Sarah Paine

demoted from one of his positions.

And that's when you get the cultural revolution because Mao is on his way out of power from these guys.

So what does Mao do is he rallies, he gets out of Beijing and he rallies the youth, the Red Guards.

These are the

Children who've been educated in communist education about how wonderful the communists are and beloved Chairman Mao.

So Chairman Mao tells the teenagers that they should be in charge.

Think about teenagers, not much life experience, but telling them they're in charge.

And then they start out by killing off their teachers.

right they have teachers they probably don't like and it's incredibly empowering and then they start working their way up the educational system and fan outward and uh it's like a semi-civil war and then this is when lin biao comes in who is a military leader and mal's going to use him to restore order uh but after he's ousted all the people who are going to get rid of him

So that's what the cultural revolution is about.

And it is ruinous for production, right, doing all this.

And you're gutting your educational system, like all the people who gave the hard grades who may have actually known something, they're gone.

I think Stalin's having a bit of a comeback with Vladimir Putin.

So and Vladimir Putin is starting to mimic more of the centralized.

He's going to recentralize his economy in ways that start looking like the old one.

Oh, Xi Jinping apparently reveres Mao.

My understanding about Xi Jinping's education is his dad was a very high level communist leader who was purged but not killed and sent to sort of interior north somewhere in China.

And so when Xi was on the, what is it, the down to the countryside movement where a lot of kids were sent to really horrible places, he was sent, I think, where his dad was.

Or where protectors who liked his dad were, so it wasn't as bad as it could be.

But he was not well educated because he couldn't be in that period.