Dan Snow's History Hit - The Creation of Modern China

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

On the 1st of October 1949, a huge crowd gathered in Tiananmen Square. In the shadow of Beijing's imperial Forbidden City, they listened as Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, proclaimed the birth of the People's Republic of China. The trials and tribulations of the Chinese people were over, he told them, and their liberation from the shackles of imperialism had finally arrived.To mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the PRC, we're joined by Dr Jeremiah Jenne, an expert in Late Imperial and Modern China. He explains how the nation transitioned from imperial rule to Chinese Socialism and all about the key characters whose opposing visions for China's future created so much chaos along the way.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today it is a deep dive into the foundation of modern China. We're going to see out the final imperial dynasty. We're going to talk about the republican era, civil war, warlordism. We're going to be looking at the second world war, the massive Japanese invasion and monstrous crimes against humanity. Then we're going to take it through to the Civil War, to Mao, the Long March, and how the People's Republic of China was born.

I'm doing this episode because it's now the 75th anniversary of the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and because I've got a great passion for Chinese history, which was only deepened, heightened, strengthened by my trip to China earlier this year. I'm joined by a fellow traveller on that adventure in China, Jeremiah Jenny. He was an academic working in China until very recently, and he's been on this podcast several times. In fact, he's been on the podcast talking about the Opium Wars, which proved popular with all of you. Thank

you for listening. The Terracotta Warriors and the First emperor, the man who in many ways built the foundations on which China is still built today. The modern history of China is one of the most spectacular stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a story that we all need to understand if we're to have any grip on what is to come over the next couple of decades. And it gives me great pleasure to have Jeremiah back on the podcast and get us into it. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Jeremiah, great to have you back on the podcast, buddy. Good to see you too, Dan. So the Chinese empire, it's been around for, the dynastic rule's been around for a long time. There've been moments within those 2000 years, but after two millennia, it comes to end in 1912.

That's right. There are forces at work in the early 20th century, ideas about nationalism, the decline in the fortunes of the last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, mismanagement. And of course, we can't forget the enormous pressure of the foreign powers, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Russia, and others, who are slowly carving up sections of China into concessions that they controlled. slowly carving up sections of China into concessions that they controlled. All of these things created a situation that made it very difficult for the center to hold. By the time you get to 1911, 1912, it didn't take much of a push for the whole thing to come apart. What gets it eventually? Is it an internal coup? Is it the military? Is it just the emperors giving up, throwing their hands in the air? What's the big moment? Dissatisfaction with the dynasty was rife in the late 19th and early 20th century.

There were those who wanted to reform it from within, and there were, of course, others who wanted to overthrow it, some of them inspired by ideas from outside of China, and start something new, maybe even a republic. A lot of those different groups, they weren't always working together very well. There was, however, one figure, Sun Yat-sen, a rather remarkable person who was really very good at bringing together different groups, sometimes with competing ideas, and forging them together into an alliance. And this alliance, this revolutionary alliance, if you will, was one of the forces that ultimately would topple the Qing when some of the units embedded in this revolutionary alliance and also members of the imperial army ended up revolting or rebelling in the city of Wuhan in October 1911.

Was there a moment, was there a glimpse of a China that could get rid of this dynasty? And some of those voices were proved correct. He needs to enlist allies, including a military man, a military commander named Yuan Shikai, to assist him in finally forcing the dynasty out of power. Well, Yuan Shikai's price is, you're president, make me president. And unfortunately, Yuan Shikai's commitment to Republican ideals was somewhat tenuous. Within a few years, he had made himself president for life. He had outlawed political parties, including Sun's new political party, the Nationalists or the Kuomintang, and he had abolished parliament. By 1915, UN tries to make himself emperor, a bid that fails, but when he dies a year later, he leaves behind just a complete mess, a hole in the middle of the state that is filled immediately

by warlords, militarists, foreign powers. And between 1916 and 1926, 1916 being the death of Yuan Shikai, and 1926 being when we see the country knit back together again by one of Sun's protégés, Chiang Kai-shek. Well, China fits most of the definitions of what we think of today as a failed state. And we call it warlordism. So what, just regional strongmen battling it out, seeking power? Right. Think about what a failed state looks like today, but on a much larger scale. So you have a government in the capital, in Beijing, the old dynastic capital, but the presidency revolves, it seems like, every year or maybe even every month, depending upon which warlord is in

