Dan Snow's History Hit - Chairman Mao

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976, Chairman Mao reshaped the nation's course of history, founding the People's Republic of China and implementing sweeping socio-political reforms that dramatically changed the country. However, his rule was marred with controversies and disastrous policies, leading to widespread suffering, trauma, and ultimately the deaths of millions.In the first episode of Warfare's Dictators series, James is joined by author Jung Chang to talk about her and her family's experiences under Mao's rule, and to help shed light on who exactly Mao was. Looking at the devastating loss' she faced during the Cultural Revolution, her eventual move to the UK, and how Mao's political relationships reached even Russia - what legacy has Mao's rule left on not only China but the rest of the globe?PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Once a week, as you know, I feature an episode from our family of podcasts. We've got loads of podcasts out there, go and look them all up. This one's from the Warfare feed. It's all about Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao, the politician, the strategist, the revolutionary, the mass murderer. He's a figure that looms very, very large indeed over the history of the 20th century. Our presenter, Professor James Rogers, is joined by author Jung Chang to talk about her and her family's experiences under Mao's rule and to tell us exactly who Mao was.

Enjoy. Who was the real Chairman Mao? Was he the fighter for his people, a guerrilla rebel against China's autocratic government who rose up from poverty to rebuild and lead China as a communist nation? Or was he simply a totalitarian dictator who had a secret personal goal to dominate the world and in doing so caused the death of 38 million of his own people during the greatest famine in history. I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, this is Warfare, and all this month on the podcast is Dictators Month. To kick off, I wanted to explore the life and legacy of the world's

most brutal dictator, Mao, and to debunk the myths around his rule. Yong Chang is our guest. Yong was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1952. She lived under Mao's rule, her parents were officials in the Communist Party and during the Cultural Revolution she worked as a peasant, a barefoot doctor, a steel worker and an electrician before leaving for Britain in 1978. Young is also the author of Mao, The Unknown Story, co-authored with John Halliday, and Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, except in China, where it's banned. I know you're going to find this one fascinating,

so if you want to listen to the rest of the miniseries ad-free and a day early, subscribe to History Hit using the code WARFARE, which gives you 50% off your first three months. But now, here is Young Chang on Mao, history's most brutal dictator. Hi Young, welcome to Warfare and thank you so much for taking the time to explore the history of Mao Zedong as part of our special mini-series on dictators. But you have a personal connection, a family connection to this period of time. Perhaps you could give us a little insight into how Mao's regime directly affected your family's history and your family's experience.

Mao's regime directly affected your family's history and your family's experience? Yes, I was born in 1952 under Mao. And I lived my first 26 years under Mao's rule, and in a couple of years after he died. So I knew that period very well. My parents were communist officials and my father was born in 1921 and he joined the communists when he was a teenager and mainly he wanted to end poverty. There was too much poverty around when I was a child. I remember father saying well you know we were starving. And also he saw a lot of injustice in society. And the communists promised to end, to change both. So my father joined the communist underground and then he walked on his own long march, so to speak, for many months to reach Mao's headquarters after Mao's Long March in the 1930s in Vietnam. And he rose to be a senior official in the party. My mother joined the communist underground when she was 15. My grandmother was a concubine and there was a lot of injustice against the women.

So she thought the communists would end the injustice against the women. And of course, both of them were disillusioned terribly in the later years. But when I was born, they were still communist officials. So I led a very privileged life, a childhood among the communist elite. We lived in this compound with chauffeurs and gardeners and cooks and guards. And I so much took hierarchy and the privilege for granted that when I first came to Britain, I thought Britain was wonderfully classless and my views were revised later. But when I was 14 in 1966 Mao launched his Cultural Revolution. It was his revenge against his party opponents and against the people in the population who opposed his policies,

particularly his policies which led to the Great Famine. Between 1958 and 1961, 40 million people died of starvation. And then my parents, it was at that time, my father stood up to Mao and took his stand and questioned Mao's policies and spoke against Mao's policies. And in fact, he said he wanted to go to Zhonglianghai to debate with Mao. And of course, what he got was arrest, torture, endless denunciation meetings. You know, these horrible sessions where a hysterical crowd sat in the audience and the victims were forced to stand on the stage and their arms were ferociously twisted to the back and their heads were fiercely pushed down and they were kicked and beaten and my father was terribly beaten and he was exiled to a camp and died tragically and prematurely.

My mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father. She refused. As a result, she went through over a hundred of those denunciation meetings, and she was made to kneel on broken glass. She was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and threw stones at her, and she was exiled to a camp. But she survived. I grew up with this intense personality cult of Mao,

and we, the children, were told Mao was our god. And if we wanted to say what I say is true, we would say, I swear to Chairman Mao. And so it was unthinkable to question Mao. But two years into the Cultural Revolution, I started to question the society I was living in. It was, in fact, on my birthday in 1968. And there was a lot of violence, and I've seen a lot of atrocities. My parents were victims, and I saw my teachers being driven to suicide, and being beaten up and so on. Just terrible. I wrote my first poem on that day, and I was lying in bed polishing the poem when I heard the door banging, and the Red Guards had come to raid our flat. If they saw my poem, I would be in trouble. My family would be in trouble. poem, I would be in trouble, my family would be in trouble. So I had to quickly rush to the bathroom to tear up the poem and flush it down the toilet. Afterwards, I lay in bed and I thought,

we were told socialist China was paradise. But if this is paradise, what then is hell? But if this is a paradise, what then is hell? And at that time, I blamed Madam Mao and I blamed the people around Mao for all the horrors. And I couldn't blame Mao because, I mean, the brainwashing, the indoctrination was so powerful. And I didn't blame Mao. But it took me another eight years, I think until 1974. And by then I had learned a little English, and somebody gave me a copy of Newsweek. It was a little picture of Mao and a little picture of Madame Mao. And the caption says, Madame Mao is Mao's eyes, ears and mouth. And I suddenly realized, of course, it's Mao.

Mao is behind all this. Mao is responsible. How could I not have realized that? But of course, you know, we must never underestimate the power of brainwashing. And never underestimate the power of good journalism to help undo that brainwashing. It's astonishing to think that in China, perhaps many people have vaguely felt things were not right, Mao was responsible. But without somebody speak the word, you know, it was just very difficult. And I think it was that period was indeed a period of the brain death of a nation. It does sound like a kind of dystopian thought police during the Cultural Revolution. You can't even write poetry in the comfort of your own room

without the genuine, real fear and threat of being raided by the police. Can you give us some insight of what you were meant to be as a good Chinese citizen? How were you meant to think and operate in society? Well, you were supposed to obey Mao, Mao's orders. No matter what? No matter what. I mean, no question about Mao's orders. I remember when I was a child, Mao had turned against cultivating flowers and grass and had said these were bourgeois habits. So as school children, we had to go out of the classrooms to remove the grass from the school lawn. And I remember feeling intensely anxious. I was 12 and I didn't want the flowers and grass, which I love, to disappear.

But I then immediately had to criticize myself, had to suppress my thought and had to, you know, accuse myself for not thinking in line with Mao's instructions. But I think gradually Mao's words were losing their magic and because it was too horrible in the Cultural Revolution. So Mao in effect ordered children to denounce their parents who had fell victims of the regime. And I and my siblings did not follow his orders. I mean, we loved our parents. We admired them for their principles and their courage. And my family became very close in the Cultural Revolution, whereas countless families were destroyed when children were

turned on their parents. And in fact, my father said to me, and to my siblings as well, if he didn't have such a loving family, he would have committed suicide a long time before. A lot of people committed suicide because their family had denounced them and they felt there was nothing to live for. So Mao is not only the leader of China, he is a godlike figure. And in many ways to many children, he is also their parent as well, more so than their own biological parents who they're being forced to turn upon. Yes, indeed, you're absolutely right. Because when I was a child, there was a song which every child in China had to sing, which is, father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao. Wow. So it's quite literally in the songs and the culture all around you.

