Sarah Paine

Mao also offered minorities the previously unofferable, which was self-determination.

And what the minority people didn't get is that a promise made in a really desperate civil war with a regional war overlaying it, once you win those things and you can turn your guns on those trying to secede, that promise may be unenforceable.

You can ask the Tibetans and Uyghurs how it all worked out.

All right, so Mao's strategy, he had a strategy of disintegrating the enemy army, and let me tell you how that one worked.

In every county, you select a large number of workers and peasant comrades, people below the radar, and then you insinuate them into the enemy army to become soldiers, porters, cooks.

You could lose women to do this as well.

Talk about people who are below the radar.

And you're creating a nucleus of a communist party to erode them from within.

And eventually it'll have a shattering effect.

And he said also part of this disintegrating the enemy has to do with leniency.

Sun Tzu advocates never put your enemy on death ground.

Death ground means that you just have no, that you're a dead person if you don't fight.

So your only hope is to fight.

And if you put someone on death ground, they tend to fight with incredible willpower.

And Mao is don't do that.

So what he did when you capture people, propagandize a little, recruit the willing, but release the unwilling so that the comparison of communist leniency and nationalist brutality becomes absolutely stark in this otherwise pitiless war.

Okay, that's the Civil War.

Now we're gonna go to the second problem, which was Japan, the regional war.

Mao made a really thoughtful assessment of what were the key characteristics of China that would determine what kind of military strategy he would use.

And this is his assessment.