control of the capital that week. And it doesn't really matter what the warlord who controls the capital or who the president is, because most of the country is in the hands of other warlords or other foreign powers. And some of these foreign powers are using militarists and warlords inside the country as proxies for their own strategic gains. So you think about what's going on tragically today in places like South Sudan or in countries where they have a political crisis and now extrapolate that to something the size of China. And you get a sense of just the immense pain, the immense trauma and the immense suffering that was going on in this period. You mentioned that the country was sort of knitted back together in the late 1920s. How does that come to be? Sun Yat-sen dies at the age of 59 in 1925. And when he dies,

the leadership of his political party, his movement, goes to a young protege of his, the leader of one of his military academies that Sun has set up named Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Kai-shek uses his position as head of the Nationalist Military Academy, the Wampoa Military Academy, to form the core of an army that then he uses to then push from the south of China, marching north and allying with warlords or conquering warlords or otherwise subjugating sections of China under his control until finally in 1927, he's able to unify the country or a large section of the central part of the country under his leadership with a new capital, this time in the central city of Nanjing. It's also worth noting that as he is doing this, as Chiang Kai-shek is doing this, he is not doing

it alone. He has with him supporters and allies from another political party, more recently formed than his, who are instrumental in helping Chiang accomplish his mission of unifying the country. And of course, that is the Communist Party. Okay, the CCP, I've heard of these guys. They are founded when? They're founded in 1921 at a meeting held in a girls' school in the French concession in Shanghai. This anti-imperialist party, one of the only places that they could organize was in the concession areas where they'd be safe from some of the warlords or some of their government opponents. In the beginning, in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party is relatively small. They're certainly not as bold a national force as the Nationalist Party.

And so one of the things that they do, and this may have been a suggestion from their Soviet advisors, was to join with the Nationalists in a united front that could unify the country, maybe eventually bring the country together, make it stronger, maybe even kick out those foreign powers at some point. And they're able to do this because you have the communists who go forth of the vanguard. They go into cities, they organize, they do leaflet campaigns, they do propaganda, they soften up the ground. So when the armies of Chiang Kai-shek and nationalists come through, it makes it much easier for them to take control of an area. And the two forces together, working almost like brothers, unify the country in 1927. And at that moment, Chiang Kai-shek turns on his communist allies and their supporters

within his own ranks in a massive purge that ends up killing thousands of people and almost destroying or wiping out the urban part of the Communist Party of China. It survives, but it survives mostly at this point in the late 1920s in the rural regions of the country. So I think we've seen that move before, right? The victorious coalition turning on each other violently the minute the battle has been won. Did Chiang initially, that looked like it had secured his regime, right? He goes on to rule a pretty much unified China? There's a big question. You asked a what-if question about 1912. What if the Republican

experiment had been allowed to continue? What might China have looked like? Another good question is 1927. What if Chiang Kai-shek's government had a real chance to enact some of the policies or actually rule for longer than they did. Because from 1927 to 1937, Chiang Kai-shek puts into place as best he can, given that he doesn't control large swaths of the country. Over time, he's still having to negotiate with different widespread militarists and warlords. And of course, the communists start to come back and he's fighting with them at the same time too. But between 1927 and 1937, we see recovery in China's cities. We see a period where there's the beginnings of a state being formed, at least in those areas that are under China's control. It's called the Nanjing Decade. And some people ask the question, okay, well, what would

happen if this had continued? Would China have been able to kind of right the ship, if you will? happen if this had continued? Would China have been able to kind of right the ship, if you will? Of course, during this entire time, once again, you have outside coming in the foreign powers. In the 1920s and 1930s, the most aggressive foreign power, at least vis-a-vis China, was Japan. Right. So we have this kind of interesting experiment in Chinese state building, badly disrupted by foreign aggression. But just before we come on to that, what kind of China was it that Chang was running? Do you think he would have been tempted? Do you think like Yuan Shikai, would he have been tempted to declare himself emperor? Did he feel that that rhythm of Chinese history would repeat,

there'd be another dynasty would emerge? Or did he have genuinely new ideas about how China should be run? Whatever he may have spoken new ideas about how China should be run? Whatever he may have spoken about it, I don't think there's any commitment that Chiang had to democracy. He definitely saw himself as a strong man, an authoritarian figure. And he certainly felt that what China needed was a strong leader, that China would fall apart, as his mentor Sun Yat-sen one time said, like 400 million grains of sand if there wasn't somebody holding it together. So I don't know if he would have declared himself emperor. I kind of doubt it. But I mean, generalissimo. I mean, who needs an emperor, Tyler, if you're going to call yourself

that? So he was definitely a strong man, maybe not a monarch, as we saw on Taiwan later on. That probably would have continued for most of the time he was in power. Tell me now about the Japanese incursions and the end of this Nanjing decade. This is a fascinating story. There's an Oxford professional named Ren Amitter has written a wonderful book called The Forgotten Ally about China's time in World War II. I highly recommend it. Japan had designs on the Chinese mainland going back to the late 19th century. By the 1920s and 1930s, they had managed to carve off large sections of what's today Northeast China, creating the state of Manchukuo, what we think of as Manchuria.