And, you know, with fear of me becoming a bit of a psychologist here, I feel like with Mao's policy on children in mind, we should go back to Mao's own childhood and figure out how this man was made. Now, am I right in thinking that he comes from quite extreme rural poverty himself? No, I'm sorry, no. Actually, his father was relatively wealthy. According to the regime's own category, his father actually belonged to something called a rich peasant. If it were somebody else, I mean, he would have been a so-called class enemy, but because he was Mao's father, so that was a finesse. His family background was a finesse. Oh, so I'm falling for Chinese communist propaganda myself here. So take us back and tell us a little bit about his background. background? Mao was from a relatively wealthy family, peasant family in Hunan in South China.

And according to his own description, in that area, people were very hardworking, and it was easy to get rich. This is what Mao described his village to his teacher. He was born in 1893. So he grew up in the late years of the Qing dynasty, ruled by Empress Dowager Cixi, whose biography I also wrote. And in that period, during her life, and in the years after her death. But carrying on with her legacy, China was at its most free and there were numerous opportunities. So the young Mao had a good education. He went to a teacher training college in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, college in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, which was called the Foreign Building, because it was a very elegant European-style building. And Mao, I mean, he had the kind of freedom and opportunities I wouldn't dream of myself

decades later under his rule. And he was a journalist, he could write whatever subject he wanted to write to speak his mind and in one of the articles he advocated the independence of Hunan, his province. So it was the kind of freedom that freed his mind and made him break from the traditional way of thinking and became a radical. But he became a communist not because he was passionate about communism, not because he was passionate in sympathy with the poor people's lot. I mean, there was absolutely no sign of both, of either. And he was just at the right place at the right time. The Chinese Communist Party was formed under Moscow's command and organization.

One of the party leaders was a professor, Chen Duxiu, who was in Shanghai organizing the founding of the party. And Mao happened to be in Shanghai. Party. And Mao happened to be in Shanghai. You see, as a peasant lad, he was free to travel all over China. And sometimes, you know, with his girlfriend, absolutely no problem. So he was there, he saw the professor, and the professor gave him a job to start a bookshop selling books, not just left-wing books, but pro-communist books or communist books, because communism was not illegal in those days. So Mao loved reading. He loved books.

And he was poor in the sense that he was a schoolteacher. He never had a lot of money. And suddenly, he got money to start this bookshop and the money that came from Moscow so he got sponsorship and that just suited him and once he was in the party then he when he was trying to be the leader of the party and in in the power struggles, he realized that the Communist Party suited him very well. And communism as an ideology suited him very well because it was not a democracy. It didn't require majority decision.

Mao was never popular. In fact, throughout, I mean, in those days at least. But all the decisions in the party were made by a few people. And Mao was very good at intrigue, at manipulating this, you know, up to five people. That's how he got to be the leader of the party, and he suited him. And later he said he was Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, known for his cruelty, for burying scholars alive.

Qin Shi Huang plus Marx. So he's inherited both of the Chinese, in fact, the worst side of the Chinese culture and this extreme ideology. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Wow, so you have this schoolteacher who becomes a bookseller, who becomes a mix of Karl Marx and a ruthless emperor who rises to become the head of the party and this leadership, his role during the Chinese Civil War. And some say he was quite a good military leader, at least in terms of tactics, and that helped him to rise up the ranks. Well, I mean, the Civil War is in the 1940s, I mean, the major war. But Mao's rise started much earlier. He basically started his political career in the 1920s. And the most power-driven, the most ruthless, the most scrupulous of all the Chinese leaders. And the Communist Party was tiny at the time in the 1920s. And to get this little party to power in the big China, Stalin felt he needed somebody like that. So he started to promote Mao, even though Mao was unpopular among his colleagues and a lot of party members. And that's the biggest factor in Mao's rise. I think his own strategy

more than his actual military talent, because he had military commanders, quite able military commanders, and also he's got Russian and German military advisors, particularly in the earlier Civil War in 1920s and 30s. But Mao was a strategist. The biggest strategic success for his coming to power was during the war against Japan. Yes, of course. During the Second World War. Now, at the time, all his colleagues wanted to fight Japan, and Stalin wanted the Chinese communists to fight Japan,

to tie Japan down in China, so Japan wouldn't be able to turn north and attack Russia. Now, Mao was the only person who absolutely refused to fight Japan. He saw China's war against Japan, not as China against Japan, but as a three, quoting a Chinese ancient story, three kingdoms, three sided war.

