Sarah Paine

warlord rule forever, and so how are you gonna extend central control to the countryside?

Really tricky.

I suspect that's why he puts them on communes, because it lines up with communism, but it also lines up with party control, because if you put all this vast population, because most people are peasants, on communes, then you control whether they eat or don't.

You truly control them.

So it's those factors.

It's so big.

When you start putting a policy in place from Beijing and then how that actually fans out over the whole country, it's got to be a mess.

Different localities and things.

Details, yeah.

Well, first of all, Russia is quite a developed country compared to China.

And if you think about it, Russia had been industrializing since the late 19th century.

And China is a much later event.

Russia also has all sorts of institutions and things that China was lacking.

So already Stalin has many more tools at his disposal than what the Chinese communists are going to have.

Also, the kind of warfare.

Think about the warfare in China.

And you get the Taiping Rebellion.

It's only the biggest of the peasant rebellions of the 19th century.

And I can't remember, people estimate, I can't remember if it was 20 or 30 million people.

That's a large number, right?