadow Communist government, you'll see there are only about six departments there, one of them is the propaganda department. If you have no power, words are, are, is your initial way into gaining power. I'm now going to use a framework from my wonderful colleagues Mark Genest and Andrea Du, 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 wood block print, that's the medium, and it's a very easy way to re- reproduce pictures back in the day. The message is about a model laborer, this a- always emulate Wu Manio, lucky us, uh, and to do all the nice things he does, what- 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 gotta reach an audience, and that's what these messengers are, are doing. And so they go into local areas and they identify local, uh, grievances for attention by the Communist Party, which when it fixes them or fixes somebody, um, that will, uh, generate loyalties and allegiance. So these, uh, propaganda personnel, uh, would be identifying local bullies to come in and deal with them, organize mass rallies, uh, during battles they're gonna double as medics, after battles they're gonna propagandize POWs, between ba- battles they are, um, he- 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 a civil, uh, messengers, they would be activists, maybe in the local government, labor unions, peasant organizations, women organiz- organizations, any number of these things. And it's their- your- 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, um, first, uh, priority work of the Red Army. This is very different from- 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 he- and while Mao was holding court up in Yan'an, he invited many of these journalists up there. Edgar Snow was by far the most famous. Why? Because he was, like, the first one in and then he was the last one out, and he had really long interviews with Mao, and when he was a young man, he never asked, "Why does this, um, uh, A-list political leader spending so much time with me?" That never occurred to Edgar. (laughs) But, you know, it's hours, and it- and he was a very fine writer, Edgar Snow. And what- uh, Edgar Snow writes Red Star over China. You can probably go to Barnes & Noble and- and pick up a copy there. It's been in print ever since, and it's the original footnote in Chinese history 'cause 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 Edward- Ed- Edgar Snow. So, um, Mao got his- 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 to, uh, 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- this is 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," 'cause you want to smear your enemy in the- 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, uh, popular poets, in China certainly, uh, 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 semi-literate can make it- w- 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, and intellectuals prize poetry and they- also they prize what's called grass writing, which is that unintelligible Chinese stuff writing under there. If, um, Mao set these poems to tunes that everybody knew, people could sing them on the- 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, uh, through- and the way he did that is through political mobilization. Part of the- of that is you've got to tell people what the policy objective is, which for h- 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, and he also used an institutional medium of education. And here is Mao, the primary school teacher in his element. Uh, 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- the military professional who actually knows about the fighting. The political commissar is the one with the, uh, 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, uh, offering all kinds of social services to people, uh, 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, uh, but once the Japanese invaded full bore, uh, they had to drop it because the Nationalist conventional armies are the ones that are fighting off the Japanese conventional armies. The communists are a guerrilla movement, and they're, uh, 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 gonna support. Mao also emphasized professional military education because he needs to turn peasants to cadres to guerrillas 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, the first four depart- uh, the first original d- 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 gonna 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......

7. 24:35 – 29:51

   Mao the social scientist

   1. SPSarah Paine24:35

      uh, at his, fr- further along in his biography, while the first uni- 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 gonna become the political commissar of the Fourth Army. And he's also gonna be in charge of land reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work. All right, uh, for Mao, he's doing data-driven survey after data-driven survey, does a whole series in between 1926 and 1933, and he's trying to figure who owns what, who works for whom, who tills where, and who... And inventories of, uh, down to the last pitchfork and last chicken as he's trying to establish what is really going on on the country side, and, uh, he does. And what he c- 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 gonna be revolution. And he goes further into the statistics and he identifies 70% is 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 of the r- uh, the revolution. This is the key. And what he wants to do is take the bottom of the pyra- social pyramid and, um, mobilize it to crush, uh, the top of the pyramid, and he wa- he's gonna do this is by determining class status through a land investigation movement, which he says is a violent and ruthless thing. We're gonna talk about class, approval of class status, confiscation of land, redistribution of land in order to, uh, invert the social pyramid, and he's got a real plan for doing it. Uh, he argues that you've just, that, uh, land reform is just essential for peasant allegiance. This is how you're gonna get it to draw these hundreds of millions into supporting the communists, but you gotta do it sequentially. You gotta propagandize first and then you're gonna distribute land later, and he had... A little bit later. And he had a very bureaucratic, uh, way of redistributing, uh, redistributing land. Uh, the approval of class status he said is a, uh, it's a life and death decision for the person in question, and so 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 gonna get, who's gonna get the land and who's gonna take a bullet. And then Mao leverages the enthusiasm of this movement, movement for the people who are gonna get the land, the other people not so much, (laughs) uh, and he's gonna leverage this enthusiasm to get people to join the party and also to join the army. All right, um, Mao, uh, is planning to, uh, collectivize all land. That's what the communists are gonna do. But he says, "Look, the system of landlords and tenants cannot be completely destroyed yet." It... 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, for doing this, but he also, um, keeps the rich peasants around too. Uh, this is a deleted portion in the collected works 'cause r- rich peasant production- production's inse- 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 gonna get... See? You got the land. Well, now you do and now you don't, 'cause at the end, uh, they're all gonna lose their land. Um, in order to, uh, reform, uh, to get the land, um, Mao is talking about, uh, a Red Terror to get it, and, uh, this, he... While he was still, um, with the Nationalists, he wrote a report on the peasant movement in Hunan, uh, 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 this program, it's not just land re- land reform and educating people, warm and cuddly, it's also coercion. Okay. That's Mao the social science. Enough of him. Now we're gonna do Mao the military leader, and you've probably heard this chestnut from Mao, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Uh, Mao spent his, uh, hi- his... It's still a part of his early career being right but, uh, being a minority view, that he had certain views about military operations that was

