TRIGGERnometry - How China Fakes Its Success with Frank Dikotter

Episode Date: September 5, 2026

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When you have a figure of 5% GDP, which we must achieve, that's a quota. You dig a hole, it's GDP. You fill it with concrete, there's GDP. You build a house on top of it. The GDP, you destroyed a house and build a bigger one, still empty, also GDP. But you can sit and you build a train, which is empty, and you can look at these great skyscrapers, which are also empty. Why are they exporting so much?

Because nobody has the means to buy any of it inside. China. We think communism is underproduction, not enough. No, it's too much of this and too little of that. It remains a classic misallocation of capital, which creates the illusion, the illusion of great achievements. At the moment you start looking at the numbers, it all vanishes rather quickly. The British government wants to force YouTube to downrank independent content like this and replace it with approved messaging from the mainstream media. The only way you can fight back and continue to enjoy our content is to make sure you're subscribed. Like this video and comment below to have your say on what the government is doing.

Frank D. Kota, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. You are one of the world's greatest experts on the history of China, especially over the last hundred plus years or so. Thank you. And the question we wanted to start with is just for you to tell us and our audience, it's a part of the world that's poorly understood. here in the West, I feel, by most people, or not understood at all. How does China, which is communist today, become communist over the last hundred-plus years? Because when we think of China, we think of it as a, as a, the Chinese imperial society. That's kind of the historical narrative we have.

How does it go from that to what it is today? Yeah. Well, that's a long story. And I'm not entirely sure where to start. But one thing you want to bear in mind, when you think about the Bolsheviks and Lenin in 1917, they basically inherit the boundaries of the Romanov Empire, right, the Tsarist Empire. So the one thing we tend to forget is that the communists in 1949, when they conquer power and the red flag goes up over the forbidden city, inherits the Qing Empire, which collapsed in 1911.

So what I'm trying to say here is that in terms of geopolitics, the China we know today is very much based on the empire that lasted from roughly the middle of the 17th century till 1911 when it collapsed. So to put it in a slightly more brutal manner, it is an empire that has yet to decolonize. So think of Xinjiang Uyghuz concentration camps, Tibet. Large chunks of that territory belong to the Qing Empire, conquered by the Manchu's in 1644. This empire collapses, like many empires, in 1911. What you then see from 1911 to 49 is an extraordinary interesting period

called the Republic of China. Can I pause there? Because I'd love for you to tell us briefly why the Qing Empire collapses. The bottom line is that they were overstretched, and had to control a huge amount of territory. But I think one other reason is that they managed to conquer so much through violence that the moment there was any sense of weakness,

a great many of these peoples they conquered, including Tibetans and Mongols and Uyghurs, rebelled in the 19th century. So this is one of the great stories Mount Mali asked about the 19th century, You know, why did it collapse? Have you heard of the Taiping Rebellion? Briefly. Briefly.

Now, you can take any one book written by a Westerner about this thick, and I will tell you some 20 million people died. If you ask, how do we know that? Where does this number come from? There is nothing of the footnotes to tell you how this number has been derived that. If you look at the demography, you'll find something much more interesting, namely that during that conflict,

which lasted from roughly the 1850s till the 1860s, about 14, 15 years, and was followed by other civil rules. About 70 million-plus individuals were massacred from both sides. The Taiping, who were a rebellion against the Qing dynasty, and the Qing who had to reconquer pretty much half of China. And then if you add on other rebellions of Muslims, of Uighur, of a whole series of peoples in the south and the north and the east and the west, You arrive at a death toll at well over 100 million people,

frequently, man, women, children, dogs, big, slaughtered without any mercy on both sides. This is an extraordinarily brutal society. So in other words, the moment that Qing Empire starts showing signs of weakness, there are local populations that seize that moment to seek revenge or claim back whatever territory they had before the incorporation into the Chinese. The whole thing collapses in 1911. Why is this so interesting?

I'll tell you why it's interesting. Because already in the 19th century, you have Westerners who complain about the fact that we tend to think about China as a culture, a civilization, you know, where people like Confucius and other philosophers have instilled some wisdom into large numbers of people, in contrast to all the savage you would see in Europe, for instance. Whereas in reality, whenever there is a war in the 19th century in China, not so much of war, it's just massacons, massacres of innocent people.

There's that contrast which some foreigners find very interesting. And I think that contrast still holds through this very day. We tend to think about China in terms of culture, not politics or war or massacres or unpleasant events. We have a romanticized vision of China. And it goes back to Voltaire and other, of course, philosophers in Europe. And why is Chinese history so brutal? I don't think it's more brutal than anywhere else. You have to be a little bit fair.

Not on this show. I mean, that's the modern era, right, not the 19th century, but take Paul Pot, he massacres what, about 1.60, 2.4 million people. He can't go much further. about 20, 25% of the population. During the Great Leap Forward under Mao, 195, 68, 62, you do have parts of China that few of your listeners will ever have heard of, for instance, Fung Yang, which has roughly 8 million people, in which about 2.4 million people are starved to death during the Great leap forward. So the proportion is the same, except, of course, that the population China is so much bigger than Cambodia. So there's a lot more to people.

play with, so to speak. I see. It's extremely densely populated. But otherwise, do I think there's something specifically Chinese about it? No, I don't. I see. So the answer is human beings are brutal. Human beings kill. If you're very lucky, you may have an emperor here or there or a king or a leader

who is slightly more willing to contemplate an alliance with the next door enemy as opposed to massacre. But in general, it is what I call the Mongol. method, you arrive and you give the local inhabitants of choice, you surrender and pay respect, or we massacre everyone to the very last. I think that's the human way of solving issues until, of course, the advent of the notion of a division of power, separation of powers, right? It's extremely modern, which is why we call the 19th century the age of revolution as people

started, you know, turning against these or twice. and empires and this and that, when sovereignty is no longer seen to reside in a king or an emperor or mandate from heaven in the case of China, but seem to reside in the people. Of course, then the people massacre each other, trying to define who is part of that people, that population, who is not. But the key point here must be that in the 19th century, as a result of the extraordinary bloody civil walls in which the reconquest by the ching of large territories is equally bloody, none of the people in charge ever take on board some of these principles that come from Europe,

which is the vision of power, with the separation of powers, which is giving ordinary people a vote, which is basically something we refer to as political reform. None of that exists. They all have their hands drenched in blood, with the result that when there is a revolution that does succeed in 1911 against the Qing, most of the protagonists are not really willing to go along the road of democracy. So this is one of the key, if you wish, key sort of difficulties in the case of the Qing Empire and China today is that the desire and the will to keep so many people and such a large country, continent, one is tempted to say, the size of Europe, to keep that unified, demands a firm hand from above. So the fear of this unity is greater than the fear of what an authoritarian hand from above will do.

So that's the issue we have to this very day. So, for instance, if you go to the People's Republic of China, if you are on Uyghur and you happen not to be in a concentration camp, which is statistically somewhat odd, in any event, you will live on Beijing time, and you will speak Mandarin, by the way. So it's one time zone for a country to size of Europe, right? So it's one time zone, one language, one people. It goes much further than just language. as the insistence on the part of Beijing that all these people will somehow organically merge into a greater whole,

an organic sort of Chinese nationality. So that insistence on unity from above is driven through by the Communist Party after 49 to this very, very day. Now, back to the Republican era, 1911, 49th, fascinating period, although some of the leaders are keen on that autocratic hand from above what is so extraordinary is that at every level of society,

people from scholars to artists, to writers, you name it, to ordinary workers, take the freedoms that they have acquired, some freedoms of assembly, of speech, of travel, to go and discover the world. From 1911 to 14, I'm what you really have is what I refer to as an age of openness in which people can actually read. They can travel. They can go abroad. They can spend 10 years and come back and, you know, open a shop.

