Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)

**Sarah Paine** (0:00)
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. All right, 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 rather just an accurate description of his global and enduring importance. And think about China. Historically, it's represented, I don't know, a third of the world's population, a third of the world's trade. That's a big slice of humanity. Moreover, Mao's theories have been used by many enemies of the United States to take over failing states from within in order to assert dictatorial rule. He is also probably the most brilliant and most famous psychopath in human history, and that is saying a lot. So here we go. All right. This presentation is based on the first eight volumes of Stuart Schramm's collected works of Mao. What Schramm did is he compared Mao's complete works, as published in the 1950s, to whatever he could find as the earliest version of whatever it was. Then he re-inserted whatever had been cut in the italics. So tonight watch the italics. Mao didn't put all of his best ideas in one place. He scattered them all over the place. So what I've done is, I've got to come, for you all, prepared like a jigsaw puzzle of all of these different ideas. Then in order to make it comprehensible to you of all these random little tidbits, you have to have like a coat rack to hang all the hangers, and that's called a simple framework, and I'll get there. But in your own lives, when you've got all kinds of complicated things to transmits to others, you can look at what I'm doing tonight, and you can do it for other things as well. So here we go with good old Mao, and oh, by the way, a lot of those 8,000, 7,000 pages weren't that interesting, so in a way, you owe me. All right. So all right. These are major military theorists. Just to run you through them, Klausowitz is the West's major military theorist of bilateral conventional land warfare. Sun Tzu is Han civilization's great theorist of how you maintain power in a continental empire, multilateral world using coercion and deception. The two fellows on the right are maritime theorists. In a way, they're writing the missing chapters of Klausowitz. It doesn't talk about naval warfare at all. The top one is Alfred Theremahan, the Naval War College's finest. And what he's writing about are the prerequisites for strategic possibilities for maritime power. And the Briton, underneath them there, Sir Julian Corbett is writing about how a maritime power, i.e. Britain, can defeat a continental power, i.e. Germany or France. But all of them are writing about warfare between states. And Mao is a different event. Mao has to do with triangle building. The term triangle building comes from Clausewitz. Clausewitz has this nice little passage here, where he's talking about these abstractions, passion, creativity, and rationality as being mainly, but not exclusively associated, respectively, with the people, military, and government. A state has full up military and civil institutions that have some connection to their people. But an insurgent is going to be building these things from the ground up. So that's what Mao is doing, is he's actually taking over the host from within by building a shadow government and eventually taking power. And many of the decolonizing world after World War II were really sick of the West. They've been colonized, didn't want to hear anything about them. But it seemed as if the Soviets or the Chinese perhaps offered a better model, the communists. And many thought that the Chinese with Mao offered the better model. Why? Because the decolonizing parts of the world were also agricultural and underdeveloped, unlike Russia, which had quite a military, excuse me, an industrial base. And so they thought Mao was the more relevant guy. All right, here's Mao in his iconic moment. He's proclaiming the victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War. China had been a broken state basically since 1911 when the last dynasty had fallen and the country had broken out into a multilateral civil war that he eventually wins. And I'm going to be talking tonight about Mao's theories from the 1920s and 30s when he had the time to write. But there's a lot more to Mao than just that. He had quite a track record. Once he won the Civil War, he imposed a social revolution. What's that? It's more than a political revolution. You're not just replacing the government. You're going to wipe out entire social classes. And I don't mean then, hey, here's your one-way ticket out of here kind of way. No, no, a social revolution is here's a mass grave, dig it and then you're in it kind of way. So if you look at these statistics of Chinese deaths and many of their wars, and this is from much of the Maoist period, I think it's 45 to 75, what you'll notice, the figures in white, I believe are civilian deaths, not military deaths. And it gets really quite ugly. There are more Chinese civilian deaths here than all deaths in World War II. And then for those of you who think the Chinese are all great long-term strategists, you need to ponder these numbers. How is it possible to kill so many of your own? That's generally not a mark of good strategy. Moreover, most of them died during the Great Famine, which was the only nationwide famine in Chinese history. Why? Because it's not caused by the weather. It's caused by policies set in Beijing. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao put all the peasants on communes. That meant the party was in control of the food supply, i.e. who lives and who dies. You don't get a meal, you're very dead. In addition, he decentralized industry, and you can see these backyard furnaces pictured here. As a result of this, production collapses, agriculture and industrial, but Mao keeps exporting food. Why? Because that's his pocket change. That is a major source of government income if he wants to be able to do anything. So they keep exporting food. As a result, 40 million Chinese starved to death, primarily in rural areas and disproportionately peasant chill girls, the least valued members of society.