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

Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy! Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only stay in power for decades, but not even face any insurgency? And how did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster - the patriotic hero who inflicted history’s worst human catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbered 5 to 1 decide "let's have peasants make iron in their backyards" and "let's kill all the birds"? In her lecture and our Q&A, we cover the first nationwide famine in Chinese history; Mao's lasting influence on other insurgents; broken promises to minorities and peasantry; and what Taiwan means. Thanks so much to @Substack for running this in-person event! Note that Sarah is doing an AMA over the next couple days on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ; see the pinned comment. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/4l3Sa8ImGFQ. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4JH4tybY1zX6e5hjCwU6gF, or any other podcast platform. Sponsor Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale AI. Scale partners with the U. S. government to fuel America’s AI advantage through their data foundry. 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. If you’re interested in learning more on how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to https://scale.com/dwarkesh. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sarah Paine?

  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 Naval War College. You got that clear? Complain to me if you got problems. All right. I'm gonna talk about Mao. He's an incredibly consequential figure. He's, 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. And think about China.

• 0:42Sarah Paine?

  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. All right. This presentation is based on the first eight volumes of Stuart Schramm's collected works of Mao. What Schramm did is he compared Mao's complete works, as published in the 1950s, to whatever

• 1:27Sarah Paine?

  he could find as the earliest version of whatever it was. And then he reinserted whatever had been cut in italics. So tonight, 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, for you all, prepared like a jigsaw puzzle of all of these different ideas. And then, 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

• 2:09Sarah Paine?

  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 no way you owe me. All right. So.

• 2:25Sarah Paine?

  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 Thermahen, the Naval War College's finest.

• 3:06Sarah Paine?

  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.

• 3:51Sarah Paine?

  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. And 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...

• 4:34Sarah Paine?

  Agricultural and underdeveloped, unlike Russia, which had quite a military, 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 there's a, I'm going to be talking tonight about Mao's theories in the, 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

• 5:16Sarah Paine?

  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

• 6:00Sarah Paine?

  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, agriculture ended.

• 6:44Sarah Paine?

  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 starve 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'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 investigated the statistics of people who are starving to

• 7:29Sarah Paine?

  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

• 8:14Sarah Paine?

  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 centuries and end with a 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 of these provincial leaders. And on this map, you can see the different colors and shadings. Those are different warlord areas.

• 8:54Sarah Paine?

  But the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party forming a united front in 1923 in order to eliminate these warlords. And so, Shenkai Shek, who is the head of the Nationalist Party, Generalissimo, 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.

• 9:34Sarah Paine?

  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, Shenkai Shek is finally successful, and he sends them off on the Long March up to way up north in desolate Yunnan. Long March is a real misnomer. It's the Long Route. And the communists lose 95% of their forces.

• 10:17Sarah Paine?

  I believe in English, decimate, lose, it means to lose 10%. Losing 95%, I think you need a whole new verb for what's happened to you. But Shenkai Shek doesn't wipe them out because he's suffering from divided attentions. When the West did the original, well, it's both the United States and Europe, the United States does its original America First thing with the holy smokes tariff, 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.

• 11:01Sarah Paine?

  So, Shenkai 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, 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 to 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 organize that in December 1936 in what's known as the Xian Incident. And the Japanese react viscerally because they look at it and the nationalists have

• 11:45Sarah Paine?

  gone over to the dark side because they've joined up with the communists. And this is when the Japanese escalate 1937, go down the Chinese coast, up the Yangtze River. And while, but then they wind up stale mating. 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

• 12:31Sarah Paine?

  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'll 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

• 13:15Sarah Paine?

  It 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. A 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.

• 14:00Sarah Paine?

  The first of these qualities is described by the French term, "coudoi." "Cou" is a glance, "oi" 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. He was, 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 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.

• 14:45Sarah Paine?

  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, what was it, a merchant, a lawyer? I'm missing something else. A soap maker? Imagine Mao, three stages of a person. Personal hygiene and whatever. It was not to be.

• 15:28Sarah Paine?

  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. It's not. And then he joins the Communist Party and is 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 in 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

• 16:11Sarah Paine?

  propaganda pamphlets in the 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 the propaganda department. If you have no power, words is your initial way into gaining power. I'm now going to use a framework from my wonderful colleagues, Mark Janest and Andrea Do, 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.

• 16:53Sarah Paine?

  And it's a very easy way to reproduce pictures back in the day. The message is about a model laborer, this always emulate woman, you know, 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.

• 17:35Sarah Paine?

  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're 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 your broadcasting system to reach a population and mobilize it. Military messengers are

• 18:18Sarah Paine?