They can translate, read, publish pretty much anything they wish within the limits. Not to say that journalists don't get killed. It does happen. But overall, compared to some of the regimes that will appear in Europe in the 1930s, I'm thinking, obviously, you know, Franco, Mussolini, good old Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, very unpleasant regimes. In comparison of the Republic of China is quite open, adheres to the very highest standards of, for instance, the League of Nations, very keen to be at the Vanguard, the modernity. Now, that's the overall picture, if you wish. But what happens? Where do these communists come from? This is a fascinating question.

You can read anything you wish on the communists. You can read a book by Edgoss Snow, was an American journalist, 1936, went to China, published Red Star over China. You can go to Wikipedia, you can read any textbook. The story is almost always the same. There is the collapse of the Qing. Nasty social forces appear,

fascists, imperialists, feudal landlords, and thanks to the Communist Party. Frank, can I just stop you there? Because in an interview, I heard you use a term nationalist. Is fascist and nationalist interchangeable in this? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. So this is the key point, is that the entire Republican era,

from 1921 onwards, when the communists are founded, the Communist Party of China is established in, Shanghai. It's about 12 people in one room representing about 15 members in the country of what at the time must have been, I think, probably about 400 million, 500 million. That's nothing, right? So the entire history of that era has been represented as a fight between the nationalists on the one hand, the people I refer to as the central government and the communists. But this particular vision, these people, and fight, and, you know, the communists by appealing to modern notions of reform and liberation prevail, they harness great social forces because they're more in tune with modernity, as opposed to the nationalist who are condemned as fascist. But the point I'm trying to make here is that these communists do not represent anyone.

The idea is somehow that the history of the Republic of China in 1920s and 30s and 40s and is determined by a fight between two camps, tends to give an overwhelming importance to a bunch of communists who represent no more than a mere fraction of the overall population, at least until 1940. One example. They are established by agents of the common town, Hank Snaveliet, I'm Dutch.

Hank Snavely was Dutchman. They know how to organize things. He is sent by Moscow to establish a Chinese Communist Party, which he does in 1921. By 1936, that Communist Party of China has roughly 40,000 members. There's a force of 40,000 people in a country of half a billion. I'll let you calculate how much it is. I'm not all that great with calculations, but it's not a great many, right? So who have we got in Europe?

Antonio Salazar, fascist, represses communists. One in every 280 people in Portugal under Salazar is a communist. In Finland, where the Communist Party is banned, taboo, one in 700 people around about the same period is a communist. China is about one in every 12,500 or so. By 1940, according to the Comintern, Common Town, stands for Communist International organization established in Moscow in 1919 to overthrow, whether referred to as bourgeois governments throughout the will throughout planet Earth to promote, of course, the proletarian revolution.

So the common, according to the common town in China by 1940, the communist represents one in 1,700 people, which I checked is oddly enough the same as the number of common relative to the overall population in the United States of America. In other words, there are as many communists in China as there are in the United States of America, although the United States of America is not generally considered to be at the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. What I'm trying to say is that China is one of the least communist inclined countries that you could find in the 1920s and 30s. They try time and again are given massive resources from Moscow.

By 1926, you have hundreds of advisors sent by Moscow. You have entire armies set up by Moscow in which the nationalists collaborate with the communists. It's called the United Front. I call it a Trojan horse. So Stalin says you want help for your revolution. The nationals won the revolution. They want to unite the country through a. military conquest.

So you want to do your military conquest, you have to accept communist members as part of your United Front, which they do. But by the time then that that United Front collapses in 1927, Stalin has hundreds of advisors in China, entire army set up with their help. You mean, just imagine there's some army somewhere in, shall we say, Wales, set up by Russia and run by Russians. and imaginable, right? So that is the key point that the communist simply don't find much of a popular resonance.

So you might ask yourself, why is that? Before we get to the next question, which obviously will be, if they were so weak, how come they managed to conquer power in 19449. The question really is why in a country that we assume, must have been sympathetic towards communism in order to turn communist. We think there must have been origins to the communist revolution. There must have been social causes for that. The one causes always land reform. The communist embark on a campaign of land reform.

They take the land from the rich to give it to the poor. It should work, right? It should work very well. It worked in Russia, didn't it, more or less? But of course, Russia won Alexander, is it the second? You're Russian, you should know. Alexander II, I think, emancipate the serfs in 18, is it 71, something like that. You do have vastly impoverished serves who live or work on big, aristocratic, landed estates.

So the disparity is absolutely enormous. And of course, that's what the Bolsheviks think of when they seize power in 1917. I want to have the land reform. But there's no such thing, unfortunately, or fortunately, in the case of the Republic of China. Throughout the Qing, the tax on land is extremely weak. And throughout that vast country, although there is a huge variety in land-owning patterns, there simply are no serves,

on the one hand. There is no aristocracy. There are no barons. There are no, you know, wealthy land-law. who somehow, you know, oppress a majority of impoverished service. There's no such thing. People tend to own a small plot of land, and it is true. There are those who can't do it and have to work for others as anywhere else on planet Earth.

You've got to remember, Italy by 1933 has about one third of the population who lives in absolute poverty. So nobody's denying that there is poverty in China at the time. But there is no land to be taken from a few and given to the many. That's the formal of land reform. I take from the rich, give it to the poor. The poor will follow me. That's the communist approach. There is not land to be taken.

Whatever little bit of territory that the communists do manage to conquer and hold onto from 1931 onwards are mere slivers of land along the frontiers of impoverished provinces in inhospitable land generally high up in the mountains, where the people over whom they preside are already extremely poor, already worked very hard just to get by, and now they must feed these communists and their soldiers and provide man for their army.

So you can see what happens within no time. There is not land to be taken. So they will start describing so-called middle peasants as rich peasants, or the normal middle peasants, they will start portraying so-called poor peasants as middle peasants. In fact, very quickly, and you can read it from their own documents, ordinary villagers realize that there really is no point in doing anything at all

because any surplus you produce will be taken by the Communist Party of China. They have an insatiable appetite. They need grain. They need cannon fodder, man. So they squeeze literally, every territory they can hold on to. They squeeze it till it right. There's exactly what John Woodhauer,

one of these communist leaders says in 1934, when he's compelled to leave a territory, he says, we squeezed it like a lemon. So what I'm trying to say here is that in the countryside, but also in the cities, there's very little sympathy for the communist by 1936. They have about the same importance as some local band of, say, bandits or outlaws.

So they're not exactly capable of creating a message that resonates with even a fraction of the population. If you own gold and it's just sitting there not earning anything, you need to hear this. What you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert. Today's sponsor is monetary metals and what they're doing is rethinking how gold is used. Traditionally, gold ownership is passive. You buy gold, store it and hope it preserves value over time. While it sits there, it doesn't do anything, and often you're paying storage or insurance fees just to hold it. Monetary metals approaches gold differently.

