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

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, 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.

(laughs)

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.

(laughs)

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)