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Unknown A
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.
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Unknown B
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.
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Unknown A
Why don't the high level officials in the ccp, after they see the impact of the Great Leap Forward, the Liu Xiaokuis and the Deng Xiaopings, why don't they? 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 Cultural Revolution, this is.
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Unknown B
When you get Peng Dehuai, who 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. 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 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 char 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?
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Unknown B
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's a military leader, and Mao's gonna use him to restore order, but after he's ousted, all the people who are gonna 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. Educational system like all the people who gave the hard grades who may actually Know something? They're gone.
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Unknown A
From Mao's perspective, didn't the Cultural Revolution work extremely well? Because for him, yeah.
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Unknown B
Not for China.
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Unknown A
He launches it because he sees Khrushchev speech in 1950 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 like revered in a way that Hitler or Stalin aren't revered in their countries.
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Unknown B
Despite killing more people, I think Stalin's having a bit of a comeback with Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin is starting to mimic more of the centralized. He's going to recentralize his economy in ways that start looking like the old one.
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Unknown A
When people say things like Xi Jinping is acting like Mao, how do you react knowing how Mao actually behaved?
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Unknown B
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. 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. He may have degrees from places, but the institution in question during the Cultural Revolution wasn't delivering an education. So he's a believer in communism. Don't ever kid yourself that the Communist Party of China doesn't believe in communism. Now they think they've modified some of the economic stuff under Deng Xiaoping, but now they're recentralizing it right back the way it was.
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Unknown A
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 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.
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Unknown B
Sniff.
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Unknown A
How do you explain these, the CCP officials who personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution being pro Mao, I mean, Stalin.
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Unknown B
Was abused as a child and then he's incredibly abusive. Hitler was abused as a child. Why would you expect. What you're assuming the man I use the word sociopath or psychopath, both apply to him. Don't think he's gonna have any tender mercies for anyone. Oh, he abandoned various sets of kids who starved to death and died. And one son, he put them right up in Korea where he could get kill, 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.
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Unknown A
How do people in China today think about Mao? And why aren't they more pissed off? You look at these numbers, I'm guessing.
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Unknown B
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 want to feel proud of their leaders. And so Mao is incredibly consequential. And I think it's also really hard to look at the dark side of your own country. This country has slavery. It is our original sin. We have not gotten over it. And the part of the United States where slavery was most deeply embedded to this day has the deepest problems dealing with.