Sarah Paine

It was also army discipline.

This is where the three rules, six points for attention, and a couple additional points, which were enforced through 1949 when the communists win the civil war.

You don't want to alienate the peasantry.

These are the people that are forming your cadres, your guerrillas, everything.

So maintain army discipline.

Don't mess with it.

Mao also took an incredibly forward-looking view about women.

Here he is with his fourth wife, the actress.

The other three had suffered, respectively, abandonment, execution by the nationalists, and commitment to a Soviet psychiatric ward.

Not for the faint-hearted.

But Mao calculated that women are about half the population.

They're miserably treated, so they're naturals for wanting...

a revolution, they're a force that will decide the success or failure of the revolution.

He calculated correctly and he was way ahead of his times.

And he also understood that in a guerrilla war, you're sending all the guys off to be

off fighting and you've got to be building base areas and things.

And this is where women came in to do those activities.

And as a result, he offered women the unthinkable, which is men and women are absolutely equal.

Women have the right to vote, be elected, participate in the work of the government.

He's just way ahead of his times.