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And yet at the same time, right, you've spoken about this many times, Frank. They were very powerful at creating a mythology. Yes. A myth. Yes. Which is almost religious in its tone, isn't it? Yes. Yes.

So I think that message really... Obviously, it starts with the comments from the very beginning. Commons are very good at creating their own myths. But I think it really stems from a book by a journalist from Missouri I mentioned earlier on called Red Star over China. So in 1936, the communists have had a so-called long march in which they have been defeated by troops from the central government. They've been pursued. There were about 80,000 who left in October 1930s.

For about 6, 7, 8,000 arrive after a year with a huge rate of attrition. There are nobody. There are a voice in the desert. In comes Stalin. And Stalin says you must not fight the central government. You must have a united front with them. You must fight, you must unite and fight the Japanese. Now, that makes sense.

Because the Japanese have been taking large chunks of China since at least 1931. You remember the last emperor, right? The movie. Yeah, great film. Great film. Manchu court. They take the last emperor of the Qingda and stall him as head of Manchuria, which they have invaded in 1931.

In 1937, they will invade the rest of China. So the great threat to China, what every person in China has, foremost on their mind, is, of course, Japan. So when the Chinese communists go on and on about fighting Changkhech and the fascists and distributing the land, it has no appeal. Stalin tells them you should fight with the central government.

You should fight the Japanese. That takes about a year for that penny to drop in the case of man. takes him one year to somehow see that that could be a message, which is powerful. And he then also uses Agosno, who visits them in 1936, uses him as a sort of platform, as a sort of intermediary to present the Communist Party of China as the real sort of underdog who could, because they're democratically inclined, fight the Japanese much better. not to mention other feudal imperialist forces than the central government of China represented by Chiang Kai-shek.

So that book has published, translated immediately in, I don't know how many languages, puts Mao and the Communist Party of China on the map. It is basically in a nutshell a sort of David and Goliath story, you know, the underdog, the communists are much more in tune with modernity. And they will eventually preside over the liberation of these many, many hundreds of millions of people who are being oppressed by all these forces of fascism and feudalism. So that's the book in 1936. I would say it's the fountain head of all propaganda. That, of course, I guess I was not going to be there forever. They fine-tuned this story. It moves forward.

But ultimately, that's the story. That's the story there. And so they've got this propaganda that is coming out. They've also got, I mean, Mao is. fantastic. I mean, that's his one. Well, he's not his one. There's a clip on the internet, which is you saying Mao is fantastic. Well, you know, Norman Finkelstein thought the same. It's clever man. But what you had with Mao is that he, that was his one real skill was. Well, hold on, who was Mao? Tell us about this character, because most people in the West have no

idea. Who was he? How does he come to be who is and why is he his greatest for instance? So Mao, Mao is not, a poor peasant, quote, unquote. I personally don't use the term peasant. There are no peasants in China, as I already pointed out, peasant brings to mind some sort of feudal society. These are villages. These are farmers.

They don't just cultivate the land. Frequently, they run a business next to it or have other occupations during the slack season. But anyway, the point is he does not come from a poor background. He's sent to school by his family. He, like many others, around about the eight, 1890s, start turning against the Qing dynasty, want a revolution in which he, you know, he proponent a revolution, like so many others, and somehow works in a library in Beijing,

where he encounters Marxism for the very first time. Now, you've got to remember one thing, when we talk about the great communist minds in China, these are individuals who have been approached by Comintern agents sent by Moscow, who were sent specifically to universities to cultivate some of these great scholars. One name is Li Da Zhao Zhao, another one is Chen Du Su. It doesn't really matter. Moutham as one of them, he becomes part of their movement.

He is very much there in 1921, when the Communist Party is established. I mentioned 12 people, roughly 50 members. He's one of them. And bit by bit, he will emerge as the key sort of leader. Why is that? I think because his real skill is, and propaganda is a key skill, his other skill is that he is, he is just very much determined. It's the sheer willpower. You wonder to what extent that is not an exclamation of pretty much everything and anything

in human life. He's just more determined than anyone else. And he's also more determined. than anyone else to make pledges that he will not keep, to make promises that he will break, to go along with alliances which he has no intention of abiding truth. He's just a, how should I say it, he is a great student of power. He knows where it is, and he knows how to gain it, and he knows how to keep it, and he will do it at all cost.

For instance, here is somebody who, you know, I mentioned earlier on, 1937, 1936, Stalin promotes the idea of a united front with the central government, go fight the Japanese, who are the real aggressors. Quite a few communists think that's a good idea. We should go, Mao says, no, I'm not fighting anyone. We let the troops of the central government fight the Japanese, and we hold back, we just wait.

And on the moment that the Japanese troops have defeated the troops of the central government, we move into that distressed terrain, and we seize it. Very pragmatic, very pragmatic, and that's exactly what he does. So from 37 onwards, the Communist Party does go up in sort of control of territory in the north. They're extremely pragmatic and supremely ruthless

will not hesitate one moment to blame anyone else and purge mercilessly to the extent that it hardly matters to him whether innocent lives a massacre. I mean, it's a general communist principle that is better to get rid of 100 people if there's a chance that one of them might be a spy or an enemy or a potential.

He belongs to that school. He belongs to that school. But he also comes across as a true believer as well. He's a true believer in power. Not in communism. Because, I mean, we'll talk about it later on. But there are times where he's with, I think during the Great League Forward, where people wanted to have, shall we say, a more pragmatic policy.

And he was very much, no, this is what we're going to be doing. This is the communist way. That's also politics. So you might, I understand what you're saying. It's a really important question, and it is valid for any dictator, communist or otherwise. They wish, I mean, what's the difference? I mentioned separation of powers earlier on. That's one driving principle for democratic societies, with checks and balances,

and, you know, an independent executive and legislative, you name it. And the other hand, you have the Leninist principle of a monopoly of a power. So Lenin says we don't want any of the bourgeois democracy. It is weak. We want a absolute control over power so that we can direct the revolution from above. We're not going to waste time like these democracies, the fake democracies. Our dictatorship is a true democracy. We represent the majority and we will implement that revolution from above.

So the question is fundamental in that all of these dictators, they don't just want a monopoly of power for the sake of power. They have a vision. And the communist vision, of course, or for that matter, the fascist vision is a profoundly democratic vision. They want the best for the majority. And in order to do that, they must unfortunately curb the rights of that majority so that they can carry out that revolution properly from above. The problem is that all of these ideas may well have been important in the beginning. But the moment you start studying power and you start acquiring it, you must also defend it. And once you start defending it, you realize that there are enemies left, right, and center.

So every dictator or dictator in the making is fully occupied, studying all the people around them. Number two, three, four, five, all the way down to 100. is there a clique there? Are the rumors over there? Is somebody going to stab me in the back? It becomes an all-encompassing, not passion, but need to keep that power at all cost. That is the life of the dictator. If you think Xi Jinping, the man with the nicely slicked hair in Beijing today,

if you think that he's reading Marx and thinking about how he can come up with it, a more equal society. Well, no. He is studying number two, three, four, five. He's busy with the military. He's a military commission, which has seven people on it. Until a while ago, he had purged five of them. It was just him and another one.

The other one has not appeared recently. There's nobody left on it. This man is constantly purging. The army, the party, ordinary people, here, this, that. It's like an all-consuming business. That's the business of power. So the vision falls by the sideway. But you are right.

