Sarah Paine

Mao also emphasized professional military education because he needs to turn peasants to cadres, to guerrillas, to conventional soldiers.

And there's gotta be an educational pipeline to do this.

And if you look at this Northwest Counter-Japan Red Army University, of the first original departments, political work is one of them.

This is not professional military education the way it's done in the West.

It's a separate thing.

Okay.

Part one over.

Mao the propagandist.

I've covered that.

Now we're going to go about Mao the social scientist.

And here he says, the peasant problem is the central problem of the national revolution.

If the peasants do not rise up and join and support the national revolution, the national revolution cannot succeed.

And if you look...

further along in his biography, while the First United Front was still operative, he's heading the Nationalist Party's Peasant Institute in Guangzhou, and also their Central Commission on the Peasant Movement, learning a great deal about it.

But once the White Terror hits, he needs to get out of Dodge fast, or they'll kill him.

And that's where he flees to Jiangxi Province, to the Jiangxi Soviet,

where he is going to become the political commissar of the Fourth Army.

And he's also going to be in charge of land reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work.

All right, for Mao, he's doing data-driven survey after data-driven survey, does a whole series of them between 1926 and 1933.

And he's trying to figure who owns what, who works for whom, who tills where, and inventories of down to the last pitchfork and last chicken as he's trying to establish what is really going on on the countryside.