  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. There's not how it would work. Also Mao had his international broadcasting system. These would be foreign journalists. While Mao was holding court up in Yan'an, he invited many of these journalists up there. Edgar Snow was by far the most famous. Why? Because he was 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 A-list

• 19:02Sarah Paine?

  political leader spending so much time with me? That never occurred to Edgar. But, you know, it's ours. And he was a very fine writer, Edgar Snow. And 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.

• 19:45Sarah Paine?

  To 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 was in Shanghai, Sichuan, turning on the communists and 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 semi-literate can make it their way through this poem.

• 20:30Sarah Paine?

  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 also they prize what's called grass writing, which is that unintelligible Chinese stuff writing under there. 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

• 21:12Sarah Paine?

  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. 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

• 21:57Sarah Paine?

  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 guerrilla movement,

• 22:40Sarah Paine?

  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 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 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.

• 23:25Sarah Paine?

  It's a separate thing. Okay, part one over. Mao, the propagandist, I've covered that. Now, we're 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.

• 24:08Sarah Paine?

  And that's where he flees to Jiangxi Province, to the Jiangxi Soviet, where he is going to become the political commissar of the Fourth Army. And he's also going to be in charge of land reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work.

• 24:25Sarah Paine?

  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 of down to the last picture work and last chicken as he's trying to establish what is really going on on the countryside. And he does. And 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.

• 25:06Sarah Paine?

  He identifies 70% as poor peasants, 20% who are like his father. They till their own land, they're middle peasants, and then they're 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 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. And 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.

• 25:50Sarah Paine?

  We're going to talk about class, approval of class status, confiscation of land, redistribution of land, in order to invert the social pyramid. And he's got a real plan for doing it. He argues that land reform is just essential for peasant allegiance. This is how you're going to get it, to draw these hundreds of millions into supporting the communists. But you've got to do it sequentially. You've got to propagandize first, and then you're going to distribute land later. And he had a little bit later. And he had a very bureaucratic... Way of redistributing, redistributing land. The approval of class status, he said, is a, it's a life and death decision for the

• 26:35Sarah Paine?

  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 going to get, who's going to get the land and who's going to take a bullet. And then Mao leverages the enthusiasm of this movement, movement for the people going to get the land, the other people not so much. And he's going to leverage this enthusiasm to get people to join the party and also to join the army. All right. 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.

• 27:19Sarah Paine?

  And because he needs the peasants to join him and their 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 keeps the rich peasants around too. This is a deleted portion of the collected words because rich peasant production, productions 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.

• 28:00Sarah Paine?

  In order to reform, to get the land, Mao is talking about a red terror to get it. And this, 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 sign. It's enough of him. Now, we're going to do Mao, the military leader.

• 28:45Sarah Paine?

  And you've probably heard this chestnut from Mao. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Mao spent his, it's still a part of his early career, being right, but being a minority view, that he had certain views about military operations that was 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. Lillie Sun was a labor organizer. He was in fact, oh, head of the Communist Party

• 29:29Sarah Paine?

  from 1928 and 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 Lillie Sun 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 Russia. And according to Mao, Comrade Lillie Sun did not understand the protected nature of the Chinese samur. Lillie Sun is trying to fight the decisive, i.e. war-winning battle far too early. You try to do that and you can get yourself ruined. Here's another critic, Xiang Ying.

• 30:12Sarah Paine?

  So Mao is in the Jiangxi Soviet. And he thinks his 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'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 to Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally. And you can imagine how this works for his later career. Not well. And he fires Mao.

• 30:55Sarah Paine?

  And this is where he winds, 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, 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 going to wind up, as up in Yunnan, way up north and deep in Muslim and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border. And Mao thought that was essential because they're the big benefactor. Whereas this gentleman, Jiang Guotao, who was the military commissar of the Fourth Army, thought nonsense. You want to be in Han, we're Han Chinese,

• 31:40Sarah Paine?

  we want to be in Hanland's lands. So he wanted to go into Western Sichuan, which he did. And he suffered a series of defeats over the 1935. 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, he had kudou 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, that war is politics by other means is something that is used to achieve political ends." So far, that's not incompatible. But then here's Mao's twist.

• 32:23Sarah Paine?

  "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. And he's going to detonate them and try to destroy them. And he talks about the violence of all of it, that you're going to get the peasant masses to overthrow these landlords,

• 33:02Sarah Paine?

  and that this will, it's going to require terror and 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 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.

• 33:45Sarah Paine?

  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 and 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 terrain. It's got to be defensible so that the weaker communist forces can defend it against conventional nationalists or conventional Japanese armies. So that's key. Pick your terrain carefully.

