Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy!Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only stay in power for decades, but not even face any insurgency?And how did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster - the patriotic hero who inflicted history’s worst human catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbered 5 to 1 decide "let's have peasants make iron in their backyards" and "let's kill all the birds"?In her lecture and our Q&A, we cover the first nationwide famine in Chinese history; Mao's lasting influence on other insurgents; broken promises to minorities and peasantry; and what Taiwan means.Thanks so much to @Substack for running this in-person event!Note that Sarah is doing an AMA over the next couple days on Youtube; see the pinned comment.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.SponsorToday’s episode is brought to you by Scale AI. Scale partners with the U.S. government to fuel America’s AI advantage through their data foundry. Scale recently introduced Defense Llama, Scale's latest solution available for military personnel. With Defense Llama, military personnel can harness the power of AI to plan military or intelligence operations and understand adversary vulnerabilities.If you’re interested in learning more on how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to https://scale.com/dwarkesh. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
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What I'm about to say are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the U.S. government, the U.S. Navy Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the Naval War College. You got that clear? Complain to me if you got problems. All right.
Okay.
I'm going to talk about Mao. He's an incredibly consequential figure. For the 20th century, he's one of the most consequential political or military figures. And he's also one of the most important figures in Chinese history of any century. And he's also a terribly significant military and political theorist. And this is not an endorsement of Mao.
It is rather just an accurate description of his global and enduring importance. And think about China, historically it's represented I don't know, a third of the world's population, a third of the world's trade. That's a big slice of humanity. Moreover, Mao's theories have been used by many enemies of the United States to take over failing states from within in order to assert dictatorial rule.
He is also probably the most brilliant and most famous psychopath in human history, and that is saying a lot, so here we go. All right, this presentation is based on the first eight volumes of Stuart Schramm's collected works of Mao. What Schramm did is he compared Mao's complete works as published in the 1950s to whatever he could find as the earliest version of whatever it was.
And then he reinserted whatever had been cut in italics. So tonight watch the italics. And Mao didn't put all of his best ideas in one place. He scattered them all over the place. And so what I've done is got to come for you all prepared like a jigsaw puzzle of all of these different ideas. And then in order to make it comprehensible to you of all these random little tidbits,
You have to have like a coat rack to hang all the hangers, and that's called a simple framework, and I'll get there. But in your own lives, when you've got all kinds of complicated things to transmit to others, you can look at what I'm doing tonight, and you can do it for other things as well.
So here we go with good old Mao, and oh, by the way, a lot of those 8,000, 7,000 pages weren't that interesting, so in a way you owe me. All right, so... All right, these are major military theorists, just to run you through them. Clausewitz is the West's major military theorist of bilateral conventional land warfare.
Sun Tzu is Han civilization's great theorist of how you maintain power in a continental empire, multilateral world, using coercion and deception. The two fellows on the right are maritime theorists. In a way, they're writing the missing chapters of Clausewitz. It doesn't talk about naval warfare at all. The top one is Alfred Theramahan, the Naval War College's finest.
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