Sarah Paine

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 with Mao offered the better model.

Why?

Because the decolonizing parts of the world were also 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 in 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.

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.

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, and 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.