• 34:27Sarah Paine?

  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. So this is Mao's idea of what you need for a base area. And he believed that you needed to match 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 the interface in between, which is where guerrilla 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.

• 35:07Sarah Paine?

  Guerrilla detach, you might send guerrilla detachments to some of the guerrilla 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'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, 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 if you're weak, the way the communists were, you had to follow a strategy of annihilation.

• 35:51Sarah Paine?

  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 an attrition strategy. So 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, that's what they're going to be up to. So 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 defense,

• 36:36Sarah Paine?

  or they can become a nucleus of a new base area. So in small guerrilla groups, party members are tough and cadres trained. The party government, mass organizations are consolidated. And 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 guerrilla forces versus conventional forces. And what guerrilla forces are operating in the rear of the enemy is so that there's no stability or security. It's, in fact, there isn't even a front line.

• 37:20Sarah Paine?

  It's just, it's so amorphous. And so what guerrilla forces are supposed to be doing is exterminating small enemy forces, weaken larger ones, attack enemy lines of communications, establish bases, force the enemy dispersed. But they're doing all of this in combination with conventional forces. Because here, it'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... Or capable of producing the decision like winning the war. There is in guerrilla warfare, no such thing as a war winning battle. Right.

• 38:02Sarah Paine?

  Guerrillas are it's it's 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 Yen'an. He thought it was important to figure those things out in advance. Mao also cultivated an unprecedented group of allies, never before assembled in Chinese history, not only peasants, but women, minorities, youth, intellectuals, enemy army, most creatively. For cultivating the allegiance of peasants, it wasn't just education and land reform. It was also army discipline.

• 38:43Sarah Paine?

  This is where the three rules, six points for attention and a 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 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.

• 39:28Sarah Paine?

  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. And he also understood that in a guerrilla war, you're sending all the guys off to be 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. Women have the right to vote, be elected, participate in the work of the government. He's just way ahead of his times.

• 40:07Sarah Paine?

  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 can turn your guns on those trying to secede, that promise may be unenforceable. You can ask the Tibetans and Uighurs 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

• 40:50Sarah Paine?

  the radar, and then you insinuated them into the enemy army to become soldiers, porters, cooks. You could lose women to do this as well. Talk about people who are below the radar, and you're creating a nucleus of a communist party to erode them from within. And eventually, it'll have a shattering effect. And 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're a dead person if you don't fight. So your only hope is to fight. And if you put someone on death

• 41:30Sarah Paine?

  ground, they tend to fight with incredible willpower. And Mao says, 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's a large semi-colonial

• 42:15Sarah Paine?

  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.

• 43:00Sarah Paine?

  And they're outsiders. And this means that the peasantry are naturally going to gravitate towards the communists. Just simply, regardless of what the communists do, just simply but based on what the Japanese are doing, they're going to gravitate towards the communists. And also, the Japanese had grossly underestimated the Chinese. And as a result of these, uh, 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 three stages of people's war. The first stage is the strategic defensive. It's the prevent defeat phase.

• 43:40Sarah Paine?

  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

• 44:25Sarah Paine?

  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 it 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. 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.

• 45:07Sarah Paine?

  So, when you transition to phase two, initially, it's quite dangerous. And here's Mao writing about these problems and saying, "Look, 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, that when the war is over, they'll annihilate us." And of course, this is what General Westmoreland was trying to do in the Vietnam War, is getting the North Vietnamese to concentrate, so that he could blow them off the map. And of course, they'd read their Mao and didn't do that nonsense. So Mao is saying, "You only fight when you're sure of victory."

• 45:46Sarah Paine?

  And 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. And 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. And that's where the Soviet Union came in. And so, this is why Mao determines that Yunnan is going to be his terminal point of

• 46:32Sarah Paine?

  retreat. He's, "I'm finding my way through to the Soviet Union." No kidding. You've got to have the conventional arms to fight this. 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 Regents Campaign that Mao fought, North China in 1940, and he was smeared. The Japanese responded with the Three Alls Campaign, which

• 47:14Sarah Paine?

  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. You know, 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

• 47:58Sarah Paine?

  to strengthen the communists during all of this, both 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

• 48:39Sarah Paine?

  Dime, because D is for diplomacy, I is intelligence, M for military, E for economics, as being critical elements of national power. Look, it's better than only looking at the military elements. At least you've got three more things. But if you look at, if you look at what 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. All right, Mao is famous for all these reasons, but also for his cinefication of Marxism, where he makes all the things that I've told you about, it makes his version of Marxism

• 49:22Sarah Paine?

  much more applicable to these countries than newly independent countries after World War II of how they put things together. And he positions himself to 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. He had proven his kudou determination with his military strategy. He also anticipated when the Japanese war in China would stalemate.

