Sarah Paine

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.

Young 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.

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 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.

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.

but the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party form a united front in 1923 in order to eliminate these warlords.

And so Chiang Kai-shek, who's 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.