There was Japan, there was Chinese communists, and there was Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government. He wanted to manipulate the war of Japan against Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese government. So in a way, he helped Japan destroy Chiang Kai-shek's regime. So he was able to challenge Chiang Kai-shek after the war. His army before the Japanese war, vis-a-vis the nationalist government army, was 1-6-0. But after the war, it was 1 to 3. So his army had grown tremendously during the war against Japan, not at the Japanese expense, but at Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist army's expense. That is fascinating. So Mao used the Civil War and the Second World War combined

to craft himself the power he needed to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists. And of course, during this period as well, Mao is being heavily funded by the West. You see pictures of Mao sitting with American officers and GIs. He's been given equipment and training and tactics. All of these things combined mean that by the end of the Second World War, that Chinese civil war is ready to rage again and for Mao to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek. Well, actually, I don't think the West, I don't think America funded Mao. I mean, they had small gestures, but I'm not serious, serious funding. He was funded

by Moscow in a big way. But the Americans did him a big service during the Civil War in the 1940s, because Chiang Kai-shek's strategy was to cut off Mao, the communists, from Russia by depriving them of a land border. And the communists were on the ropes when Marshall and the force put pressure on Chiang Kai-shek. So Chiang Kai-shek had to have a ceasefire. And he gave the communists the four months of ceasefire. and he gave the communists the four months of ceasefire. And with this land border, with the Soviet Union and with North Korea and with Soviet Outer Mongolia, Mao was able to get huge supplies and training, which transformed his army. So they sort of inadvertently helped Mao, So they sort of inadvertently helped Mao, except not in huge quantities of arms.

Well, the thing is, Mao said America was his arms supplier. But in fact, I mean, A, that's a figurative speech. I mean, he meant he captured these American arms from the Nationalist Army. But actually, mainly they were from the Nationalist Army. But actually, mainly, they were from the Soviet Union. A lot of them were for the Soviet war against Germany. And the foreign lettering were chiseled out to help Mao say these arms were actually from the West. I see. And some of these weapons and military hardware, I'm sure, would have come across from the United States as well, supplied to the Soviet Union, then passed into the hands of Mao as he caught them keeping Chiang Kai-shek on side, but then inadvertently again funding that civil war that continues after the Second World War? Well, America was deceived by Mao's trick of Mao made in cahoots with Stalin, which is to portray the Chinese communists not as communists, but as agrarian reformers.

So they agreed, Mao and the Russians, they agreed. Mao even wanted to change the name of the Chinese Communist Party. So they presented themselves as harmless reformers. And Mao, you know, there were Americans in Mao's headquarters in Yan'an, observers. And Mao said to, you know, told them he was out to charm them and said he wanted to visit America. He felt closer to America than to Russia, you know, things like that. And of course, he did deceive many people who, and of course, Edgar Snow, this American journalist, who played a big role, giving Mao a nice image in the West. He actually also played a role for my mother to join the communists because Edgar Snow's writings

about Mao were then translated by the Chinese communists and given a harmless title of Journey to the West instead of its original title Red Star over China which would have been too obvious so they called it Journey to the West. So Edgar Snow's book was presented as a very neutral book. He was this American, you know, writing objectively and fairly about the communists. And so my mother, as a teenager, read that book. My mother, as a teenager, read that book and that influenced her a lot in her decision to join the communists when she was 15. You see, that's fascinating for me to hear, to hear your point of view on that US-Mao cooperation,

how Mao is playing his own games here, trying to present this positive image to the West to keep support going, or at least to stop them turning against Mao in many ways. And this is a game that's being engineered by Mao and Stalin. And for me, as you speak, that makes perfect sense in so many ways, because as we move towards the post-war period and through the late 1940s, well, we can very much clearly say Mao is not a friend of the United States, especially as we move through into the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Oh, Mao was never a real friend of America. I mean, his policy, which he told his party, you know, high officials, was to neutralize America, for America not to stand so firmly with Chiang Kai-shek and to be more