• 50:04Sarah Paine?

  And he also anticipated more or less when the United States was going to get into the war in Asia. And he's the great cinefier of Marxism. All right, Mao 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 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, because they're communist and all these things.

• 50:44Sarah Paine?

  And 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, I mean, of North Korea trying to mobilize the peasantry in the South, that wasn't so successful. And Why? Sigmund Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately did land reform. And this glues loyalty of soldiers to the leadership doing this. And maybe that is not the only factor, but an important factor for why the Korean War turns out differently. Base areas.

• 51:28Sarah Paine?

  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, 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

• 52:11Sarah Paine?

  good for the defensive, kind of a big party organization, a lot of local support, you've got to have military forces there. Does Al Qaeda, well, it's ISIS or something, do they have all four of these things, or can you remove any one of them? All right. 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. And 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, right? I showed you the map.

• 52:56Sarah Paine?

  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 there in Manchuria, and then he springs a trap and destroys Chiang Kai-shek's armies up there. And then the entire civil war wraps up within a year of that. So 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 then Mao springs a trap. And MacArthur didn't realize that, I don't know, 350,000 Chinese troops had been infiltrated around him. Oops, missed that. It did not work out well.

• 53:38Sarah Paine?

  But for the US Navy now, 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 Yunnan being a really good one. And that worked. And then when the Manchurian Campaign initially wasn't going well for Mao, he retreated up to Saping, which was a little bit north. And that worked well enough. But when Shanghai 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.

• 54:23Sarah Paine?

  You suppose the communists don't know about it. And 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? All right, another concept from Mao is disintegrating enemy forces, which is what happens to the nationalists. Think about, Shanghai Shaq had been fighting since 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 Shanghai Shaq fought them alone for a long time before we joined the war.

• 55:03Sarah Paine?

  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've been fighting forever. And then the whole place just wraps up. And the same thing with Japan in World War II. That they've 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. And 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.

• 55:48Sarah Paine?

  And the places in question were ruined. So don't expect that to happen too fast. And of course, 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-da, you win. And they're cumulative, right? You do certain things and then they're, and then you get to phase two and they're, you've had this cumulative effect of destroying enemy forces and you're getting 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 an even better way to use it, is like a metric of how insurgency goes up and down. So that ISIS may be on the cusp of going into stage three.

• 56:33Sarah Paine?

  I don't know that they're 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. 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 the presence or absence of factors, presence, absence being opposites.

• 57:16Sarah Paine?

  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 dualities is a task of studying strategy, and it's really everything. So 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 with, 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. And you've got to, you've got to put everything in the context of each other, losses, replacements,

• 57:59Sarah Paine?

  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.

• 58:16Sarah Paine?

  Who has a distinguished military career. And also, he went on to get a D Phil. It's like a PhD from Oxford in military history. And 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. 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 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 "此地" as "death ground."

• 59:01Sarah Paine?

  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. So 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. There is now, what is it, over 40 years after his death.

• 59:45Sarah Paine?

  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."

• 1:00:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 Lama, Scale's latest solution available for military personnel. With the Defense Lama, military personnel can harness the power of AI to plan military or intelligence operations

• 1:01:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  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/dwarke. All right, back to Sarah. 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 everything. And then you fast forward to when he's in power

• 1:01:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  and you go to the Great Leap Forward. And some of the things that he was doing, you can't imagine that somebody thought this was a good idea, that peasants would take off the harvest, wouldn't attend to the crops, 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 this idiocracy-level ideas in the Great Leap Forward?

• 1:02:09Sarah Paine?

  Well, first of all, you need to think about what his objective is, which number one is stay 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 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 communist ideology is people don't believe it because they know it's wrong. They believe it because 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 so the basic theory that he's implementing is incorrect.

• 1:02:53Sarah Paine?

  It just, and it takes the communists a little while. Some of them haven't figured it out, but it takes them a little while to figure out their parts that don't work. But there's a whole other piece to him is, I 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 peace economy is crazy. But of course, he wants to do it. So he stays there. Or think about like in Britain, Winston Churchill, great wartime leader, but he's booted out of office right after that war. If you think about different capabilities of people. So don't expect one individual to do everything.

• 1:03:38Sarah Paine?

  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 going to extend central control to the countryside? Really tricky. I suspect that's why he puts them on communions 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 communions, then you control whether they eat or don't. You truly control them. So it's those factors. It's so big.

• 1:04:18Sarah Paine?

