PJ Vogt

He decides that landlords are evil, has one to two million of them killed, and gives their land to poor farmers.

It's an atrocity.

The poor farmers in the end also don't actually get to keep the land.

Taiwan also does land reform, but a gentler, more interesting kind.

Taiwan confiscated land from landlords who owned above a certain amount, but the process was much less insane.

The landlords, compensated by the government, were also given shares in some big state-owned companies.

Rather than shooting them, Mao's version, in Taiwan, the idea was to absorb these landlords into the state industrial class, which kind of worked.

It's not somebody shows up at your house and says like, you capitalist pig.

It's a little closer to like eminent domain.

Yeah, exactly.

And is this, are a lot of these consumer doodads, I'm curious about America's relationship to Taiwan during this period.

Is it like we are the buyers of these consumer doodads?

Like how are we positioned?

We are 100% the buyers of these consumer doodads, right?

And what are the consumer doodads?

What are we buying?

What are they sending us?

Yeah.

So then you have a democracy that is also a really serious economy.

What I don't understand also is, like, how does Taiwan then go from there to now?