friendly towards him. And that was his policy during the post-Second World War civil war. And he was quite successful. Well, when it comes to Mao's post-Second World War period, I'd be really keen to hear, given your own obviously personal experience towards the end of Mao's regime, what were his major ambitions for China at this point? And was he successful in helping China grow in any way? Or is Mao's legacy, as we look back at it, one of just complete disaster for China? Well, Mao's ambition, as soon as he seized China, was to build a huge world-class arms industry. So he conquered the world. And that

brought great disaster to the Chinese people. China was poor, and Mao bought huge quantities of arms industries from Russia and from Eastern Europe. And what did he have to pay for these expensive purchases? And Mao's answer was food. So over the years, he basically shipped huge quantities of food to Russia and to Eastern Europe. East Germany, by the way, lived its food ration thanks to Chinese food in the 1950s. And Mao knew his people were dependent on this food to survive, but he didn't care. He said for all his projects to take off, maybe half of China will have to die. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. on Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Which was really terrifying. And when I was writing, I've discovered this when I was writing the biography of Mao and had access to these documents. And I thought, you know, I'm living through Mao and living through the Great Famine. And I knew Mao you know, living through Mao and living through the Great Famine, and I knew Mao was awful, but I didn't know he was that awful.

He was knowingly starving his people to death in order to ship the food abroad. And so when people say that you can't compare Stalin, Hitler and Mao, not because they're not all incredibly brutal dictators, but because Mao killed so many more of his own people than Stalin and Hitler. Do you think that Mao should be remembered in history as one of the most ruthless and brutal dictators there's ever been? Absolutely. I mean, he was there in the League of Hitler and Stalin. I think he should

be remembered as somebody who was responsible for at least the death of 70 million Chinese in peacetime. 70 million? In peacetime alone? In peacetime alone. And so is this due to the famine that is caused from shipping all of this Chinese food over to Eastern Europe, to the Soviet Union, to East Germany, which of course for-war period to build up its own economies and its own food stockpiles, if you can see that the communists are thriving, then you might encourage people to turn towards communism. So Mao is vital to Stalin at this point, but the cost is to millions of his own people. But Stalin was dead then. He died in 1953. But anyway, never mind. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, I mean, the West German communist leader kept asking Mao to supply enough meat to East Germany so they could beat West Germany. That was Khrushchev's time in this so-called peaceful competition with the West. At that time, I lived in China. I knew people were starving. I knew people were starved to death, including the family of our maid. Our meat ration was a quarter of a kilo,

half a pound a month. That was the ration. And that was a time when a lot of Eastern European countries didn't know what ration was about. You know, Mao was paying for all this. I mean, you know, the East Germans, the Albanians, the Albanians never knew what ration was like. And so he was just really so awful.

I mean, had no pity for his people. I mean, what then he probably did, he laid a kind of military foundation for military industries. I mean, like Deng Xiaoping said, what do we get from Mao's period? I mean, there is nothing, only two bombs and one missiles. Two bombs stand for atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, and then the rocket. But well, then it was a sort of foundation of the military industries in China today. And we know, of course, after Mao's death and when Deng Xiaoping comes to power, there is an opening of China over a longer period. But when was it that you decided to leave China young? Because I know that you came to the UK to study at my old workplace at

the University of York, which is a great honour for York as well. And you were the first person from China to get a PhD from a British institution. But what caused you to leave at the point you did? Well, after Mao died in 1976, China began to open, then I was able to take a national exam. I did very well in the exam. So I was given a scholarship to come to the West. I was one of the 14 people in the group to come and study in Britain. So it was a mix of hard work and a fortuitous opportunity that brought you over to Britain. To start with, I wanted to come. I mean, I grew up in China that was completely isolated

from the outside world. I felt suffocated. I mean, here I had an opportunity to come to Britain. Of course, I grabbed the opportunity. I created my own opportunity, I must say, because I was the first person to walk into a pub because we were all told. There were many rules.