8. 29:51 – 40:17

   Mao the military leader

   1. SPSarah Paine29:51

      not shared by communists' essential, and, uh, Mao, uh, kept following that dim light wherever it may lead and events eventually, uh, vindicated him. He survived a variety of encirclement campaigns, but then he had some troubles, and here are his critics. Li Li-san was a labor organizer, he was a de facto head of the Communist Party from 1928 and 1930, and after the White Terror on the northern expedition, uh, Moscow had told i- its, uh, communist buddies in China that the next thing to do was to take the cities, and so Li Li-san tries to with the Nanchang Uprising in 1927. Total disaster. And he tries it again in 1930 with the Changsha Uprising, another disaster, and that gets him into exile in, in Russia. And according to Mao, "Comrade Li Li-san did not understand the protected nature of the Chinese Civil War. Li Li-san is trying to fight the, uh, decisive, i.e. war-winning, winning battle far too early." You try to do that and you can get yourself ruined. Here's another critic, Xiang Ying. So Mao is in the Jiangxi Soviet-And he thinks it's 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. Uh, 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're off in Shanghai, they're a long way apart, and so Communist Central can't do anything about it. Mao does his own thing. So the Communist Central sends Xiang Ying, uh, to, uh, Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally, and you can imagine how this works for his later career. Not well. (laughs) And he fires Mao and this is where, uh, he winds... his strategy winds up producing the Long March, the long retreat in when which they lose 95% of their people by trying to defend territory. So people began to get it that Mao may have know- may have known what he was doing. And then on the long retreat, Mao chose as his terminal point of retreat, like where are you gonna wind up, as up in Yanan, way up north in... deep in Muslim and, uh, Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border, and 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. You want to be in Han la- We're Han Chinese, we want to be in Han lands, land." So he wanted to go into western Sichuan, which he did, and he, uh, suffered a series of defeats over the 1935- uh, and as a result, he was never as important ever, ever again, and eventually defected to the Nationalists. So Mao had proven himself prescient and right and determined and he, uh, he had and determination and people eventually recognized that. All right. Mao and Clausewitz d- defined war somewhat differently. Clausewitz ha- 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 and act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another." Uh, Clausewitz is not about, uh, 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 th- believes the linchpin of the social order are landlords and he's gonna detonate them and try to destroy them. And, uh, he talks about the violence of all of it, that you're gonna get the peasant masses to overthrow these landlords and that this will, uh... it's gonna require terror and in rural areas, uh, 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, the, um, civil war with the Nationalists and then the regional war with Japan. Pearl Harbor comes a little later. And, uh, he talked about defeating Japan in three stages. He said, "Japane- 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 gonna talk about each of these three things in turn. So in order to win the civil war, Mao believes you need base areas. The Soviets, where are they located? On the... often on the, um, pr- boundaries of provinces in ver- very difficult terrain where provincial authority, let alone national authority, simply does not extend. And Mao thought that there were certain prerequisites for a good base area and one is strategic t- terrain. It's gotta 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, so you gotta have some local support there, and then you need a good party organization. So this is Mao i- uh's idea what you need for a base area, and he believed that you needed to match, uh, your military unit, the type of military unit, to the territory and he said there are three kinds of territory. There's base areas, there is enemy-controlled areas, and then there is, um, uh, is the interface in between, which is where guerrilla forces are gonna be roaming. So he was all about deploying the Red Army to the comparatively safe ba- base area. They'll protect that. Uh, guerrilla detach- uh, you might send guerrilla detachments to, um, some of the guerrilla, uh, 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. Two... you gotta have at least two before you fight, and 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, the 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, uh, if you're weak the way the Comminis- 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's really strong can tough out, um, an an- uh, attrition strategy. So-Um, he's also about triangle building in these areas, so little guerrilla 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, um, that's what they're going to be up to. So, the- these guerrilla 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 pr- um, defense, or they can become a nucleus of a new base area. So, in small guerrilla groups, party members are toughened, cadres trained, the party government mass organizations are consolidated. And if they're successful, then you bring in the Red Army, uh, 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. Um, Mao had two military services. We always think of army, navy, air force. That's not what it w- was for him. It was guerrilla forces versus con- conventional forces. And what guerrilla forces are operating in the rear of the enemy so that there's no stability or security. It's, it's... In fact, there isn't even a front line. It's just, it's so amorphous. And so what guerrilla forces, um, are supposed to be doing is exterminating small enemy forces, weak, weaken larger ones, attack, uh, ene- enemy lines of communications, establish, uh, bases, force the enemy to disperse but they're doing all this in, um, qua- combination with conventional forces, 'cause here's the thing. You think about Mao and his guerrillas. Well, actually here's what Mao really says. "Regular forces are of primary importance because it is they who alone are ca- capable of producing the decision," like winning the war. Uh, there is, in guerrilla warfare, no such thing as a war-winning battle, right? Uh, uh, guerrillas are... It's, it's r- the relationship of the two is really important. Uh, 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 Yan'an. He thought it was important to figure those things out in advance. Mao also cultivated, um, an unprecedented group of allies never before assembled in Chinese history. Not only peasants, but women, minorities, youth, intellectuals, enemy army most creatively. Uh, 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, uh, couple additional points which were enforced through 1949 when the communists win the civil war. Why? You don't want to alienate the peasantry. These are the people, uh, that are forming your cadres, your guerrillas, everything, so maintain army discipline. Don't mess with it. Um, Mao also, uh, took an incredibly, uh, 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. Uh, but Mao calculated that women are about half the population, they're miserably treated so they're naturals