  When you, when you start putting a policy in place from Beijing and then how that actually fans out over the whole country has got to be a mess. Different localities and things.

• 1:04:29Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:04:33Sarah Paine?

  Which ones?

• 1:04:34Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:04:40Sarah Paine?

  Details, yeah.

• 1:04:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  But. That was an intentional famine where he was trying to root out the Kuomintes. 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, Molotov and others, say, "You can't do it because nobody else can run the government like you can."

• 1:05:01Sarah Paine?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  True, but the level of...

• 1:05:08Sarah Paine?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:05:18Sarah Paine?

  Well, first of all, Russia is a, 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. And you got the Taiping Rebellion. It's only the biggest of the peasant rebellions of the 19th century.

• 1:06:00Sarah Paine?

  And I can't remember, people estimate, I can't remember, 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 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 one's here, one's there. By the end of it, they've basically devastated 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. You're talking about a massively trashed country. And think about it, I'll give you another example for Americans in the room.

• 1:06:41Sarah Paine?

  And for others who aren't Americans, you have to, based on your dealings with Americans. The, 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 many, 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 kind of civil wars. At the end of the civil war, who gets, Li's army is allowed to go home.

• 1:07:26Sarah Paine?

  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.

• 1:07:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Just to linger on this.

• 1:07:51Sarah Paine?

  Uh oh.

• 1:07:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  So.

• 1:07:55Sarah Paine?

  New exit strategy.

• 1:07:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 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 better, but this is a lie and I'm not going to stand for it." Whereas if you go to the Great Li Forward, people will, 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 just this ability to like, have this basic discernment of who is, like, what is actually going on, that true situativeness is gone.

• 1:08:36Sarah Paine?

  Okay, there's, no, there's another, there were, Mao doesn't become canonized as Mao, or a mixing metaphors, the Emperor of China.

• 1:08:47Sarah Paine?

  Until victory in the Korean War. So in the early period, a lot of that, oh, Mao is supposed to have written this book called On Guerilla Warfare. It is not written by Mao. It took time to figure it out for outsiders. It's written by Peng Dehui and others, his generals. And so there were many people's ideas that went into winning the civil war. It is not just Mao's. And then he winds up purging these people later. And so it's not until after the Korean, during the Korean War, he's busy purging everybody massively because he can use it as a big excuse, right? We got this war, we don't want to hear from these people.

• 1:09:29Sarah Paine?

  And so he has purged more and more and more and more people so that there are fewer and fewer counter arguments. It's a real case against dictatorship. For all the chaos of party politics, you're at least, you're forced to confront the counter argument. It is a healthier situation to be in.

• 1:09:45Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:09:48Sarah Paine?

  Okay.

• 1:09:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 joins 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 like a master strategist here?

• 1:10:26Sarah Paine?

  I believe there's a detail of how many tens of millions of Russians died in that thing. So, great, it's a personal success for him. The numbers of Russians who were destroyed in that are incredible. So, okay, for dictators, yeah, they can have personal successes. I think more it's in these horrible wars that dictators can rise. Also, Great Depression's provide hothouse conditions for dictators. So, yeah, 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. Right, it might be a lesson for our own day.

• 1:11:11Sarah Paine?

  Right, isn't this Ukraine's problem? They didn't want to fight a war. What are you gonna do? Putin launched.

• 1:11:17Sarah Paine?

  We don't exactly want to fight a war. Well, what do you want to do? Let Putin do whatever he wants forever, for 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.

• 1:11:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 1:12:00Sarah Paine?

  I doubt it.

• 1:12:03Sarah Paine?

  I think communism was a new thing, right? So you've got it going on with the Russians. Yeah, 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 desperate situation with all what the Japanese were doing. And then they get blamed for it all. Yeah, there can't be something worse than that. We call communists. But I don't, I don't know that anyone could have predicted. Can anyone do a crystal ball what the world's gonna be like in 10 years? Yeah. It seems, when you read the history books, that it had to be that way.

• 1:12:44Sarah Paine?

  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?

• 1:12:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  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.

• 1:13:07Sarah Paine?

  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 go get themselves killed. And that's quite, that's quite something to ask someone to make that kind of sacrifice. See, it had better be worth it. Right? And so there are 300 million Americans. Well, the world's got 8 billion. 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

• 1:13:51Sarah Paine?

  and other things that come through the UN? It 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. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. China's 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.

• 1:14:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  So after World War II, the Soviets are giving the communists in China tremendous amounts of leftover weapons from the Japanese, a bunch of other goods, supporting them tremendously. At the same time, Truman, you know, is wishy-washy, 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 is has to be forced in 1948 by Congress to give a couple hundred million to China, literally 100th of what was given to Europe.