You can't go out on your own, etc. One was you're not allowed to go into a pub but i was dying with curious torn with curiosity and i knew there was a pub across the road from the college and one day i darted across the road i pushed the door of the pub open i walked in but i saw nothing. Oh yeah, we were told there were nude women gyrating in the pub. And of course, I saw nothing. I have no nude women. Well, I can safely say that in the pub across the road at the University of York, there are no nude women gyrating. No, this was before York, University of West London.

Ah, well, I don't know much about what goes on down there. But being in the UK must have dispelled so many of the propaganda and the myths that you were told under the Maoist regime. Was it that moment that was a kind of a light-up moment in your mind? Well, I think by the time I came to Britain in 1978, I had already rejected much of the propaganda and the indoctrination that had taken over my brain. I think the people who did most for my liberation of the mind was the regime itself. I mean, over the years, all the things that I naturally loved have all been condemned as being bourgeois.

You know, like we were talking about earlier, cultivating flower and grass and being kind to people and, you know, saying thank you. Too often warranted denunciation meetings in the Cultural Revolution and, you know, violence, atrocities, those things I hated. And the books were burned across China. And in the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, China was virtually a cultural desert. You know, no cinemas, no theaters. They were turned into quasi-prisons.

And my mother was imprisoned in the biggest cinema in Chengdu, where I grew up. And, you know, all these terrible things, you know, while they named all these things as the evils of the West. And then I couldn't help saying to myself, you know, the West must be a wonderful place. And so I already wanted very much to see the West. And of course, the West did not let me down. the West. And of course, the West did not let me down. I mean, the first year when I was in London,

and I had such a wonderful time. I mean, of course, things were new. I mean, having said the indoctrination was gone, but there were many, many new things and the wonderful things which I was learning every day. And so it is in many ways also a liberation. Talking about York University, I had a very nice, wonderful professor, Professor LePage at the linguistics department. I went to discuss with him about my PhD thesis. I went to discuss with him about my PhD thesis. I sort of gave him a survey of the existing linguistic theories.

So I said, I don't like this one. I think that one is good. Or, you know, the third one is wonderful. And he listened. And at the end, he said, now show me your thesis. And I said, what are you talking about? I haven't written it yet. And he said, but you have all the conclusions. that had fastened my brain by a totalitarian education. We were always told to start with Marxist theories, Mao's thought, the party line, and to find the things to fit these guidelines. Or the facts were ignored or even condemned. So, I mean, I think that to keep an

open mind, and this was so simple, it seemed so simple, but it's so important and it affected my whole life afterwards and my career. Well, while the facts and the creativity were suppressed in China, we're so glad that you're able to join us here and here on this podcast to bring us your point of view on this history and to help us reappraise our own views of the Maoist regimes and its legacy. Young, thank you so much for your time today. You have to tell us, where can we read more of your work on Mao? I wrote a book called Wild Swans, and that's the experience of my family, the story of three generations of women, my grandmother, my mother and myself. And then I wrote a biography of Mao with my husband, John Halliday.

We spent 12 years, 12 years, travelling all over the world, in China, in Russia, when Yeltsin opened the Russian archives, and in China, when China was relatively open in the 1990s, and with lots of documents being made public and witnesses still alive and interviewed all over the world, you know, virtually anyone who had interesting dealings with Mao. And we really started from the facts, as my professor from University of York said, you know, I must start from the facts and to draw conclusions, which is why having even written Wild Swans, and it still took me and my husband combined doing nothing else 12 years to write this book, A Biography of Mao. And I think that's really all we have found out from the archives, from the witnesses. And it was also a riveting decade in our life. We were like two detectives solving one puzzle, one mystery after another. Wow, what a fascinating journey. The book is called Mao, The Unknown Story, and it is available

everywhere, including the link in our show notes. Young, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for listening. A reminder that you can now follow along online on Twitter at HistoryHitWW2, on Instagram at JamesRogersHistory, and on TikTok, also at JamesRogersHistory and on TikTok also at JamesRogersHistory. You can also subscribe to our free Warfare Wednesdays newsletter by the link in the show notes. you