Sarah Paine

It's been in print ever since.

And it's the original footnote in Chinese history because no one knew anything about Mao.

And so then everybody starts citing Edgar Snow and then we cite everybody and everybody and everybody, but actually it only goes back to Edgar Snow.

So Mao got his word out.

Mao thought you want to keep the message simple, you want to make it epigrammatic so that people can understand it rapidly.

In his day, this meant having matching slogans to the equivalent of newspaper headlines to provide a lens for people to understand events, rather like tweets in our own day.

So when the White Terror occurred, when this is when Chiang Kai-shek is turning on the communists in the First United Front, the slogan was, arm the peasants.

And then when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the new slogan is, Down with imperialism and the Nationalist Party too, because you want to smear your enemy in the Civil War while you're at it there.

But there are a whole series of these slogans.

And here, Mao is one of the most popular poets in China, certainly, of the 20th century.

He could write really simple couplets.

If you look here, I think it's a total of eight characters, so that someone who's semi-literate can make their way through this poem.

On the other hand, he wrote really complicated things because he needed to garner the support of intellectuals initially before he'd educated enough peasants and workers to take over.

And intellectuals prize poetry, and also they prize what's called grass writing, which is that unintelligible Chinese stuff writing under there.

If Mao set these poems to...

tunes that everybody knew, people could sing them on the Long March and elsewhere and learn them that way.

So he's an incredibly accomplished man.

He also understood you have to manage the message, and the way he did that is through political mobilization.

Part of that is you've got to tell people what the policy objective is, which for him was abolishing imperialism, feudalism, and the landlord class, and then presenting a strategy for how to get there.

And here are the media that he used, not only the written