And by the mid-1930s, they were looking towards the rest of China as well. One of the reasons that China was vulnerable to this was, of course, that the nationalists were fighting with the communists. The communist insurgency had come back from this great purge. They had become much stronger. The two sides are fighting with each other. The Japanese are eyeing this, thinking, well, in this moment of weakness, we might be able to strike. Just before the Japanese begin a large-scale invasion in 1937, in fact, Chiang Kai-shek and his enemies, the communists, come together in a second united

front. But at this point, Japan had already begun the plans to kind of move in. They used an incident that occurred just outside of Beijing in 1937 as a pretext to launch an invasion. And from 1937 until 1945, most of China, most of Eastern China was under Japanese occupation. It shows how we view the world. But I mean, any objective discussion of the Second World War, you really should say actually starts just outside Beijing in 1937, right? With the bridge incident. In China, they would even say it goes back to 1931 and 1932 with the conquest of Northeast

China. But yes, in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek's troops, his best troops are deployed to fight off the Japanese invasion. And most of his best divisions are wiped out in that first year. By the time we get to 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt is asking Chiang, like, what are you doing with all the weapons we're sending you? Why aren't you doing more fighting? Chiang is in his third or wartime capital, or is the capital of Chongqing that he's had to move too deep in the mountains thinking to himself, dude, I've been fighting this war for four years and I've been losing for four years. I'm doing what I can, but I don't have

much left. Let's come on to the most famous communist in all, Mao Zedong. He was there in the girl's school, wasn't he? He was there right from the beginning. He was present at the creation. At the time, if you had asked the people in the room, one of you will become the leader of China and one of the most famous men of the 20th century, not many people would have pointed to Mao. But over time, in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Communist Party goes through these different phases where they're in ascendancy, and then they almost get wiped out in the purge, then they're in the ascendancy and then their battles against Chiang further constrict them until they're forced into this epic retreat called the Long March in which about 80% of their forces are lost.

In all of these situations, one of the things that Mao does over and over again is he seems like if he's not always right, he's not wrong a lot. And so by the time you get to the 1930s, the late 1930s, people start to realize that this figure, this Mao Zedong, he seems to be somebody who has a good mind for strategy, a good mind for guerrilla warfare, a good mind for propaganda. It's not an immediate thing. In China today, there's a certain sense that he was always destined to command. But over time, in the 1920s and 30s, he emerges as a first among equals. And by the time you get to this period I'm talking about here with the Japanese invasion, the occupation, of course, the communists are holed up in a base as well, trying to stay out

of the way of the occupation. But Mao has emerged at this time as pretty much the commander, or at least the leading figure of the Communist Party in China. So he is waging this sort of guerrilla warfare against the regime, against Chiang Kai-shek. He's up against, I mean, he narrowly escapes capture. He's kind of on the front line. He's definitely somebody who is in danger quite a bit, maybe not as much as some of the troops and maybe not as much as some of his own family members. But Mao, for whatever his faults later, we have to give him some credit as being quite a talented commander of guerrilla forces. He knew how to lead a guerrilla army. He was a very talented revolutionary general. We can talk later about whether that skill set always translates effectively to being

a good head of state. But at the time, he was somebody who was taking a group of fighters who were sometimes at the very edge of extinction or the edge of being wiped out and time and time again, kind of helping to reform them into a formidable fighting force that ultimately would win the Civil War. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about China more coming up. 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. People will have heard of the Long March, and indeed you've mentioned it, but it is astonishing. What are the circumstances? It's just before that big Japanese attack in 1937, this couple years before that, he basically relocates the Chinese Communist Party. After the purge in 1927, the communists regroup in the countryside. One of these is a rural base in South Central China, if you will. Mao is already there. He's one of the leaders there.