Of course, he is a communist. Of course, the idea is that you were going to fight imperialism. And, you know, we may poo-poo it. I don't think there was much of a British imperialism in China. The Brits start in 1927, returning all the concessions they had acquired in the 19th century. they start respecting China as an independent nation. But there's true, as I said, that the Japanese are in Manchuria. That's a true imperialist power.

They're seized Manchuria. They're keen on seizing more territory. That's a very serious sort of thing. So, of course, they're there to fight imperialism, fight colonialism, fight for the proletariat, fight for the peasants, and our equality for all, et cetera. That vision is there. But ultimately, when you read their own archives,

They're on reports. When you follow what they do day in, day out, it is always and invariably about politics. The Cultural Revolution, much later on, is not about culture. It's about politics. The Great League Forward is not about leaping forward, economically otherwise. It's about politics. It's always about politics. They themselves, the communists themselves say it very clearly. In particular, in the case of China, they're quite pragmatic and they say very nicely.

politics in command as constant reminders throughout the entire history of Chinese communism that politics is in command i remember covid 2020 it must have been april or so you could see slogans that was in hong kong spent 20 years there you could see slogans that said politics first science second COVID is about politics Now, who is responsible? What are we going to do? It's a political issue. It's not a scientific issue.

This goes on and on and on. It's always about politics. And so you've got the Japanese invasion going on. Then the government is fighting back. The communists are holding back. How do they go from that position to being in charge? So 31, Japan invades in Troia. And bit by bit, they start seizing territories slightly

to the south of the Great Wall of China, just outside of Manchuria, and in 37 in the summer, they decide to invade all of it. The central government fights back. The communists hold back their troops. They're in the United Front now, but instead of fighting, they're just hold back. And they start taking bits of territory

from which the central government troops have been eliminated. Even then by 1940, they are still a minority. So the key question really is, if, as I claim, the communists really didn't represent, than a great many people, if the territory they held on to was incredibly impoverished because they couldn't run the proverbial lemonade shop without ruining it, lemonade stand, then how did they get to power roughly 10 years later, 1949? I think if we were to be talking about, say, so we say, Germany,

or Poland? Would you ask me, why, Frank, why is it that Poland became communists after 1945? Why is it that East Germany, exactly half of Germany, became communist after 1945? Is there something in that Eastern German culture, you know? Has it to do with Heidegger or these other philosophers? There's just some inclination. Were the land holding patterns in Eastern Germany that somehow led to a social revolution?

The answer is, of course, no. No. The Red Army arrived and occupied it. In the case of Poland, of course, they arrived first in 1937, a few weeks after the Nazis divided Poland between them. Now in 1994, if I don't know what I am. 1939. 1939.

I apologize. I meant 19309. They divide it in 1939, September, a couple of weeks in between, and then 45, they have the whole thing to themselves. Wonderful. Your point is the communist conquer China. I'm saying that the Soviets sent one million troops into Manchuria in August 1945, and they invade all of Manchuria, which is the entire region to the north of the Great Wall of China, north of Beijing, if you wish, which is not only economically, extraordinarily rich and important. There's also the strategic gateway to the rest of China.

That's how the Manchu's invaded China to establish the Qing dynasty in 1644. So once they are there, even after Japan surrenders within literary days, they're on their way to the 38th parallel in Korea, right, to meet the Americans. But they hold on to all of Montreal for months on and they strip it, strip it as much as they can. But they hand the countryside over to the communists. So the Chinese communists benefit from the occupation by the Soviets and are able to control the countryside. So that's one crucial element, but then there's also an other power that intervenes in 1944 and more importantly in 1945. And that power is the United States of America.

And they make that mistake that so many people make to this very day. they think, oh, the Chinese communist, they're not very important. They don't have that much territory. And most of all, they're not really communist. They're just like grand reformers. They're much more democratic than the central government of China. And the central government of China, Shankar Shack, must collaborate with them. In other words, they want to impose on the central government of China,

the same conditions that Stalin wanted to impose during the first. and second United Front. The Americans want a United Front. So you must collaborate. You must have a coalition with the Communist. They send a vice president called Harry, what's his name? Henry Wallace, I believe, in 1943. He visits Magadan in

in 1943, which is, of course, bang in the middle of all those, the Gulag, right? Visit the Gulag. Then goes to Chongqing, where Chang Keshik is, with the government of the Republic of China, and says, well, you know, these Soviets do really well. Economically, you should do the same thing as they do. And then Chankajek says, well, no, they're communist,

and the communist in our country also communists. So Henry Wallace says, no, Stalin told me that these are Marjorine communist. They're not real communists. He believes this. He believes this. 1945, I'll skip a few episodes, but one American after the other is keen on this coalition. In December, 1945, George Marshall arrives, the very man who will later come up with a plan to rescue all of Europe against the communist threats.

Doesn't want to do anything in favor of the Republic of China. On the contrary, he's very keen also on a coalition. He says you must come up with a coalition and says there must be a ceasefire. This ceasefire is broken by the communists. In April 46, the Soviets withdraw the army of one million. By now, the communists are everywhere in the countryside. And the central government is able to push back the communist all the way up to the border with Siberia, martial intervenes. Again, now we're talking May 46th, says, you must stop immediately or we shall cease all deliveries of weapons to you.

the communists are on the edge of extinction at that moment. They survive. And a few months later, Marshall also imposes an arms embargo on the communist. So you have both the Soviet Union, which is backing up the communists, and the United States of America, which is forcing the central government to embrace the communist. In the meantime, even as there is an arms embargo. But you said the embargo is on the communist, but you meant on the central government.

I meant on the central government. That's right. The other than Almsenbarg on the central government. That's right. So just to restate because it got a bit muddled. Yes. The Soviets are helping the communists. And the Americans are preventing the central government from fighting.

From fighting the communists. Yes. And so the communists of actually being helped by both the USSR and by the United States. Very, very precise. Yes, very good. So you're absolutely right. The Almsenbarg is, of course, on, and you've got to remember that the Republic of China is one of the four great allies up till 1943,

which recognized as a great power. It ties down a huge number of Japanese troops, even as the Americans are fighting their way through the Pacific. They've lost Pearl Harbor and got to fight all the way to Tokyo. So it's not like the Republic of China is doing nothing in there, quite the opposite. Now, the point is that all along, weapons are delivered to the country,

in Montreal by the shipload and the wagon load. Huge amounts are being provided by the Soviet Union. They trained the communist. They equipped them. They sent officers to Moscow for advanced training. There's a huge backing to the point where in 1947, they come out of it pretty strong. They've transformed themselves.

Not only thanks to the backing of the Soviet Union, but also because they, because they now implement so-called land reform in Manchuria. So what is land reform in Manchuria? Land reform is, I enter your village and I take what I need. I take the grain and I forcibly enroll the man I need to go and fight that war. And I have barrier troops to make sure that those soldiers move forward, not backwards. Trotsky is one of those used barrier troops and the conquest, re-conquest of Siberia.

And the way the point is, they have grain, the communist in Montreal, have grain from the countryside, which they can use to trade. They have man in the army. And most of all, they have guns, but not just guns, but a willingness to use the gun that makes, in my mind, makes the crucial distinction between the troops on the side. government and the communist troops. It's the willingness to use that gun. It goes back to what I said about Mao and hit that sheer bloody desire to prevail. What I'm trying to say is that the war that they waged, the civil war that they waged is a war of attrition. They will not hesitate to use barrier troops to make sure that the soldiers move forward. Just for people who don't understand, Are troops behind your troops who will shoot them if they come back?