• 1:15:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  And by that time, it's too late for Chiang Kai-shek. The, if you, I mean, if you just look at that record, it just seems like sort of we've abysmally messed up after World War II and helping the nationalists stay in power, right?

• 1:15:27Sarah Paine?

  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, they know, and Japanese as well, they know exactly how to recreate things and produce, rapidly produce modern institutions.

• 1:16:11Sarah Paine?

  You're talking about China, they'd 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. So, and we've had this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we decide we're going to do the debathification thing. And then we think the police are going to 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 competent Foreign Service officers in China in this period. Why?

• 1:16:56Sarah Paine?

  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 Shangai 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, right? If he's busy grooning them in to 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, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years later,

• 1:17:40Sarah Paine?

  when they've already lost their careers and who knows how they raised their families.

• 1:17:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  I thought it was the case, 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-

• 1:17:53Sarah Paine?

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

• 1:17:56Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:18:09Sarah Paine?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:18:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  And they're constantly goading the nationalists to form some sort of ceasefire, do some sort of coalition government, when in fact what I should have done is like, no, you have to make sure that you keep China.

• 1:18:19Sarah Paine?

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

• 1:18:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Even in like 1945, 46?

• 1:18:31Sarah Paine?

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

• 1:18:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  I mean, we didn't have to send GIs, we just had to like not, not cut off support.

• 1:18:53Sarah Paine?

  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.

• 1:19:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  I feel like you'd do better than one one-hundredth of the Marshall Plan, for to keep China from turning communist, and look what the consequences was. Vietnam, we had to fight, Korea, we had to fight, Cambodia, the genocide there.

• 1:19:25Sarah Paine?

  Got it, but you can't solve all these things. There are things that are not feasible.

• 1:19:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  I'm gonna linger on this because, um-

• 1:19:32Sarah Paine?

  You're an optimist. Anyway, 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. That would be my take.

• 1:19:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  I remember in your book, which is to your right, the word Sichuan, you, there's a passage where you say, there are so many sort of individual contingent things that led to the communists taking power. If any of these factors was off, the outcome might have been different. The fact of all these factors, the fact that American supporter, 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 they should have, it just didn't matter.

• 1:20:04Sarah Paine?

  I don't know that it may, it's just not politically feasible. I mean, talk about it. You want to go, 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 tours, a year tour here and there. It was, you're 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.

• 1:20:39Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:20:43Sarah Paine?

  Oh, I think it was so minor. By then, it's too late. The great question is, some people would argue, then 1946, when Marshall tells Chiang Kai-shek to stop, 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 Saping, 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 can make an argument that that might be true. Here's the counterargument, I don't know the answer.

• 1:21:23Sarah Paine?

  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 thing, the only way, given the Chinese railway system, is 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,

• 1:22:07Sarah Paine?

  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 gonna 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 gonna 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?

• 1:22:52Sarah Paine?

  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. So that would be the lesson from this thing of the, we kept trying to do a coalition government with the communists and the nationalists, it's a non-starter. But, we, 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 that, 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.

• 1:23:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  If you had to speculate, suppose the nationalists win. In Taiwan, because they're forced to, they have a very sort of 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?

• 1:23:51Sarah Paine?

  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 big after-action report. 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. And they were, 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.

• 1:24:36Sarah Paine?

  But land reform was bloody in Taiwan. But it's, today Taiwan has a very equal income distribution.

• 1:24:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  And what is the explanation for, you were just had these tallies of numbers up of how many debts through different events. And so 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 the span of a couple of decades.

• 1:25:04Sarah Paine?

  It's famine. If you have warfare, you have famine. Yeah, it's not mostly bang, bang, you're dead. It's just, that goes on too. But it's starvation. We disrupt things in this way.

• 1:25:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 1:25:30Sarah Paine?

  Oh, I think it's because everyone's on board about peasants have got their land. The only way they're going to keep it, they think, is by supporting the communists. And then they're all, Mao isn't living any kind of luxurious life. There's no, that was another thing, that you have these rich officer corps and the nationalists flaunting their wealth among absolutely starving people. And that's another reason why they were 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, these incredibly baggy clothing. No one's got luxury, luxury wear or anything.

• 1:26:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Although after they won, Mao is like famously a fan of luxury and has Right, in a way that I think Stalin would sleep on his couch in his office.

• 1:26:18Sarah Paine?

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

• 1:26:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so if we go, you're 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 in 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.

• 1:26:45Sarah Paine?

  Communists are good at this. When the North Vietnamese win, 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.