9. 40:17 – 49:34

   Mao the feminist

   1. SPSarah Paine40:17

      for wanting, uh, a revolution, they're a force that will decide the set- success or failure of the revolution. He calculated correctly and he was way ahead of his times. And he also understood that in a guerrilla war, you're sending all the guys off to, uh, be f- off fighting and you've got to be building base areas and things, and this is where women came in to do those activities. And as a result, he offered women the unthinkable, which is men and women are absolutely equal. Uh, women have the right to vote, be elected, participate in the work of the government. Uh, he's just way ahead of his times. Uh, Mao also offered minorities the previously unofferable, which was self-determination. And what the minority people didn't get is that a promise made in a really desperate civil war with a regional war overlaying it, once you win those things and you could turn your guns on those trying to secede, uh, that promise may be unenforceable. You can ask the Tibetans and Uighurs how it all worked out. All right, so, uh, Mao's strategy, um... H- he had a strategy of disintegrating the enemy army, and let me tell you how that one worked. Uh, you... In every county, you select a large number of workers and peasant comrades, people below the radar, and then you insinuated them into the enemy army to become soldiers, porters, cooks. You could use women to do this as well. I talk about people who are below the radar. And you're creating a nucleus of a communist party to erode them from we- within and eventually it'll have, um, it- it'll have a, a, a shattering effect. And he said also part of this disintegrating the enemy has to do with leniency. S- uh, Sun Zi advocates never put your enemy on death ground. Death ground means that you just have no h- that you're a dead person if you don't fight, so your only hope is to fight, and if you put someone on dead f- uh, death ground, they tend to fight, uh, with incredible willpower. And Mao is, "Don't do that." So, what he did i- when you capture people, uh, propagandize a little, uh, recruit the willing but release the unwilling so that the comparison of communist leniency and nationalist brutality becomes absolutely stark in this otherwise, uh, pitiless war. Okay, that's the civil war. Now we're going to go the pro- 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 you would use, and this is his assessment. He said, "Okay, China's a large, semi-colonial country. It's an undeveloped country.... point one. Second, its enemy's really strong, point two. Thirdly, the Red Army's weak. And fourthly, there's an agrarian revolution going on. And from this, he concluded that revolution was definitely possible, but it's gonna take a long time, so he didn't kid himself about quick wins. He's gonna come up with a strategy for protracted warfare. And, uh, 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, uh, guerrillas could roam far and wide behind Japanese lines. Also, the Japanese were brutal, just gratuitously brutal, and they're outsiders. And this means that the peasantry are naturally gonna gravitate towards the communists. Just simply, regardless of what the communists do, just simply b- based on what the Japanese are doing, they're gonna gravitate towards the communists. And also, the Japanese had grossly underestimated the Chinese and as a result of these, uh, uh, u- underestimating the Chinese, they made errors. And 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 a strategic offensive, the deliver victory phase. In the first phase, you're focusing on the peasantry. In the last phase, you're annihilating the enemy army. 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, you 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 gonna have the war-winning battle. And how do you get from the phase, 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 incumberment government, government gets it, that they're facing a, an insurgency bent on regime change and their regime change is strategy. And 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, it initially is quite dangerous. And here's, um, uh, Mao writing about these problems and saying, "Look, in, in this 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 'cause they'll annihilate us. And of course, this is, uh, what General Westmoreland was trying to do in the Vietnam War, is 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. So, uh, Mao is saying, "You only fight when you're sure of victory." And also, uh, in order to get to phase three, you need a big friend. Why? Because phase three is conventional warfare which requires, uh, uh, infinite supplies of conventional armaments that requires an industrial base to produce it, and somewhere like China lacks this industrial base. And so s- uh, good old Soviet Union played this role the w- 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, and th- that's where the Soviet Union came in. And so this is why M- Mao determines that Yan'an's gonna be his terminal point of retreat. He said, "I'm fighting my way through to the Soviet Un- 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. Uh, 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 f- uh, the Hundred Regiments c- uh, campaign that Mao fought North China in 1940, and he was smeared. The Japanese repl- uh, responded with the Three Alls Campaign, which is kill all, burn all, loot all, which is what they did, and it wiped out loads of Chin- uh, of communist-based areas in North China. So Mao never tried that ever again, and he certainly didn't write about it in his collected works. You know, don't talk about failures there. So, (laughs) it's interesting, what he's talking about really applies to hi- the civil war. And Mao understands these different layers. So as the nationalists are busy fighting the Japanese and actually being destroyed by them, uh, t- the communists are pretending that they're fighting the Japanese. They're later gonna take credit for it and say, "We won against the Japanese," which is nonsense. There was also the United States in, in, in that as well. Uh, because he's, he's using that to strengthen the communists during all of this, b- rural mobilization, so when the, Japan's defeated and the communists', uh, when 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 strat- uh, power into a coherent strategy. These are Mao's instruments of national power. Uh-... the peasantry, propaganda, land reform, base areas, institution building, warfare, and diplomacy. The US military, when they're thinking, uh, about elements of national power, love this little framework DIME, 'cause D is for diplomacy, I is intelligence, M for military, E for economics, as, as being critical elements of national power.