Yes. So if you move forward, you might survive. If you turn around, you will get shot. They're called Zagradatrad in Russian. That's exactly it, with Trotsky, of course. Not that. And Stalin used them in World War II. Yes, of course. So you got barrier troops.

You get what are referred to as human waves. You send unarmed people to absorb the bullets of the troops of the central government. that telegrams from Ta Yuan in particular, where the commanders say that the soldiers are so demoralized having to shoot endlessly unto unarmed civilians were sent forward towards them in wave after wave. But most of all, also the willingness to surround cities and starve them into surrender.

So this is what happens in Changchun, one of the very large cities in Manchuria, where during an eight-month siege, nobody is allowed to leave, with the result that 160,000 ordinary civilians die of hunger and disease until that city just falls. And they tried to do the same with other cities along the way, to the point where by the end of 1948,

any commander of any city is aware of what has happened in Manchuria, and may no longer be willing to subject the people in his city to that same fate. And that's what happened with Beijing. Beijing sees the troops by Ling Biao surrender what used to be the capital. And there's some hesitation there, and after a while, the city just surrenders. But they know what happened in Changchuan. It's an eight-month siege. It's just ruthless.

Rousse's, no ordinary person is able to pass through the guards, sentinels, established in the perimeter by Lien Biao around that city with trenches dug and guards everywhere. They will not hesitate to shoot civilians to try to get through. It's not willing to do it, and other cities will fall one after the other. There are a couple of other great conflagrations, including the Huaii Battle, I believe, also 48, with a million troops involved, the ferocious fighting. But as far as I'm concerned, the fall of Changchuan,

that is the key moment where bit by bit, the central government just starts collapsing. Troops surrender. They just can't. You cannot fight an enemy like that. But here's a little anecdote. Red flag goes up, 19449. October.

A year later, troops enter into North Korea to fight the United Nations, right? So at one point, I think it's around about 51, 52. One of these U.S. generals is in Taiwan. And he speaks to Chiang Kai Shack, who has had to leave mainland China for Taiwan. So Taiwan becomes a sort of, you know, a sort of island of resistance against the which is, which it remains to this very day. But the point really is that Shankar Shek has told, look, these communists are really hard to fight.

They will just throw troops at us. And, you know, some of them are not even equipped with normal footwear. They're just being driven forward by carters who, you know, have no respect for human life whatsoever. Some of their weapons are completely antiquated. we still can't fight them. So Chunkajek looks at them and says, oh, if you can't fight them now, how did you expect me to fight them back in 1948

without any help? If the United Nations find it difficult, how do you think I should have done it in 48? That's a very good point. It's a very good point. Let's be honest about modern life for a second. Processed food, stress, not enough sleep, and whatever we're calling a good night out these days, Your liver sits there quietly dealing with all of it while you carry on like nothing's happened.

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What was it? How did it come about? And why did they think it was a good idea, even though it was patently a disaster? Oh, it was a great idea. That's why they call it great. And it was going forward. If you can't do it at first, you just try again. They have used the term Great Leap Forward a few times, by the way, even after that disaster, which cost, according to their own calculation, several tens of millions of people.

people died, according to me and five other historians from the people's Republic who have used archives. It is at least 45 million lives lost from 58 to 62. That's roughly the equivalent of all the people lost during the Second World War, right? Worldwide. It's not far away from it. So it's not a small number. How?

49, red flag goes up. What does the Communist Party do? It does what it does everywhere else. It eliminates all real or imagined enemies in a campaign of terror from 50 to 51, and then very gradually starts turning all private property into state property. You mean taking private property? Taking property. Yes.

That's how you convert it from private into state. You take it from people and you see it. No, I do not take it. You give it to me. Or you liberate it. I liberate you, and then you will come with the deeds of that corner shop, that three generations of your family have been running in Shanghai. You come and present me the deeds with your shop with a big smile

and say how pleased you are to contribute to the communist cause. Why do you do that? Because you know that you will become a state employee like everybody else. So your job will depend on me. I'm the state. So you must appear to be really keen. Otherwise, I'm going to say, this man's not keen at all. I don't want to give him a job.

You go work somewhere in Xinjiang in a camp. So whether these are big industrialists or small shopkeepers, by 55, 56, they surrender everything they have to the state, become state employees, and the same thing happens in the countryside. Of course, 1994-1949 onwards, that the parts that have not gone through land, reform will go through land reform. So everybody's given a very small plot. Then the common Israel are a plot are too small to really be productive. Let's pool everything. And then around about 55, 56, thank you, we will have the land back. It will now be collective land. So by 56,

57, a farmer in China does not have any land, any pools, and it's all been collectivized. All collectivized. But it's not enough. collectivization is good, but it's not enough. So what does Mao want? If you want to understand Mao communism, you must go back to the other communists. And they all do pretty much the same thing. What does Stalin want, he wants to modernize his country? How does he do it?

He takes the grain, the milk, the butter from the countryside. He sells it abroad to earn foreign currency. He uses the foreign currency to buy advanced industries, entire plants. That's how he gets his modernization, right? Now, he wants the grain to go straight from the fields into the state granary. Why? Because he can't trust those. Damn, Kulax, rich peasants and all others, you know, they will withhold the grain.

They will feed themselves before. the state can, so he wants to go straight into the state granary. And man wants the same thing. The countryside has been collectivized by 56, 57. The tools belong to the state, but it's not enough. All of it must go straight into the state. Not only that, but he thinks he's got an advantage. China, many people.

It may be poor, but it's rich in people. So if he could just transform every man and every woman, in the countryside, in that huge country, into a foot soldier who will work day and night to transform that economy. What can he do? He can get a great move forward and, most importantly, overtake.

At the time, they talk about overtaking England, which is still great industrial power. The talk is about producing more iron, overtaking England, but that's not what he's got in mind. wants to overtake the Soviet Union. He wants to, Stalin is dead, right? 1953, he's dead, body, 56, dragged out of the mausoleum with de-Stalinization. Khushov is the man in charge. Who is Khushov? Some little clown from the point of view of Mao. Who brought a quarter of humanity into the communist camp? It's Mao, not Khrushov.

It is Mao who's the man. He wants to be the leader of the socialist camp. So you must overtake North England, but you must overtake the Soviet Union. So by transforming every man, every woman in the countryside into a foot soldier that you can deploy day and night, you can create that great leap forward into communism. You overtake the whole socialist stage. You overtake the Soviet Union and you become the one who has found the bridge from socialism into communism, the one who has liberated first China and the rest of the world. you become the one, the one pivot around which history revolves.

So that's the plan. The reality is somewhat different. The reality is that when you transform every man and woman into a foot soldier, it means literally that you take their every cup, that every tool, you collectivize everything. People sleep in dormitories, children are sent to kindergartens, man and woman separated in the fields to work. You take away something that is referred to by economists as incentive.

