Stephen Kotkin

communism as potentially successful.

So we criticize these fools who thought that the Stalin regime was not going to kill them, was not going to produce famine.

And yet we have this narrative that the Communist Party produced an economic miracle in China, which

I'm sorry.

The Communist Party took advantage of the economic miracle in China, played a part in the expropriated the hard work of many people, stole the businesses.

A lot of those local officials just stole the land and stole the businesses from people who created a success.

This is the thing that the party did that's really important.

Deng Xiaoping first went to Japan in early 79, before he came to the US and met Carter, put on the cowboy hat, that gigantic 10-gallon hat that was bigger than he was.

He was like five gallons, the hat was like 10 gallons.

He goes to Japan, and you're looking at Japan, DK, and it lost the war.

It was actually literally incinerated in the American use of atomic weapons.

It was destroyed.

It lost the war.

And it's rising to be the second largest economy in the world.

Like, what happened?

How was that possible?

How could Japan rise from the ashes, literally, when China won the war?

It was on the winning side.

Right.

And it's $200 per capita GDP.