Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you had to speculate, suppose the Nationalists win. In Taiwan, because they're forced to, they have a very pro-American policy. But if they had won in the mainland China, would it have been similar where mainland China just turns into Taiwan, or would it have been different? No, I'm sure it would be different. One of the reasons Taiwan is Taiwan is after they lost the civil war and they are on the island of Taiwan, they did a big after-action analysis of what went wrong and they decided it was corruption and that it was land reform that they needed to fix those things. But they couldn't do land reform on the mainland because that's their officer corps. But when they come to Taiwan, they can more than redistribute Taiwanese land, which they do and it's bloody. Because the Taiwanese don't want their land redistributed. The Taiwanese were given bonds, and they thought those bonds would be like the pieces of paper that were issued in the mainland, i.e worth nothing, but actually after time they became quite valuable. Land reform was bloody in Taiwan, but today Taiwan has a very equal income distribution. And what is the explanation for -- you just had these tallies of numbers up of how many deaths through different events. The famine obviously makes sense, a lot of people would die. But you just go down the list, and there are so many things where a couple million people die, and it's like one out of ten items that happen within a span of a couple of decades.…

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