10. 49:34 – 58:12

    Mao the grand strategist

    1. SPSarah Paine49:34

       Uh, look, it's better than only looking at the military el- elements. At least you got three more things. But if you look at (laughs) , uh, if you look at what Mao... Uh, it's, this is not a cookie cutter event. This is a different society, different national, uh, elements of national power, uh, are available. You've got to get to the other side of the tennis court net to see, uh, what the other team is doing. All right, Mao, uh, is famous for all these reasons, but also for his Sinification of Marxism, where he makes, uh, all the things that I've told you about. It makes, uh, his version of Marxism much more applicable to these countries, the newly independent countries after World War II, of how they put things together, and he positions himself to, uh, replace Stalin, who dies in 1953, as the leader of communism. So 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, uh, he had proven his cudo 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 gonna get into the war in Asia. Uh, and he's the great sinifier of Marxism. All right, Mao prod- uh, produced all kinds of concepts and paradigms that are useful for insurgents who are trying to take over the host from within, and I've listed all of, uh, a variety of them here, and I'm going to go through them in turn, and these are the things that the counterinsurgent then has to counter. All right, rural mobilization. This is obviously a big deal in Mao, and if you compare... I'm going to be doing a lot of comparisons with the Vietnam War and the Korean War, 'cause they're communists and all these things, and, uh, you can see Mao's rural momo- mobilization was very successful in China. The North Vietnamese rural mo- mobilization was also really good. South Korea, not so much. Why? The leader, I mean, of North K- uh, Korea, trying to immobilize the, the peasantry in the South, that wasn't so successful. And why? Syngman Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately did land reform, and, uh, this glues loyalty of soldiers to, to, uh, to the leadership doing this, and maybe that is not the only factor, but a- 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 i- 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 gonna flee if you're, uh, 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, uh, Al-Qaeda means the base. That's the tr- I believe that's the correct translation. So if you're thinking about ISIS or whatever, or whatever's left of it, uh, 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, got to have a big party organization, a lot of local support, uh, you got to have an o- uh, military forces there. Uh, does Al-Qaeda... Well, it's going to be ISIS or something. Do they have all four, all four of these things, or can you remove any one of them? All right, another, uh, idea from Mao is luring the enemy in deep, and, uh, Mao had done that very successfully in the third, first three encirclement campaigns, and then he was removed from command so he wasn't doing that anymore, and, uh, and again, in the final phases of the Chinese Civil War, the '45 to '49 event, Mao lures the nationalists deep into Manchuria and the, the nationalists are a South China phenomenon, right? I showed you the ma- the map. Chiang Kai-shek starts in the South and he goes way up North, so he's weakest in the North, but Mao lures him way up, way up there in Manchuria and then he springs a trap and destroys, um, Chiang Kai-shek's armies up there and then the entire civil war wraps up within a year of that. So, uh, Mao also lured good old General MacArthur, who fancies- fancied himself a great Asianist in the Korean War. He, uh... MacArthur goes all the way up to the Yalu River, right on the Chinese border in the Korean War and then Mao springs a trap and MacArthur, uh, didn't realize that, uh, I don't know, 350,000 Chinese troops had been infiltrated around him. Oops, missed that. (laughs) Uh...