• 1:27:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Why don't the high-level officials in the CCP, after they see the impact of the Great Leap Forward, the Lushakris and the Deng Xiaoping's, why don't they?

• 1:27:34Sarah Paine?

  They did.

• 1:27:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, 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 the Cultural Revolution.

• 1:27:43Sarah Paine?

  This is when you get Peng Dehui, who, he was the general that was 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? Is he?

• 1:28:18Sarah Paine?

  Rallies, 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 beloved Chairman Mao, 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. And 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's going

• 1:29:02Sarah Paine?

  to use him to restore order. But after, he's ousted all the people who are going to get rid of him. So that's what the Cultural Revolution is about. And it is ruinous for production, right? Doing all this. And you're gutting your education system, like all the people who gave the hard grades who have actually known something, they're gone.

• 1:29:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  From Mao's perspective, didn't the Cultural Revolution work extremely well? Because-

• 1:29:29Sarah Paine?

  For him, yeah. Not for China.

• 1:29:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  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. So-

• 1:29:48Sarah Paine?

  Well, I think Stalin's having a bit of a comeback with Vladimir Putin. So, and Vladimir Putin is starting to mimic more of the centralized, he's going to re-centralize his economy in ways that start looking like the old one.

• 1:30:04Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:30:10Sarah Paine?

  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. So, 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 culture. He may have degrees from places, but the institution in question during the Cultural Revolution wasn't delivering an education.

• 1:30:54Sarah Paine?

  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 re-centralizing it right back the way it was.

• 1:31:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Given the fact that he personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution, I think there's a story that at some point, because his dad was announced, he was announced and he like 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 like, these CCP officials who personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution being pro Mao?

• 1:31:33Sarah Paine?

  I mean, Stalin was abused as a child, and then he's incredibly abusive. Hitler was abused as a child. Why would you expect? But you're so, the man, I use the word sociopath or psychopath, they both apply to him. Don't think he's gonna 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, and Stalin said, nah, nah, nah.

• 1:32:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  How do people in China today think about Mao? And why aren't they more pissed off? You know, you look at these numbers.

• 1:32:22Sarah Paine?

  I'm guessing, I'm not Chinese, but I think all of us need to be proud of things. And 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 wanna feel proud of their leaders. And so Mao is incredibly consequential, and I think it's also really hard.

• 1:32:56Sarah Paine?

  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 to be, that's just obvious to be proud of. Like, you know, we're just the wealth and innovation and things, of recent innovation. And then we claim we won all these wars all by our lonesome. And of course, we had allies, come on.

• 1:33:37Sarah Paine?

  But I think that's part of it, is understanding. The Chinese history's been so sad. If you ever go to a Chinese movie, you hear the "Our door," whatever the instrument is. "Our," whatever it is, I've got the word wrong. 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, and what is it? The Arnold Schwarzenegger line in True Lies. "Oh, honey, they were all bad." I mean, that's...

• 1:34:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  I want to try out an idea on you. So...

• 1:34:14Sarah Paine?

  You've tried many. What's the latest?

• 1:34:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  The... Well, 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're to like really abandon communism and pursue pro-growth policies, you needed viscerally the culture of revolution as a counterexample, the Great League Forward, to say, "No, we've got to try something else."

• 1:34:45Sarah Paine?

  Possible. Definitely possible, because of all the people who are 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. And I think it's around 1990-ish, where Taiwan is, I think, this is, I'll try this. It's got 1/50th the population of the mainland. It's got 1/250th of the landmass of the mainland. And it has about 40% of the GNP. And if you're trying, PRC mainland, looking at this,

• 1:35:30Sarah Paine?

  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 of the Communist Party is. There used to be this racist notion that, oh, 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 there, 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.

• 1:36:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  What I find disturbing about communism in comparison to, I mean, maybe even like especially Chinese communism, is if you, 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.

• 1:36:47Sarah Paine?

  Oh, well, Hitler's just trying to annihilate people. So he doesn't care what they're gonna tell him. He's just gonna kill them all. So that's just completely, he's into destroying every last year 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? And there was actually a way to mobility is 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 reeducating people.

• 1:37:31Sarah Paine?

  You could shoot everybody, you could. But that's not the Chinese tradition. The, the loads of people dying is, a lot of it's starvation. So people like Deng Xiaoping, who, if he'd been in Russia, they 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.

• 1:38:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, i- if you look at, you're mentioning, uh, Shankai Shik's Purge of the Communists, where he just massacred thousands of them.

• 1:38:08Sarah Paine?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:38:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Whereas other people-

• 1:38:10Sarah Paine?

  He's a soldier.

