Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…reform as he figures out how to calibrate that to make it work. 00:24:46 All right, for Mao, he's doing data-driven survey after data-driven survey, does a whole series of them between 1926 and 1933. And he's trying to figure who owns what, who works for whom, who tills where, and inventories down to the last pitchfork and last chicken, as he's trying to establish what is really going on on the countryside, and he does. What he concludes is that 6% of the rural population owns 80% of the land, and 80% of the population owns only 20% and his solution is going to be revolution. And he goes further into the statistics and he identifies 70% as poor peasants, 20% who are like his father—they till their own land, they're middle peasants—and then there are the exploitative 10% who don't get their hands dirty with anything. And what Mao is trying to figure out is how you can incentivize 80% of those people into actively taking part in the revolution. This is the key. 00:25:53 And what he wants to do is take the bottom of the social pyramid and mobilize it to crush the top of the pyramid. The way he's going to do this is by determining class status through a land investigation movement, which he says is a violent and ruthless thing. We're going to talk about class, approval of class status, confiscation of land, and redistribution of land in order to invert the social pyramid. He's got a real plan for doing it. He argues that land reform is just essential for peasant allegiance. This is how you're going to get it, to draw these hundreds of millions into supporting the communists. But you got to do it sequentially: you’ve got to propagandize first, and then you’re going to distribute land later. A little bit later. He had a very bureaucratic way of redistributing land, the approval of class status, he said, it’s a life-and-death decision for the person in question. 00:27:02 It starts out with a vote at the local level, and then it goes through many layers of party approval before being sent back to the local level to announce who's going to get the land and who's going to take a bullet. And then Mao leverages the enthusiasm of this movement for the people who are going to get the land, the other people, not so much. He's going to leverage this enthusiasm to get people to join the party and also to join the army. Mao is planning to collectivize all land. That's what the Communists are going to do. But he says, "Look, the system of landlords and tenants cannot be completely destroyed yet." 00:27:45 Because he needs the peasants to join him, and the peasants desperately want land. So, Mao gives it to them, and he gets a great deal of support for doing this. But he also keeps the rich peasants around, too. This is a deleted portion in the collected works: “because rich peasant production is indispensable”. Until he wins the civil war and can then turn the guns on them. And he's also got a duplicitous program for the middle peasants. It's a big bait and switch. It looks like you're going to get -- see, you got the land? Well, now you do, and now you don't, because at the end, they're all going to lose their land. middle peasants. It's a big bait and switch. It looks like you're going to get -- see, you got the land? Well, now you do, and now you don't, because at the end, they're all going to lose their land. 00:28:26 In order to reform, to get the land, Mao is talking about a red terror to get it. And while he was still with the Nationalists, he wrote a report on the peasant movement in Hunan, where he's talking about taking all the land from the landlord class and shooting them. And that won't cut it with the Nationalist army because their officers are landlords. So, as part of his program, it's not just land reform and educating people, warm and cuddly. It's also coercion. 00:29:04 Okay, that's Mao the social scientist. Enough of him. Now, we're going to do Mao the military leader. You've probably heard this chestnut from Mao: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao spent his- it’s still part of his early career- being right but being a minority view. That he had certain views about military operations that were not shared by Communist Central. And Mao kept following that dim light wherever it may lead, and events eventually vindicated him. He survived a variety of encirclement campaigns, but then he had some troubles. And here are his critics. Li Lisan was a labor organizer, he was the de facto head of the Communist Party from 1928 to 1930. And after the white terror on the Northern Expedition, Moscow had told its communist buddies in China that the next thing to do was to take the cities. 00:30:10 And so Li Lisan tries to, with the Nanchang uprising in 1927. It was a total disaster. And he tries it again in 1930 with the Changsha uprising, another disaster. That got him into exile in Russia and according to Mao, Comrade Li Lisan did not understand the protracted nature of the Chinese Civil War. Li Lisan is trying to fight a decisive, war-winning battle far too early. You try to do that, and you can get yourself ruined. Here's another critic, Xiang Ying. Mao is in the Jiangxi Soviet, and he thinks a smart strategy is to lure the enemy into your own terrain, which is favorable to you, let them get exhausted, then you spring the trap and you annihilate them. Communist Central in Shanghai thought this was nuts, that you shouldn't be ceding territory at all. So Mao, for the longest time, he’s off in Jiangxi, they were off in Shanghai, they were a long way apart, and so Communist Central can’t do anything about it- Mao does his own thing. 00:31:08 So the communist Central sent Xiang Ying to Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally, and you can imagine how this works for his later career- not well. He fires Mao and this is where his strategy winds up producing the Long March, the Long Retreat, in which they lose 95% of their people by trying to defend territory, so people began to get it, that Mao may have known what he was doing. Then, on the Long Retreat, Mao chose as his terminal point of retreat, like where you’re going to wind up, as up in Yenon, way up north, deep in Muslim and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border. Mao thought that was essential because they're the big benefactor. treat, like where you’re going to wind up, as up in Yenon, way up north, deep in Muslim and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border. Mao thought that was essential because they're the big benefactor. Whereas this gentleman, Zhang Guotao, who was the military commissar of the Fourth Army, thought, "Nonsense, we're Han Chinese, we want to be in Han lands." So he wanted to go into western Sichuan, which he did. 00:32:10 And he suffered a series of defeats over 1935, and as a result, he was never as important ever again, and eventually defected to the Nationalists. So, Mao had proven himself prescient and right and determined. He had kudoi and determination, and people eventually recognized that. All right, Mao and Clausewitz define war somewhat differently. Clausewitz has this famous line, "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." Mao says, "No, no, war is politics by other means. It is something that is used to achieve political ends." So far that's not incompatible. But then here's Mao's twist: "A revolution is an uprising, an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another." Clausewitz is not about class warfare at all. In fact, his wife is always trying to wine and dine the aristocrats, so completely different in that department. 00:33:07 Mao is looking at the world, and he believes the linchpin of the social order are landlords. He's going to detonate them and try to destroy them. He talks about the violence of all of it, that you're going to get the peasant masses to overthrow these landlords, and that this will require terror in rural areas, but this is absolutely necessary and of course this is what the Nationalists absolutely would not tolerate. Mao also understood he was operating in a period of nested wars, and that the ones that were ongoing were the civil war with the Nationalists and then the regional war with Japan. Pearl Harbor comes a little later. And he talked about defeating Japan in three stages. 00:34:02 He said “defeating Japan requires three conditions: first is progress by China”, i.e, the civil war, “which is the basic and primary thing; the second is difficulties for Japan”, i.e, the regional war, “and the third is international support”, the big friend. I'm going to talk about each of these three things in turn. So, in order to win the civil war, Mao believes you need base areas, these Soviets, where are they located? Often on the boundaries of provinces, in very difficult terrain, where provincial authority, let alone national authority, simply does not extend. Mao thought that there were certain prerequisites for a good base area. One is strategic terrain. It's got to be defensible so that the weaker communist forces can defend it against conventional nationalist or conventional Japanese armies. So that’s key, pick your terrain carefully. 00:34:54 Also, you need to have a strong Red Army presence there to make it work. You need numerous organized workers and peasants. You've got to have some local support there. And then you need a good party organization. This is Mao's idea of what you need for a base area.…

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