And as the base becomes bigger and bigger, other groups move in. Eventually, the armies of Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists start to encircle this area. There's some debate about what happened and discussions of strategy that ensued. But some of the commanders, some of Mao's rivals thought they should try to fight Chiang Kai-shek a little bit more directly. That turned out to be a flawed strategy. Whatever the reason, the nationalist troops were able to squeeze and squeeze the space until finally the only solution was to run for it. Mao and some of the other leaders led this massive retreat, tens of thousands of people on what's known as the Long March, marching something like 6,000 kilometers or something crazy like that.

I apologize that my frame of reference is the United States. It'd be like marching from Atlanta, Georgia to Minnesota in the Midwest via Oklahoma. It's this incredible distance. And of course, the entire time people are shooting at them and they're going over high mountains and deserts and plains and they're starving. And the idea is that very few of them actually make it. But that core that does, that core that finally makes it to what would become their rural base in Northwest China, they are knitted together. I mean, talk about having undergone something. I don't want to over-mythologize this because certainly the Communist Party of China does that a lot today themselves. I mean, think about any great epic struggle that you've ever heard in history. That's how this is remembered.

They were a band of brothers, which of course makes it all that more tragic when after the revolution, many of these brothers turn on each other. And as the Japanese invade and push into central China from their already conquered territory up in the Northwest, who does the bulk of the fighting? Is there genuinely a coalition between Mao and the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, or are they still at each other's throats even whilst fighting the Japanese? They're nominally united, but it is in the initial invasion and for much of the war, it is the troops of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government that do most of the fighting,

and they suffer most of the casualties. The communists do fight the Japanese as well, mostly through guerrilla warfare. They use some of the same tactics that they had used against the nationalists, against the Japanese. But the reality is that much of the fighting was done by Chiang Kai-shek. By the time you get to the later stages of the war, and of course, in China, 1943, 1944, 1945, these are the later stages of the war. And of course, in China, 1943, 1944, 1945, these are the later stages for them. They've been fighting this a long time. The communist leadership, including Mao Zedong, realizes that the war will eventually be over. And when it does end, it'll be the resumption of conflict with the nationalist government. They need to stock up, reserve their strength, and get ready for what is sure to be a battle for the soul of China. And of course, after the Japanese surrender in 1945, that's exactly what happens.

And they do pretty well. I mean, despite it being, obviously, it's an ulcer from which their army can never recover. But in terms of territory conquered, they conquered much of what we would now think of, you know, central and coastal China, this occupation is remembered for its utter brutality. And it's World War II. It's war in general. There was brutality and there was atrocities all around the world. But some of the things that were done in China on behalf of the Japanese army were truly shocking in terms of the massacre at Nanjing, experiments on human beings done by Japanese scientists, as well as just the wholesale slaughter of lots of Chinese civilians. And many people in China feel like their sacrifice does not get the same attention as the sacrifices made by, say, the Soviet Union or the sacrifices made by some of the European countries in the war. And I think it's worth pointing that out. The other thing that China never did, and as much criticism as

Chiang Kai-shek has gotten for the corruption of his government, some of the American generals called him General Cash My Check, all of that, fair enough. But one thing he didn't do was surrender. And we think about what that would have meant. It took the Japanese an enormous amount of manpower to hold on to China. If Chiang Kai-shek had just given up, that's a lot of manpower that could have then been redeployed and might have made the advances across the Pacific that much more difficult. It's a hypothetical, but it's one worth thinking about when we think about what China's role was in the war, why Chiang Kai-shek was at those conferences along with Churchill and Roosevelt, and what the war meant for them. So there's astonishing scale of fighting in the Chinese theater operations, conventional

fighting between Chiang Kai-shek's troops and the Japanese. Are the Chinese communists doing any fighting at all? They just stopped piling their weapons. Their propaganda today is that they were valiantly fighting a brilliant guerrilla effort to set the countryside aflame under the Japanese occupiers. As historians, we get caught between the propaganda wars, right? So did they fight, or were they as instrumental in the defeat of the Japanese as the current government of China maintains that they were? No. Were they completely ineffectual? No. They were operating in the area around their bases. They carried out guerrilla attacks against the Japanese as best they could.