    2. NANarrator54:22

       (laughs)

    3. SPSarah Paine54:23

       It w- it did not work out well. But for the US Navy now, uh, needs to think about, what about being lured into the South and East China Seas and then the Chinese pulling the trap? Uh, it's... There are places you don't need to go. Uh, the Chinese may have to go there but maybe you don't have to. All right, another one is terminal point of retreat. I've talked about Yan'an being a really good one and that worked, uh, and 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 sh- 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 and, uh, they encircled the nationalists in these cities and destroyed them there. So, uh, when you're thinking about insurgents and things, think about, well, if you knock them out of one area, where might they go next? All right, another, uh, concept from Mao is disintegrating enemy forces, which is what happens to the nationalists. Think about it. Chiang Kai-shek had been fighting since, uh, the 1920s and forever and ever 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, uh, 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 with Japan in World War II, that, uh, they'd been fighting all over the place forever, fighting us, uh, 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, uh, uh, quit. And i- 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, and the places in question were ruined, so don't expect that to happen too fast. And of course, uh, Mao's big contribution are his three stages of People's War, and Mao presents them as sequential. You go from one to two to three and ta-dah, you win. And they're cumulative, right? You do certain things and then they're, uh, and then you get to phase two and they're, you, th- you've had this cumulative effect of destroying enemy forces and you're getting more accumulating, uh, casualties on the other side and finally you win. A student of mine said that's not actually not a great way to look at it, or an even better way to use it is like a metric of how, uh, insurgency goes up and down so that ISIS may be on the cusp of going into stage three, I don't know that they're really ... well, possibly, with all the, uh, equipment they got initially, or whether then they get bo- uh, 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, uh, Mao, is it, when you read these 7,000 pages, and I don't recommend it, uh ... (laughs)

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel57:42

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SPSarah Paine57:43

       Um, one is struck by all these dualities, and 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, um, the presence or absence of factors, presence/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, and it goes on and on that studying the differences and connections between

11. 58:12 – 1:02:14

    Yin and Yang analysis

    1. SPSarah Paine58:12

       dualities is a task of stunning pra- uh, strategy and it's really everything. So to defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance, uh, it- it- it goes on and on and it, and it's all about, um, correctly orienting yourself with, uh, between these opposites. So oppose protracted campaigns in the strategy of a short war, uphold the strategy of protracted war in a short campaign, and I'm starting to lose it. And you've gotta (laughs) , you've gotta, uh, 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, uh, of Sun Tzu who, uh, has a distinguished military career and also he went on to get a D.Phil, that's like a PhD, from Oxford in military history, and if you look at his career, um, 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 and, oh, look at these details: Navy Cross, Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross. He's a distinguished man. And for retirement he decides he's gonna go get the, 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, uh, I can't remember the, the words, like, I don't know, Contested Ground, something else. Uh, but I'm guessing that when he chose those words, Death Ground, it's 'cause 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. So, uh, he has provided, uh, 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 where, which is where they should be, and his service to his country continues to this day 'cause it's his translation, uh, that continues to educate officers now, what is it? 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 the 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.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:01:05

       Before we move on to the interview, a quick word from our sponsors, Scale AI. The AI race is the Manhattan Project for the modern age. Whoever wins reshapes the balance of global power. That's why Scale partners with the US government to fuel America's AI advantage through their data foundry. The Air Force, Army, Defense Innovation Unit, and Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office all trust Scale to equip their teams with AI-ready data and the technology to build powerful applications. Scale recently introduced Defense Llama, Scale's latest solution available for military personnel. With Defense Llama, military personnel can harness the power of AI to plan military or intelligence operations and understand adversary vulnerabilities.Whether through its work with the government or businesses like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Meta, Scale is at the forefront of US AI innovation. If you're interested in learning more about how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to scale.com/dwarkesh. All right, back to Sarah. (scene transition whoosh)

12. 1:02:14 – 1:05:16

    Q&A begins

    1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:02:14

       So here's something I'm confused by. You were talking about Mao as this shrewd, uh, commander, somebody who had studied not only the military but had also compiled these rigorous records of farm life and agriculture and everything. 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- you can't imagine that somebody thought, "Well, this was a good idea," that peasants would take off the harvest, wouldn't attend to the crops if they were gonna make iron in their backyards, they're gonna shoot the sparrows, and they'll have a locust infestation. How do we square this shrewdness in the beginning and this idiocracy-level ideas in the Great Leap Forward?