And you will remember, I said that already for the 1930s, that they arrive in very deprived regions, and quickly local villages realize that whatever they produce will be taken by the party. So why do anything at all? It's exactly the same thing with the Great League Forward. They have no incentive to. work. So what do you do when you cannot get the farmers to work into the field? You whip them. You force them. So bit by bit, you get this sort of cycle of violence in which at first,

farmers try to resist, then they get beaten, then increasingly brutal forms to force these people to work. And of course, you do this because you may. must perform. You must fulfill certain quotas. Every village, every county, every province has a quota. And they all compete. They want to outdo each other. I'm the head of one village. I want to el-do your village. I want to show that I'm rather than red. I'm more revolutionary than you are. I can produce more. So on paper, the numbers go up. In reality, nobody's eating. But the grain inspectors take a great amount of grain away. So bit by bit, people start starving to death. But the key point is not that people starve to death. The key point is that their food

depends on work points earned in the fields. And when they have no work points, if you are a pregnant woman and you cannot work, if you are sick and you cannot work, if you're too old and you cannot work, if you're considered to be an undesirable element, you will not have enough work points to earn whatever feeble little portion of food you might be given in the canteen. In other words, food is used as a weapon and a great many people are simply cut off from the food chain as a form of punishment. That's the key to understanding the Great League Forward. The food is used as a weapon. Tens of millions of people are banned from the canteens start to death. that's the result of the greatly forward into communism.

And how many people approximately starved to death, Frank? Because as well, there was a very curious case of the sparrows, wasn't there? Yes, there was that, too. You said, again, great idea. Birds take away the grain, get rid of the birds. So you have people deployed all day long to make noise so that these sparrows and other birds, I presume, I don't think, you know, that the sparrow is going to somehow.

So birds cannot land because they're afraid of landing with all the noise that people make with gongs and drums and shouting and loudspeakers. Or shall they start dropping dead? So you got yourself rid of all the birds. That's wonderful. Except then, of course, that the birds don't just eat the grain. They also eat insects and things like locusts. which thrive in this very distressed terrain.

So they contribute, of course, to be greatly forward and its disaster. So it's just this extraordinary idea that everything can be controlled by using people as foot soldiers in one great army. It can transform nature fundamentally. But all it does is, of course, backfire massively with huge consequences

not just for human beings, but also for nature at large. It's not just the sparrows. The amount of deforestation is very hard to find a tree in China that is more than about 70 years old or so. Where are we now? 27 from 50, 9, 60, 61 onwards, about 60 years. People cut down trees all the time, because they need the fuel, because they've destroyed their own home,

for fuel, because they have backyard furnaces. You know that episode of the backyard furnaces? China must produce steel if only every household in the countryside could contribute to producing steel once they come back from the fields. Of course, you can't produce steel. So they improvised sort of backyard furnaces, and they start using pots, pans, four handles,

anything that's called iron in it, they smelt it to contribute to the quota, the quota of steel that must be delivered by the village. So it's just a massive enterprise of demolition. That's what it is. And are the communists and Mao aware of the damage this is doing? So there is this myth that somehow everybody's guilty, except the man himself, Sherman Mao. It's a little bit like, you know, the king can do no wrong.

wrong. He didn't know. You know, it's his intermediaries who are guilty. Of course, Mal knows exactly what's going on. He is in charge on a daily basis of a huge machine that tries to find information on and about everyone and everything. So he sends his own teams into the countryside to find out what's going on. He knows precisely what's going on, but it's much easier, first, to deny it, than when other party members bring it up in the summer of 1959, being utterly paranoid, as all dictators are. When you spend your life studying power and who may or may not have it, you become paranoid. It is paranoid. So when a number of party members bring up the famine in a very sort of indirect way, very polite,

they tiptoe around the great man, he sees it as a threat. And as yet another purge, pushing the Great League forward even further in 5960. So by the time we're in 61, we're talking tens of millions, and he knows exactly what's going on. Then he turns around and says, exactly what Stalin said.

Stalin said that the further you go with the real, revolution, the more counter-revolutioners there will be. Our counter-revolutionaries in the countryside who have sabotaged everything. That's why the Great Deep Forward failed. So you must purge the countryside of all its counter-revolutionary elements. That's what he does. From 62 to 66, what is 66? What is 66?

It's a cultural revolution. So you have purses of the countryside of counter-revolutionary elements. Now, 66, you must have a cultural revolution to purge the revolution. cities of anything and everyone who thinks in a manner that is not considered to be communist or proletarian enough. Ask me about the cultural revolution. So, but before we get to the cultural revolution, it's just extraordinary if you're a leader of a country that you see that tens of millions of your subjects are starving.

Yes, it is. And your conclusion is that the reason they're starving is they're not cooperating enough with your policy, so we have to starve them harder, basically? Yes, not only that, but there's a wonderful saying. I mean, when you read the archives, it's just fantastic because you can see how these top leaders write to each other and explain what problems they have.

The leader of Sichuan, which is country to size of France, he gets the results of an investigation into the deaths in the countryside and such one, and the result is roughly 9 to 10 to 11 to 12 million people starved under his leadership. And he tells the chairman, you know, we've lost a great many people, but that's a good thing. Because the ones who survived, they had a core.

They had a core. But the people we lost are the slackers, counter-revolutionaries, riff-raft. That's the idea. Right, don't forget, communism is not a soft ideology, right? No. I mean, Stalin, steel, Molotov, hammer, Lenin mocks, you know, the bourgeois crying, sentimentality, humanism. What a, what a pathetic. value that is, empathy, you know. Why? You must be a man of steel. You must carry on with this

revolution. In other words, you will never get there. If you're going to stop and cry at every man you lose in the field, you're going to win the war. These are pretty hardened man. They've gone through a civil war that lasted about 20 years. But the military man, they're not literate. They're not reds. They have spent 20 years fighting in the field, and they're going to continue to fight after 49 for that great goal. So yes, of course, what is 45 million plus? I say it's a minimum of 45 million people. It could be 50. A number of Chinese historians have come up with 50 million. I don't think you can come up with an exact figure. It's impossible. Just a rough approximation. But what is that in the population about 800 million at the time? There's nothing. Mow says,

Mel says, when he goes to meet Khrushchev, I believe it's in 57, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution 1917, he said, you know, if we have a nuclear war, an atomic war, and half the population on planet Earth will die, but the other half will become communist very quickly, and then we will prevail. Now, you might think he's just being flippant, which is true, absolutely, a lot of being flippant. He likes to trigger people. But he's also been quite serious. He's got the broad, long vision. People will reproduce eventually.

What matters is that we get from this stage to that stage. We must fight capitalism, we must have socialism, and then somehow get to the communist stage. That's what matters. The Trigonometry Merge store is built on Shopify, because the moment someone's actually ready to pay, Shopify make sure they can. And if they've bought before, their details are already saved,

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I remember we had the historian Dominic Sambrose. from the rest of history on the show. And one of the things that was the real takeaway, is he talked about the fact that the greatest killers in human history were always idealists, people who had this great vision that they were trying to implement

and they were prepared to do whatever it took. That's what you're describing. Yes, yes, yes and no. I mean, I think it's the other way around. Scholars, people like me, idealists, you know, you spend time with ideas. Is Mao an idealist cultural revolution? Why, what?

When, 66, until he dies roughly, what is it all about? There are those who think that the Great Leap Forward is a disaster. Doesn't matter how many, whether you think it's 20 million, or what is 40 million or more, it's a disaster. So Mao fears that that somebody's going to do to him what Khrushchev did to Stalin, denounce it, possibly even before he dies. There could be demowification. He doesn't like it.