They're also in an area that's slightly away from the main Japanese occupation area, which helps protect them a little bit. But it's not like the communists were just sitting there and completely biding their time. They suffered casualties. They did fight on behalf of the Chinese people, just not to the extent that the armies of Chiang Kai-shek did, and certainly not to the extent that you would think if you were to see a movie or pick up a textbook in China today. So the situation in 1945 is strange in China. Japan has been castrly defeated in the Pacific. Its home islands have been bombed and then atomic bombed. The Soviets have overrun much of northern China, Manchuria. There's a million Japanese troops sitting in China when that surrender

occurs. How are they managed out? There's still a lot of Japanese units in China at the time of the surrender. The communists and the nationalists, each with their own backers, the Soviets trying as best they can to help the communists, the United States doing what they can logistically to help Chiang Kai-shek, to try to be there when certain Japanese units surrender so that they can take their material and take over the area. And so there's already beginning, just even with the surrender, the start of trying to find the best possible position to fight what both sides know will be a continuation of the civil war that's been going on for much of the last few decades with the final victor to determine who will control China in the post-war era. Is there any sense they could coexist? There's a brief moment where they're brought to the table together, but not really. I mean, this is something that they're going to have to fight it out.

And for the communists, they have some advantages. One, they have managed to hold on to many of their best troops. Chiang Kai-shek's troops, their best units have been decimated. Also, after the war, during the war, there is just horrifying economic turmoil, destruction of infrastructure. People are suffering. Inflation is out of control. People are buying rice by bringing entire bushels and wheelbarrows full of cash that's devaluing even as they're walking down the street. And so one of the challenges that Chiang Kai-shek has is that he's the incumbent. Many people in China don't know what to make of the communists. They're sometimes even a little skeptical of the communists or worried about what a

communist regime might look like in China. But a lot of people also know that things are horribly broken under Chiang Kai-shek, or at least his government is blamed for everything that is broken. And so there are a surprising amount of people in China who maybe haven't taken a side, but are certainly willing to give the communists a chance. At the worst, many people feel, they could just be the latest in a long line of temporary governments that we've had. At best, maybe they actually have solutions that could help us at a time when China has been almost destroyed by years of conflict and now, of course, many years of occupation. by years of conflict and now, of course, many years of occupation. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about China more coming up. 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. Does fighting just break out immediately upon the cessation of the violence in the Second World War? I mean, this is just so grim for the people of China. I mean, is there a breathing space or do these two just go at each other straight away?

It's very brief, the breathing space, but they almost immediately begin the operations against each other. It starts as small-scale skirmishes and works its way up to major battlefield engagements. One of the things that the communists had going for them too is they had some very talented commanders in the field who were able to hand some decisive defeats to the nationalist side until finally it became unsustainable for the nationalists to remain in China. And they began

the process of retreating across the strait to the island of Taiwan, where they planned to continue their resistance against the communists indefinitely. And of Taiwan, where they plan to continue their resistance against the communists indefinitely. And of course, that begins the schism between, or at least the modern schism, I should say, between Taiwan and the mainland. The Soviet Union is helping the communists at this point. Are the Americans showing equal support for Chiang Kai-shek, or is some of that wartime skepticism overruling their desire to intervene? The US is providing logistical, financial, and moral support for the nationalist armies. They have troops stationed in key cities right after the war. Part of that is to help hold on to those

cities until Chiang's troops can get there to take them over so that the communists don't get there first, that kind of thing. But of course, right after World War II, the US forces also have to deal with the crises in Europe. They're looking at the Soviet Union now in a very different way. And the commitment to fighting on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek against the communists in China just really isn't there. And when Chiang Kai-shek loses, when the communists take over, one of the questions that will be asked in the halls of power in Washington, and if we think about it, it's a very strange question to ask, but it is phrased in this way. Who lost China? How did we lose China? And a lot of that thinking,

flawed as it might be, went into the decisions later on to go to war in another Asian country, also split between a unpopular government and a communist insurgency. And of course, that was Vietnam. So from through 1949, city after city just falls to the communists, some of them without a fight. Chiang Kai-shek makes the decision to jump across to Taiwan. I guess he's safe there because US naval power can defend him. And at this time, the Communist Party doesn't really have a navy per se, or certainly not an invasion force.

There was precedent here, too, in the last days of the Ming Dynasty. This is going back to the 17th century. One of the loyalists of that dynasty, faced with the invasion of China by a group called the Manchus, which established a new Qing dynasty, took his troops across the strait and had a kingdom in Taiwan for many decades. across the strait and had a kingdom in Taiwan for many decades. Last remnant, the last holdout, if you will, that only ended when the new Qing dynasty finally got the boats together to go across the strait and put an end to this rebellion once and for all. A lesson that today's Chinese government sometimes looks back to with a certain amount of envy. And does Chiang Kai-shek, does that regime continue?

