Sarah Paine Episode 3: How Mao Conquered China
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What I'm about to say are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent those of the US government, the US Navy Department, the US Department of Defense, or Naval War College. You got that clear? Complain to me if you got problems. Alright. I'm I'm gonna talk about Mao. He's an incredibly consequential figure. He's, for the 20th century, he's one of the most consequential political or military figures, and he's also one of the most important figures in Chinese history of any century, and he's also a terribly significant military and political theorist, and this is not an endorsement of Mao. It is
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first of all, you need to think about what his objective is, which number 1 is stay in power. Right? And number 2 is probably Communist Party in power and his visions of revolution. So that's one thing. So then you're you're worried about welfare of people as if that's the primary objective. It most certainly is not. And then he may have assumed that it came along with these things, and that's a whole problem with, communist ideal ideologies. People don't believe it because they know it's wrong. They believe it because it's right. And there's a whole problem with that about labor theories of v
when I compare him to other, even other communist leaders Which
ones? So
if you look at Stalin, for example, yes, he causes the Holodomor. Right? 3,000,000 people die. But that was
Details. Yeah.
But that was an intentional famine where he was trying to root out the collapse. The Great Leap Forward was like, he wasn't trying to kill tens of millions of Chinese. And there's instances in the twenties where Stalin threatens to resign and people close to him, the Molotov and others, say, you can't do it because nobody else can run the government like you can. Oh,
yeah. Right. I
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