Maoβs Red Terror β Power, Fear, and Control in Revolutionary China π¨π³ | Boring History for Sleep
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What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hey, tonight we're going somewhere most history classes skipped entirely, Mao Zedong. A name that appears on t-shirts, coffee mugs and dorm room posters, right next to Che Guevara, worn by people who would not last a single afternoon in the world he actually built. We're talking about a man responsible for more civilian deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined, and yet somehow his face is still hanging over Tiananmen Square like nothing happened. 70 million people. Let that number breathe for a second. But before we get to the terror, the famines, the children informing on their own parents, we need to understand the world that made Mao possible. Because monsters don't appear out of nowhere. They get summoned.
And China in the late 1800s was doing everything it could to summon something enormous. Turn the lights down, get comfortable, and before we dive in, drop a comment. Where are you watching from? What time is it there? I'm genuinely curious who's up at this hour ready to go there with me. This is Chapter 1. To understand what Mao Zedong was able to do to China, you first have to understand what had already been done to China before he arrived. and the picture is not pretty. Actually, not pretty is the kind of understatement that historians use when they don't want to cause a panic in the first paragraph. The truth is that by the mid-1800s China was one of the most systematically humiliated civilisations on the planet, and the people living through it knew it, which somehow made everything worse.
For most of recorded history China had been exactly the kind of empire that other empires looked at nervously, from across a very large body of water. At its peak, the Middle Kingdom, and yes, Chinese rulers genuinely called it that, because when you've been the dominant civilisation in your region for 3,000 years, you get to name things whatever you want, produce more silk, more porcelain, more philosophy and more innovative technology than most of the known world combined. Paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass. China invented or refined all of these things centuries before Europe had figured out how to stop dying of plague long enough to write them down. The Tang Dynasty alone, which ran from roughly 618 to 907 AD, oversaw a cultural golden age that made the contemporary European Dark Ages look like, well, exactly what historians call them.
But history has a way of not caring about past accomplishments, and by the 19th century China found itself in the deeply uncomfortable position of being a great civilisation in steep decline, like a former champion boxer who still has all his. Old trophies on the mantle but genuinely cannot beat the new guys anymore. The Qing dynasty, which had ruled since 1644, was creaking under the weight of its own bureaucratic inertia, a population explosion it had no idea how to manage, and a growing conviction among its leaders that the best response to rapid global change was to pretend it wasn't happening. This is not a strategy that tends to work well in practice. The first major blow came courtesy of Britain, which had a small but deeply consequential problem.
It loved buying Chinese tea, silk and porcelain. But China wasn't particularly interested in buying anything Britain had to offer in return. The resulting trade imbalance was giving British merchants headaches. So, and this is genuinely one of the more creative solutions in the history of commerce, Britain decided to fix the problem by flooding China with opium. The drug was grown in British-controlled India, smuggled into China in massive quantities, and sold to a population that, unsurprisingly, took to it with the kind of enthusiasm that tends to follow when an addictive substance is made cheaply and widely available. By the 1830s millions of Chinese people were addicted, silver was flowing out of the country at alarming rates and the Qing government, finally paying attention, tried to ban the trade and confiscate existing stocks.
Britain's response was to send warships.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is discussed at the start of this section?
0:00β9:17
2
How did China become a civilization in decline?
9:17β24:35
3
What were the consequences of the Opium Wars for China?
24:35β53:19
4
How did the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions impact China?
53:19β2:13:33
5
What impact did the Little Red Book have during the Cultural Revolution?
2:13:33β2:23:56
6
How did the Cultural Revolution disrupt education and professional development?
2:23:56β2:32:07
7
What were the psychological effects of the Cultural Revolution on the lost generation?
2:32:07β2:42:31
8
How does the legacy of the Cultural Revolution affect contemporary China?
2:42:31β4:38:17
Speakers
1 identified
Host 262 min
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