Is what we see today in Taiwan, is that the descendants? Are they the descendants of Chiang Kai politically? No, I think in some ways, Chiang Kai-shek would actually recognize today's People's Republic of China more. Strong authoritarian leader surrounded by party flunkies who are interested in economic development of the cities at the expense of the rural areas. I think he could get behind that. What's happening in Taiwan with its rather boisterous, rambunctious democracy, I don't know if he'd recognize that. It says something about Chiang Kai-shek's successors, including his own son, who put Taiwan onto a very different trajectory towards being a very vibrant liberal democracy in a neighborhood where those kind of governments haven't always thrived. So while Chiang Kai-shek might not recognize it, Taiwan still survives to this day. And one thing that I want to point out too quickly, many people in Taiwan, especially at the time Chiang Kai-shek's government came over, saw it as an invasion.

There's also a very strong indigenous Taiwanese identity, people who identify as Han Chinese and, of course, people who don't identify as Han Chinese, for whom Chiang Kai-shek and his government's arrival in the 1940s into the 1950s was just as traumatic as when the Japanese invaded back in the 19th century. For them, it wasn't a very smooth process. It was a process that involved a lot of violence. Where Taiwan is today is really remarkable considering where it started back in the days immediately after the Civil War.

So Mao is in charge and the communists are in charge of China, mainland China. Is there radical and immediate social and political transformation? Mao's a revolutionary general. That's how he sees himself. That's how he thinks. In a revolution, there's a few things you need to do when you're fighting in a camp as a revolutionary, as a guerrilla army. You got to keep people ideologically on the same page by whatever means you have, because you can't have different ideas floating out there if you're all going to be scattered fighting a guerrilla war. You need to make sure if your troops aren't all together, at least everybody's fighting for the same thing. The other thing you need to do too is keep moving, keep changing, keep evolving, keep the revolution going, keep the ideology pure. And he carries this over into the period after 1949. You may even want to think of him as an idealist.

And sometimes idealists without people to tell them no can be as dangerous and as destructive as the worst Machiavellian schemers. And in this case, Mao had this idea where anytime he looked out into the world or into his country, and it didn't look the way he thought it should, whether it was economic inequality or social inequality or a bureaucratic elite that was starting to calcify into something like a caste system, he sought his duty as to completely shake it up and to destroycify into something like a cast system. He saw it, his duty as to completely shake it up and to destroy it and create something new. It's a little bit like if you've ever had one of those souvenir snow globes and you shake it up and the little particles of silicate come down like snow. Well, for Mao, China was his snow globe. And for the 1950s and

1960s, every time China didn't look the way he thought it should, he shook it up. Except instead of tiny pieces of silicate encased in a solution, it was almost a billion people going, oh my goodness, what's happening now? And for whatever the goals were, the results were often incredibly catastrophic. It's just very hard to think of a society that suffered as much as China has over that period. You've met people who've lived through that entire span. How do they cope? How do you come to terms with life going from empire to warlordism to republic to civil war, occupation, civil war, communism, how did people protect themselves?

At the risk of sounding essentialist, I've always been amazed at historically and even today, just the amazing resilience of the people of China, given the history of the last 100, 200 years. The ability to keep going, to keep their culture going, to still have a positive view of the future, even after everything that's happened, is truly remarkable. And you think about those generations, particularly who lived through either a much older generation who lived through World War II and the revolution to what we might think of as the boomers. China had a baby boom too, who starved as children during the Great Leap Forward and who put on the red armbands and marched for Mao during the Cultural Revolution, a truly terrible 10 years in which the country turned on itself. You think about what it means to go through those things and the fact that people came out the other side and were able to, in the 1980s, 1990s, into the 2000s, were able to build, in some ways, a whole new country

based upon ideas of economic opening is an incredible story. At the same time, it's tough to remember things when the memories of those times are obscured, hidden, or outright censored, and especially in the last 10 years under Xi Jinping, discussions of periods of post-1949 history, like the famine of the Great Leap Forward or the political terminal of the Cultural Revolution, have become red lines. And you think about how do people process trauma, trauma they may have gone through as a child, no matter how resilient they are, but in a way that there is no recognition or acknowledgement of that trauma in public discourse, only in whispers, only in private conversations. That's a very strange thing to have to deal with. Jeremiah, Jenny, thank you very much for coming on and talking about that great swathe of history, how modern China was founded. Thank you very much. Somewhere right now is one of my students going,

we could have done that entire semester in like 38 minutes of lecture. Really? Trust me, students, you got a lot more. You got a lot more detail and juicy context. That was a quick praise. Well, thank you, Dan. And thank you for having me on. you