He's paranoid. He sees all sorts of cliques around him, people who will destroy his legacy. It comes up with the Cultural Revolution, which in a nutshell is really asking in the stage number 1, 66 to 68, ordinary people. for the very first time in any communist regime to denounce party members, and people are keen to do it. Then he brings in the army from 68 to 71, so he lets the people purge the party. Then he uses the army to purge the people, and then towards 71, with the death of Lin Biao, the very man who besieged Changchuan and created 160,000 deaths in that siege that lasted eight months.

when Ling Bia was more or less killed, really, in 71, head of the army, then the army is purged. So Mao's pretty much purging everyone and every institution so that he can sleep peacefully. So in 1974, I think somebody comes up and says, you know, there could be a threat from such and such. And Mao says, no, no. I've dealt with all the issues.

There is no threat anymore. He can not so much retire, but he can rest. No, there is no Khrushov out there. Millions of people purged during the Cultural Revolution, number two, Liu Shouchi tortured to death in a dungeon. Many party members either tortured to death or sent to the countryside. hundreds of millions of ordinary people their lives destroyed. The Cultural Revolution is about loyalty.

You must prove your loyalty to the chairman. So if you're just an ordinary individual, you must be able to know his work by heart, pay respect to him, show your loyalty by denouncing others who are others. Well, if you're going to denounce somebody who's already been denounced, it's not much good. So you should denounce maybe, you should denounce maybe,

a friend, a colleague, a family member. You should denounce someone close to you. Then you really prove your loyalty to the chairman. But that's the Cultural Revolution. And why? Why, why, why? So that the chairman can sleep. To protect his power and his legacy? Yes.

Okay, Frank. Well, you seem pretty down on communism in the sense, too. I must say. Oh, that's not true. And people look at China today, which remains formally communist, the People's Republic of China. What do you mean by formally? Well, this is the point I'm driving at.

Good. The regime effectively, under Xi Jinping, is the successor regime to the successor regime to the successor regime to the successor regime of Mazadon. Yes. And yet, look, how wonderful China is, people will say. Yes, it's wonderful. So I'll make a point. When I went to China, I went into the shop.

Let me guess the food was great. The food was. Actually, no, it wasn't. It was better at my local. But anyway, when I was not focus on that. Didn't have Sweden's out pork, Frank. Not a civilized country. Anyway, well, I went into...

We literally just offended 1.4 billion people with a bit of banter. You said it. But when I walked into a shopping center, I mean, it didn't look like communism. There was Louis Vuitton. There was Gucci. And these shops were the size of supermarkets.

Yes, yes. Isn't it wonderful? And who built all of Moscow? You remember, I mentioned Stalin earlier on, 29 to 33. Massive famine, right? Not least in the U-Train, by the way, so that he could buy entire plants,

industry abroad and modernizes country. Moscow is transformed skyscrapers everywhere. He wants to rival Manhattan, New York. Who builds all these skyscrapers? An American, the gold by the name of Kahn, K-A-H-N, he's the head of a firm of architects who build hundreds. of hotels and factories and skyscrapers transform the skyline of Moscow.

Oh, same with China, of course. They want the same thing. They want these huge buildings. They want, you know, proof of tangible proof of success, and they've been working at it for quite some time. Now, take, for instance, should we talk about the bullet trains? I just loved it. I love those high-speed trains.

I love them. They're always empty, the ones I take in China. They're always empty. So we've been told time again, look at how successful China is. Now, where are you going to find this kind of train here in England? Never mind the United States of America. Maybe you can find them in France. But in France, they have unions, workers protests, things close down, horrible.

In China, like under Mussolina, by the way, the trains arrive on time. to pardon Trump, is in debt to the tune of $900 billion US dollars, which is a large amount, right? It will never make money. So the counter argument is going to be, oh, well, that's great. It's a public good. To which I would counter that it is not a public good in that the public, the vast majority of ordinary people cannot afford to take these high-speed trains. They take the parallel system. trains, which are very slow and cumbersome.

So who pays for these bullet trains? It is those very people who take the ordinary trains. Ordinary people have the deposits in state banks. 99.5% of all assets of banks in China belong to state banks. In fact, this may be a good point to invoke a very simple principle, which is communist, namely that, as Marx said it, the means of production must belong to the proletariat, which is the state, right? There must be state control of the means of production.

That's the case in China today. So not one farmer owns a plot of land. Not one single person owns a plot of land in China. The bank assets belong to the state. Most of the primary materials belong to the state. Energy is controlled by the state. Big industry is controlled directly or indirectly by the state. You can be a billionaire today.

Tomorrow, your assets belong to the state. We will find you somewhere, you know, you fell out of a window or off a wall, or you just disappear. People are made to disappear for years on end and then reappear as faithful servants of the Communist Party of China. In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the People's Republic of China has not abandoned its absolute control over the commanding heights over the economy, which means it can carry out huge projects like these trains, these bullet trains, which make very little money. And some bits are very good, you know, between cities, which are quite close to each other. But these trains run all the way through this huge continent, this huge country the size of a continent. Many of them empty.

They simply don't make money and never will. They are funded by the savings of ordinary people. Ordinary people do not consume what you're looking at in effect of the benefits of a system in which wealth produced by anyone at every level flows towards the state but not towards the people. In other words, it is a system in which ordinary people, the household proportion of GDP is the lowest or one of the lowest of any modern economy and world history.

The Chinese have a saying for that, the temple is rich but the monks are poor. So when we talk about how China must you know, come up with a more balanced economic model and must promote consumption. That's a political problem. It will not happen because if the state were to decide that people should consume more, it must give them a greater share of GDP. By giving them a greater share of GDP, the state can do less.

It can no longer build these bullet trains. It cannot build up its army. It cannot prepare for an invasion of Taiwan. It cannot dispose of all these assets that it needs to confront the imperialist camp, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So now you can see what the problem is. What you see when you go to China is the temple, and a temple frequently built without much rhyme or reason.

I'll give you another example, ghost cities, those cities. Great many of them. Or one reason is they can't count. It's a communist country. Communist countries are unable to count because nothing is open or transparent, which means that people lie at every single level. It's a bit like Gogol, the Murpiyuduji,

the dead souls by Gogol, I think there's a chap who goes around collecting dead bodies. And by having these dead bodies and pretending they're still alive, we can still collect rental so. Yes, the tale by Nikolai Gogol. Everyone does that in the People's Republic of China. A village will pretend to have 100 people when it only has 80 to collect benefits for 100 people. And you pocket the 20% that don't exist.

So they don't know how many people they have. We've got this massive scheme about cities building for the future for a population simply not there. But the key point really is that the economy is not just debt. driven, but it's also driven by quotas, in that sense it is a Stalinist economy. Stalin would give quotas. You must produce this, you must do that. When you have a figure of 5% GDP, which we must achieve, that's a quota. You will and must achieve 5% GDP, whether you are the mayor of Uchan City, or whether you run a province or a village. You must show that you have achieved 5% of GDP. How do you do it?

Why do you get 5% GDP? When people don't have enough money to buy anything, when you're in debt to your neck, we're no longer talking 280%. We're talking about 300, 300, 320% of debt? Huge. What do you do? You can do anything.

You dig a hole, it's GDP. You fill it with concrete, it's GDP. You build a house on top of it. It's GDP. Destroyed a house, build a bigger one, still empty, also GDP. So again, a style in this measure, that you measure not only is GDP a quota, a command from above,

not something you just measure that occurs naturally in the market economy. But you also measure what comes out regardless of what goes in, the output, not input, and also the output regardless of whether or not anyone buys it. That's the key point.