    2. SPSarah Paine1:02:55

       Uh, well, first of all, you need to think about what his objective is, which number one is staying in power, right? And number two is probably Communist Party in power, and his visions of revolution. So that's one thing. So then you're, you're worried about 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, uh, communist ideal- ideology, is people don't believe it because they know it's wrong, they believe it 'cause it's right. And 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 and... Uh, so the, the basic theory that he's implementing is incorrect. It just... And it takes the communists a little while. Some of them haven't figured it out, but takes them a little while to figure out there are parts of it that don't work. But there's a whole other, uh, uh, piece to him, is... 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, and then to expect him to then run a peacetime economy is crazy, but of course he wants to do it, so he c- he stays there. Or think about, like in Britain, uh, Winston Churchill, great wartime leader, but he's booted out of office right after that war if you think about, uh, different capabilities of people. So, uh, don't expect one individual to do everything, so that's a whole other problem. So when Mao's 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 gonna extend central control to the countryside? Really tricky. I suspect that's why he puts them on communes, because it, 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, it's those factors. It's, it's so big, it, when you, when you start putting a policy, eh, in pla- in place from Beijing and then how that actually fans out over the whole country has got to be a mess.

    3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:14

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SPSarah Paine1:05:14

       Different localities and things.

13. 1:05:16 – 1:11:42

    Why was Mao worse than Stalin?

    1. SPSarah Paine1:05:16

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:16

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

    3. SPSarah Paine1:05:19

       Which ones?

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:20

       (laughs) So if you look at Stalin, for example, yes, he causes the Holodomor, right? Three million people die, but that was-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:05:26

       Uh, details, yeah.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:27

       But-

    7. NANarrator1:05:28

       (laughs)

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:29

       ... that was an intentional famine where he was trying to root out the kulaks. The Great Leap Forward was, like, 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, uh, Molotov and others say, "You can't do it because nobody else can run the government like you can." Um-

    9. SPSarah Paine1:05:48

       Oh, yeah, right. (laughs)

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:49

        Uh, I, uh, true, but-

    11. SPSarah Paine1:05:51

        (laughs)

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:51

        ... the l- the, the level of... (laughs)

    13. SPSarah Paine1:05:54

        Yeah?

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:56

        Um, th- it doesn't seem like S- uh, Stalin was a devoted communist and that led to many deaths, but it didn't seem, it, he didn't seem deluded in the same kind of way that Mao was.

    15. SPSarah Paine1:06:05

        Well, first of all, Russia is a, um, a, a, quite a developed country compared to China, and if you think about it, Russia had been industrializing, uh, since the late 19th century, and China's a much later event. Uh, Russia also has all sorts of institutions and things, uh, that China was lacking. So already, uh, S- Stalin has many more tools at his disposal than what the, the Chinese communists are gonna have. Uh, also the kind of warfare, think about the warfare in China, and you've got the Taiping Rebellion. It's only the biggest of the peasant rebellions of the 19th century, and I can't remember, people estimate, I can't remember if it was 20 or 30 million people. Uh, that's a large number, right? 'Cause I think World War II was supposed to be like 55 million, so this is... There are a whole series of these peasant rebellions in the 19th century that go on for, I don't know, 25, 50 years if, if, one's here, one's there, they, by the end of it they've basically devastated, uh, parts of every province, and 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, uh, 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, t- you, based on your dealings with Americans, the Amer- this country had a civil war. It ran, what, four or five years? It was mostly in the South. Northerners came, uh, joined the 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, 'cause they were s- trying to secede, and, uh, many, the losing side of that war still hasn't gotten over it.Right? E- So if that's what's going on here, and that thing wasn't nearly as brutal as the kind of civil wars... At the end of the Civil War, uh, who gets... Uh, Lee's army is allowed to go home. They aren't shot on sight, which would be the kind of thing that went on in the Russian Civil War and Chinese Civil War. So if that kind of bitterness and unsettledness is still present in this highly, uh, 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.

    16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:34

        Hmm. Just to linger on this-

    17. SPSarah Paine1:08:38

        Uh-oh. (laughs)

    18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:40

        (laughs) So-

    19. SPSarah Paine1:08:41

        New exit strategy.