• 1:38:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Whereas other people, even other nationalists, wanted to be, accommodate the communists more, especially early on. And he, I think he has one quote that, you know, the Japanese are a disease of the flesh, but the communists are a disease of the soul. So, wh- what was the nature of his anti-communism? Because, I mean, in retrospect, obviously, the means, we don't endorse, but he was right about that, that understanding, what would happen if the communists took power.

• 1:38:37Sarah Paine?

  He was interested in the communism, and he sent his son, Jiang Jingguo, to Russia to study, and actually, his son was hostage up there. He married a Russian. And that's one of the reasons you don't have a Jiang Dynasty, because these children are not 100% Han, right? Because their mom's Russian. And, however, as he learned more about it, because initially, he's interested in that, he's interested probably in fascism as well, and how you organize a side, and he studied in Japan, knew a great deal about how the Japanese had done things. I think he, military education there as well. But then he starts realizing how dangerous they are. He was accurate.

• 1:39:20Sarah Paine?

  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 Shankai Shik knew you only take on one enemy at a time, you'll become overwhelmed if you do. And he believed that really, you needed, 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 the Japanese separately. But he got, faced so much popular pressure, that that's when he go, the Xian Incident

• 1:40:01Sarah Paine?

  takes place in the end of 36, where he agrees to form the Second United Front, because he realizes he'll be overthrown by a 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.

• 1:40:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  When you read Western journalists who are covering the Communist 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?

• 1:40:36Sarah Paine?

  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 bored, a young man, he wants an adventure, so he goes off to China. So this, typical. And he's in these cities where he's seeing nationalist corruption, and it's evident there. And Mao is looking for a foreign journalist. There'd been a guy, Jack Reed, who'd written however many days of the Russian Revolution, back during the Russian Revolution, who'd really popularized 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.

• 1:41:20Sarah Paine?

  You want someone who can 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 Sung sisters, another one of the Sung sisters is married to Shangkai 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 Yunnan to interview the big man? And Edgar goes, sure. And they infiltrate him through Japanese lines and all the rest of it. And there's Mao, the busy man, who's spending hours with a 30-year-old, or I don't even know if he's his 20-year-old, I can't remember how old he was.

• 1:42:04Sarah Paine?

  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 guerrilla, this and that. And he is, what is it? He is the last person to get out of Yunnan, and then the Japanese and the war just shuts it down. So no one's got any more information about Mao. Ever. So Edgar Snow writes his book Red Star of China. He gives the drafts to Mao. Oh, yeah, he does the Mao interviews and then he has Mao correct them and his translator correct them back and forth, back and forth, which

• 1:42:46Sarah Paine?

  isn't the normal thing. And then over the different editions of Red Star of 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 of those people go away and they're no longer in the index. And Edgar Snow goes on, goes along with this. And for the rest of his life, he is publishing books that are various variation on a theme on this book. So it's the only thing that makes him important.

• 1:43:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Before he dies, is he discredited?

• 1:43:21Sarah Paine?

  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 in trouble with the McCarthy era, as you can well imagine, for good reasons, actually. And so Mao sends his personal physician or something 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

• 1:44:06Sarah Paine?

  made him important. And so it's the, that's what he was to the end of his life. Me, me, me, me, me.

• 1:44:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  When you had the slogans up about how Mao was 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.

• 1:44:25Sarah Paine?

  Like a tweet.

• 1:44:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Sarah Paine?

  Still works.

• 1:44:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  I mean, why was this enough? You know, you can just write one line and that's...

• 1:44:33Sarah Paine?

  It's not enough. I think it's, 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 it in the current election of how important information is. And Mao and the communists play it well, and the Russians absolutely understand how to do this.

• 1:45:16Sarah Paine?

  This is their, they're really good at understanding of 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.

• 1:45:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  When was the last time you were allowed to go into the archives in China?

• 1:45:33Sarah Paine?

  Oh, it wasn't a question of being allowed.

• 1:45:37Sarah Paine?

  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. And 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. And 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.

• 1:46:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's funny to hear you say, "I wouldn't visit China now." So in two weeks, I'm gonna go to China. And my next question...

• 1:46:29Sarah Paine?

  Have fun.

• 1:46:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  My next question was gonna be, what is your advice?

• 1:46:31Sarah Paine?

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

• 1:46:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  When you're in these archives and you're studying all these atrocities that happened, I mean, 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. And 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?

• 1:47:11Sarah Paine?

  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, 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.

• 1:47:51Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 1:48:04Sarah Paine?

  You want to save your reputation?

• 1:48:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Great, thank you.

• 1:48:08Sarah Paine?

  You're welcome. Thank you for coming.