So we've been talking about overcapacity, right? Oh, China produces all these, on solar panels and electrical vehicles, but there are way too many solar capacity. Europeans have been complaining about overcapacity, as if this is new. And it goes back at least until the Asian crisis in 96, 97, when there were, on about, I think, a fifth of GDP was overproduction. So at the time, not solar panels, but maybe bicycles and washing machines and what have you not. But in fact, it's intrinsic to communism.

We think communism is underproduction, not enough. No, it's too much of this and too little of that. But at the height of the Great League Forward, as people are literally starving or being starved to death, there are mountains of uncollected drain, you know, along dusty roads in the countryside. The goods accumulating, that they might have a mountain of shoes size 42,

but not enough size 38. I'm just making it up now. But it's a mismatched economy. Why? Because nothing is transparent and it's still the same to this very day. The state decides that it must invest huge amounts in high-speed trains,

solar panels, electrical vehicles. It will identify what it thinks matters most regardless of what people are able or willing to produce, never mind consume. So it remains a... classic misallocation of capital, which creates the illusion, the illusion of great achievements. But the moment you start looking at the numbers, it all vanishes rather quickly. So you're saying the Westerners who look at China's numbers and some of the things they

see when they visit and are impressed, the Walter Durantys of our time, effectively. Exactly, except that this regime has had. So Walter Durante is the one who visits Moscow in the 1930s, and thinks it's just wonderful. There's no famine. Nothing ever happened. I think his exact line was something. I think it's his line. I've never eaten as well as I ate in Moscow.

He says this during the holiday, or when... Which is probably true. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure it would have been true. Yes. And of course, this is true for visitors to China from 49 onwards. They eat very well at the height of the famine in Beijing. No, you might say there is no famine. People eat well in China.

That may or may not be true. one very simple fact is that a greater proportion of children in the countryside in India can afford to buy spectacles and go to school than in China. There you go, okay? That's not nothing, right? Children going to school in the countryside is not nothing. So anyway, the point really is this is a regime that has had many decades to very gradually build up. its ability, ability in terms of, you know, the architecture of it,

but also ability in terms of economic cloud, build up its ability to project an image of great stability and success. It's very simple. You've been to China. Have you ever seen a shanty town in China? No. No. Have I seen people sleep outside in Hong Kong?

Yes. Have I seen homeless people in the richest capitals of the world? Yes, absolutely. Have I ever seen anyone homeless in the people of the public? No. Why? Because they get the ported back to the countryside. It's a complete and utter control of that image that matters a great deal.

A lot of us go to trying to visit a couple of cities. The moment you leave a city, that huge, beautiful highway turns into a city. two-way road. Once it hits the countryside, it's a dirt track, and it all vanishes rather quickly, very, very quickly. That is the point is that so much wealth is extracted to project an image of great wealth in the cities and whatever links these cities.

But you can sit in your bullet train, which is empty, and you can look at these great skyscrapers, which are also empty. and you got to think really about who pays for all of it and how sustainable is it. And most of all, where is it going? Where is it going? Where is it going?

This debt gets bigger and bigger and bigger. There was a period when the debt seemed to be huge, but there was the illusion that somehow growth could be greater than the debt itself, so you can outgrow the debt. But that never was the case. The debt has been accumulating. very, very steadily. I mean, 2008, the financial crisis, the USA poured a lot of money into the economy,

but the PRC pulled as a proportion far more into it, far more so. A great deal of that is just basic, straightforward misallocation of capital. It looks good, but underneath, it's not doing all that way. Well, we read newspapers about how China today has a trade surplus of a trillion, is that right? Is that 1.1 trillion used? I mean, the numbers are just phenomenal. So we're supposed to applaud. I mean, isn't that just amazing?

But it's not. It had several engines of growth. One was infrastructure. But they had built so much infrastructure. There's a point, of course, in the 80s. One of the decades of neglect, you do need roads. You do need trains. You do need pores.

You can invest into that. But they've been investing and investing and investing just to meet that quota. You must achieve it was a lot more than 5%. That 5% is a reason a low one. It was much higher before. You must reach that GDP. There's no infrastructure to be built.

There's just far too much of it already. So that's gone. Then there's real estate. That's another clever trick. You know, I build something. So I fulfilled the quota. Then I sell it to other people. The whole thing is like a Ponzi scheme.

And you have ordinary people try to get a foothold and invest in to this. But that's all gone pear-shaped too. Real estate's all gone downhill. So what have you got left? Exports. You must export at all cost. Why are they exporting so much? Because nobody has the means.

to buy any of it inside China. So what you have is an economy controlled by the state in which a factory, regardless of whether this is a private or a state factory, makes no difference. It's all about who's going to pay tax on that stuff locally. So your local government will give you subsidies. We'll give you, you know, don't worry about the land belongs to the state. We provide it for free. We provide tax subsidies.

We will sell you energy below cost of production. you just go ahead and churn this stuff out as much as you can. But other local governments are doing the same. We have the basic, the same issue that appeared in the 80s, the 90s, all along. Instead of having, say, 100 great bicycle factories, and I'm talking about the 1980s, every little county must have its sewing machine factory, its bicycle factory, and its refrigerator factory.

the factory. A mountain of this stuff doesn't get sold. What do I do? I cut corners. What do you do? You cut corners. We're in a competition. We try to bring down the cost of production. I start selling below cost of production. You start selling below cost of production. And here comes the WTO. This is fantastic, 2001. I can now export all that rubbish I've been producing. I can just put it on a boat and it goes all the way to California where some sucker will buy it. And nobody can compete. If you're in Bangladesh, you cannot compete in the production of garments, Bangladesh, because you don't have the same kind of subsidies. Nobody can compete.

It's what Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, called the Road to Servedom. There are those who say, we must compete better with China. There is no competing. The moment you start competing, you're on that road to serve them. You're going to have to curtail. First of all, you must ban all unions, right? You must nationalize all industry. You must make sure freedom of speech is gone.

You must provide massive tax subsidies. You must have a labor force that has zero rights. That's the key point, really. And ultimately, your point is they must be poor. They must be poor. In order to subsidize this. Because they are the ones who are paying, they do the work, and then you don't pay them. That's the key point.

Frank, I mean, this is what a pleasure it's been. A bit depressing, but nevertheless, a pleasure. It's just absolutely fascinating. That's classic trigonometry, man. Yeah. Final question is always the same, Frank. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I thought about that, and I thought, who should it be the notion of peaceful evolution in China,

which is with us, or with them, the way till now, she would talk about overcapacity. But all of this has been around for a long time. I think the one thing, I would say Winston Churchill, study history, study history. All the secrets of state trough are in history. So we study history. We're all fascinated by our own history, but study the history of China. There's so much in there.

There's so much of it. So much of it. It's like a soap opera. The overcapacity goes back decades. Peaceful evolution as a concept goes back decades. A lot of stuff goes back for decades. There's very little that is really new, quote-unquote, history, study history. And indeed, you have written a number of very successful and excellent books on the subject,

including about the Great Lead Forward, the Cultural Revolution. And you've also written one about dictators and you have others coming up too. Yes, thank you. Somebody's got to do it. Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on. And thank you for watching.

We won't have time for sub-stack questions for this one. We'll see you soon with another episode. Thank you.