    20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:08:43

        (laughs) The... 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 someb- 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, this is a lie, and I'm not gonna stand for it." Whereas if you go to the Great Leap Forward, people will... Uh, 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, let's export our grain."

    21. SPSarah Paine1:09:16

        Oh-

    22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:16

        And just, just this ability to, like, have this basic discernment of who is... like, what is actually going on.

    23. SPSarah Paine1:09:21

        Oh-

    24. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:21

        That situational awareness is gone.

    25. SPSarah Paine1:09:23

        Okay, there's... No, there's another... There were, um... Mao doesn't become canonized as Mao the E- or the... I'm mixing metaphors, the Emperor of China, uh, until victory in the Korean War. So in the early period, uh, a lot of that Mi-... Oh, uh, there... Mao is supposed to have written this book called On Guerrilla Warfare. It is not written by Mao. It took, uh, uh, time to figure it out for outsiders. It's written by Peng Dehuai and others, his, his generals. And so there were many peoples' ideas that went into winning the Civil War. It is not just Mao. It's... And then he winds up purging these people later. And so it's, it's... Not until after the Kore-... During the Korean War, he's busy purging everybody massively 'cause he 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, uh, you're at least... You're forced to confront the counterargument. It is a healthier situation to be in.

    26. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:32

        Let's go back to the end of World War II.

    27. SPSarah Paine1:10:34

        Okay.

    28. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:35

        So if you look at basically all the main actors, none of them get m- m- 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, uh, 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, how do we make sense... Is Stalin just, like, a master strategist here?

    29. SPSarah Paine1:11:13

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

    30. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:18

        But-
14. 1:11:42 – 1:14:50

    Yalta satisfied no-one

    1. SPSarah Paine1:11:42

       dictators. So, uh, yeah, uh, it... I think the lesson is the last thing you want to do is fight a, a world war, but, um, as Britain discovered in World War II, if, uh, Hitler's insistent, you're stuck. Right? It might be a lesson for our own day. Right? Isn't this Ukraine's problem? They didn't want to fight a war. What are you gonna do? Putin launched. Uh, we don't exactly want to fight a war. Well, what are you gonna do? Let Putin do whatever he wants forev- forever, for however long he wants? Uh, 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. 'Cause what do you do when people break the rules? You hire a lawyer. It's not protection money or, um, starting to blow up each other's buildings and destroying wealth at an incredible clip is 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.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:37

       Before Mao, before the, the communists won- completely won the civil war, did people anticipate how, truly how terrible the, uh, the communist power would end up being in China?

    3. SPSarah Paine1:12:47

       Uh, I doubt it. Um, I think, uh, communism was a new thing, right? So you've got it going on with the Russians. Uh, yeah, I mean, the na- the con- 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?" 'Cause they were desperate situation with all what the Japanese were doing, and then they get blamed for it all. Yeah, there's, can't be something worse than that. We'll be called communists. But, um, I don't, I don't know that anyone could have, and predicted why you s-... Can, can anyone do a crystal ball what, what the world's gonna be like in 10 years? Yeah. When... It seems, uh, when you read the history books that it had to be that way, and yet in our own lives, we know that it's contingency of why things turn out as the aggregate of all of our choices. How would you ever calculate that?

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:13:40

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

    5. SPSarah Paine1:13:54

       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, uh, that's quite a, that's quite something to ask someone to make that kind of sacrifice. So it had better be worth it, right? And, uh, so there are 300 Ameri- million Americans. Well, the world's got eight billion. Uh, be cautious. And it's, 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? It, uh, uh, do not dismiss these organizations. They've done a lot, or the EU. Work through these things and listen to your, uh, allies.

15. 1:14:50 – 1:16:29

    Corrupt allies, ideologue enemies

    1. SPSarah Paine1:14:50

       They'll, they will have insights, and there's 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 different-

    2. NANarrator1:15:03

       (laughs)

    3. SPSarah Paine1:15:04

       Yeah, I mean, it's, it's incredible. A, China's, who are, who are China's friends? I mean, Iran? A theocracy? I mean, talk about passe. Who does theocracies anymore? Okay, the Iranians? Okay, good on them. (laughs)

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:18

       So, uh, after World War II, the, uh, the Soviets are giving the communists in China tremendous amounts of leftover weapons from the Japanese, uh, well, a, a bunch of other goods, uh, supporting them tremendously. At the same time, uh, Truman, uh, you know, is wishy-washy, d- there's an actual arms embargo on Chiang Kai-shek in 1946. The Marshall Plan for Europe is 13 billion to help build up defenses against-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:15:47

       Yep.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:47

       ... Communist, uh, appeal. At the same time, Truman is, has to be forced in 1948 by Congress to give uh, uh, a couple 100 million to China, literally 1/100th of what was given to Europe. And, uh, by that time, it's too late for Chiang Kai-shek. The, uh, if you, if you, I mean, if you just look at that record, it just seems like-

    7. SPSarah Paine1:16:09

       Uh-huh.

