Transcript
Claims
  • Unknown A
    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 from the 1920s and 30s when he had the time to write. But there's a lot more to Mao than just that. He had quite a track record. Once he won the civil war, he imposed a social revolution. What's that? It's more than a political revolution. You're not just replacing the government, you're going to wipe out entire social classes. And I don't mean then, hey, here's your one way ticket out of here kind of way. No, no, social revolution is here's a mass grave, dig it, and then you're in it kind of way.
    (0:00:00)
  • Unknown A
    So if you look at these statistics of Chinese deaths and many of their wars, this is from much of the Maoist period. I think it's 45 to 75. What you'll notice the figures in white, I believe are civilian deaths, not military deaths. And it gets really quite ugly. There are more Chinese civilian deaths here than all deaths in World War II. And then for those of you who think the Chinese are all great long term strategists, you need to ponder these numbers. How is it possible to kill so many of your own? That's generally not a mark of good strategy. Moreover, most of them died during the Great Famine, which was the only nationwide famine in Chinese history. Why? Because it's not caused by the weather. It's caused by policies set in Beijing. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao put all the peasants on communes.
    (0:00:51)
  • Unknown A
    That meant the party was in control of the food supply. That is who lives and who dies. You don't get a meal, you're very dead. In addition, he decentralized industry and you can see these backyard furnaces pictured here. As a result of this, production collapses agriculture and industrial. But Mao keeps exporting food. Why? Because that's his pocket change. That is a major source of government income if he wants to be able to do anything. So they keep exporting food. As a result, 40 million Chinese starve to death primarily in rural areas and disproportionately peasant. Chill, girls. The least valued members of society. The statistic of 40 million deaths comes from this book by Yang Jishang, 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 death, including his father, for whom he wrote this book to serve as an eternal tombstone.
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  • Unknown A
    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 ban, a banner of communism, and then fighting the coalition of all the major capitalist powers to a stalemate in the Korean War, or in their mind, a victory that constitutes ending what they consider the era of humiliations that started in the mid 19th centuries and end with the communist revolution. So he's a hero at home.
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