Sarah Paine

And he does.

And what he concludes is that 6% of the rural population owns 80% of the land, and 80% of the population owns only 20%.

And his solution is going to be revolution.

And he goes further into the statistics.

He identifies 70% as poor peasants,

20% who are like his father, they till their own land, they're middle peasants.

And then they're the exploitative 10% who don't get their hands dirty with anything.

And what Mao is trying to figure out

is how you can incentivize 80% of those people into actively taking part of the revolution.

This is the key.

And what he wants to do is take the bottom of the social pyramid and mobilize it to crush the top of the pyramid.

And the way he's going to do this is

by determining class status through a land investigation movement, which he says is a violent and ruthless thing.

We're going to talk about class, approval of class status, confiscation of land, redistribution of land, in order to invert the social pyramid.

And he's got a real plan for doing it.

He argues that land reform is just essential for peasant allegiance.

This is how you're going to get it.

to draw these hundreds of millions into supporting the communists.

But you got to do it sequentially.

You got to propagandize first, and then you're going to distribute land later.