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:09

       ... sort of we abysmally messed up (laughs) at, after World War II in, uh, helping the nationalists stay in power, right?

    9. SPSarah Paine1:16:14

       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,

16. 1:16:29 – 1:25:35

    US indifference to the Nationalists

    1. SPSarah Paine1:16:29

       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, uh, they had, uh, parliaments and other things. So that when you, uh, give Germans some cash, they know ex- and Japanese as well, they know exactly how to recreate things and, and produce, uh, uh, 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 illiter- 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. So, um, and we've had this problem in, um, Iraq and Afghanistan, so we decide we're gonna do the debaathification thing, and then we think the police are gonna still show up and work, except, no, it's, that's not how it works. They haven't got these institutions. And so it's not feasible to... A Marshall Plan in China would not have worked, and also, we had really, uh, 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 gonna win this thing because he's hated by the peasantry." Um, which he was, uh, because for the reasons I've told you, right? If he's busy dr- 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, 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, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years later when they've already lost their careers and who knows how they raised their families.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:31

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

    3. SPSarah Paine1:18:40

       Oh-

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:40

       ... but, uh, but, but-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:18:40

       ... it's at the time. Uh, different people realize it at different times.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:43

       But, but, uh, the reason they didn't support, uh, Chiang as much as they should have was because they thought he was, he was inef- it was... I mean, the communists were, al- seemed like hopeless underdogs, and it wa- it was just thought that, like, Chiang is gonna win and then that, that, that we therefore we don't have to support him-

    7. SPSarah Paine1:18:56

       No, no, no, no, it's-

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:57

       ... and they, they're constantly-

    9. SPSarah Paine1:18:58

       No, no.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:58

        ... goading, uh, the nationalists to form some sort of ceasefire, do some sort of coalition government, when in fact what they should have done is like, "No, you have to make sure that you keep China."

    11. SPSarah Paine1:19:06

        No, it was considered hopeless. This is called making, uh, an, a net assessment of not what you want it to be but an accurate one. They believed it was not feasible.

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:16

        E- even in, like, 1945, '46?

    13. SPSarah Paine1:19:18

        You're talking hundreds of millions of people. We can't even deal with Afghanistan today with, what, 20 million people. Uh, it's, it's not feasible. It's at the end of World War II. Uh, American GIs are sick of it, uh, and as are their parents, which, uh, of, of fighting more wars, and, and to think about it-

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:37

        I, I mean, we didn't have the same GIs.

    15. SPSarah Paine1:19:38

        No, no.

    16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:38

        We just had to, like, not, not cut off support.

    17. SPSarah Paine1:19:39

        No, no, Europe has been leveled, and there's this absolute fear that the communists are gonna move into Europe, which actually counts for, uh, Western economies in those days. The, uh, Italian and French communist parties were incredibly strong, so all the focus of limited resources is gonna make sure that Europe settles out.And we don't have infinite resources.

    18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:03

        I feel like you could do better than 1/100th of the Marshall Plan for, to keep China-

    19. SPSarah Paine1:20:06

        Uh, but-

    20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:06

        ... from turning communist.

    21. SPSarah Paine1:20:07

        Uh, I think-

    22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:07

        And l- look at what the consequences was. Vietnam, we had to fight. Korea, we had to fight.

    23. SPSarah Paine1:20:10

        Got it. Got it.

    24. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:10

        Cambodia, the genocide there.

    25. SPSarah Paine1:20:11

        Got it. You, but you can't solve all these things. There are things that are not feasible. I mean, I like-

    26. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:16

        I'm gonna linger on this because, um...

    27. SPSarah Paine1:20:18

        You're an optimist.

    28. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:19

        (laughs)

    29. SPSarah Paine1:20:19

        But anyway, y- maybe you're right. But anyway, you've got my take on it, and you've got, I, I can't prove I'm right. Um, that would be my take.

    30. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:27

        I, I, I remember in your book, which is to, to your right, The War of Asia, you... uh, there's a passage where you say there's so many sort of individual conting- uh, uh, intention things that led-
17. 1:25:35 – 1:28:21

    Imagining a Nationalist mainland

    1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:35

       just had these tallies of numbers up of how many deaths through different events and, uh, so obvi- there, the famine obviously makes sense a lot of people would die, but you just go down the list and there's so many things where a couple million people die, and it's like one out of 10 items that happened within a span of a couple of decades.

Episode duration: 1:49:00