Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…ading the northern expedition to fight off all the warlords. Except he stops midway near his power base in Shanghai, and he turns on the communists, massacres them in droves. This is the White Terror. Why? Because he thinks that while he's away fighting, they're trying to take over his government while he's away. He's correct. So he keeps on moving there. There's a nominal unification of China under Nationalist rule when this takes place. In addition, once he's done with that, then he wants to eliminate the Communists for good. And so he runs a series of five encirclement campaigns around their base areas that are scattered in South China. The primary base area- a base area is also called a Soviet, is the Jiangxi Soviet. And on the fifth encirclement campaign, Chiang Kai Shek is finally successful. He sends them off on the long march up to, way up north in desolate Yenan. Long march is a real misnomer. It's the Long Rout. The Communists lose 95% of their forces. 00:10:30 I believe in English “decimate” means to lose 10%. Losing 95%, I think you need a whole new verb for what's happened to you. But Chiang Kai Shek doesn't wipe them out, because he's suffering from divided attentions. When the West did the original- well it was both the United States and Europe, the United States does its original America first thing with a Hawley-Smoot tariff, putting tariffs up to historic highs. And then everybody, of course, retaliates. And now everybody's got high tariffs. Well, here's trade dependent Japan, that's always cooperated with everybody and suddenly they're toast. And so their solution is autarky and they need an empire large enough to be autarchic. And so then that's when they invade Manchuria in 1931. So Chiang Kai Shek has all of a sudden lost this area from China that's greater than Germany and France combined. It's a mess. And so he has to, he's trying to balance what to do about Japanese versus Communists. 00:11:26 The Japanese don't quit with Manchuria. They stabilize the place, they make massive infrastructure developments, they transform it into the most developed part of Asia outside of the home islands, but they keep on going. And it gets so bad that the Communists and the Nationalists form a second united front because they're facing this lethal threat called Japan. And they organized that in December 1936 in what's known as the Xi'an Incident. And the Japanese react viscerally because they look at it, and the Nationalists have gone over to the dark side because they've joined up with the Communists. And this is when the Japanese escalate in 1937, go down the Chinese coast up the Yangtze River. Uh, and well, but then they wind up stalemating. Once they get beyond the Chinese railway system, which isn't that great in this period, the Japanese can't stabilize the place and the Soviets start adding more aid, and we add more aid. It's a mess. So the Japanese decide they're going to cut Western aid to the Chinese. And that's where Pearl Harbor comes in. That's what the attack of Pearl Harbor is all about, is telling Americans to stay out of Asia, which of course, you know, we did just the opposite. the Chinese. And that's where Pearl Harbor comes in. That's what the attack of Pearl Harbor is all about, is telling Americans to stay out of Asia, which of course, you know, we did just the opposite. 00:12:36 And then the Nazis interpret their alliance with the Japanese broadly to declare war on the United States. So when that happens, you have a regional war that had already been going on over Poland in Europe and this other war that had been going on since `31 in Asia, they unify into a global World War. Mao understood that he was dealing with three layers of warfare, nested wars, that he was fighting a civil war against the Nationalists within a regional war against Japan. And then after Pearl Harbor, there's going to be a global war that will eventually morph into a global Cold War. Most of his writings are written before Pearl Harbor. So he's going to focus on the first two layers of what's going on here. So after the World War II is over, Mao goes after the Nationalists full bore, and the Japanese have already very much weakened the Nationalists and Mao wins the civil war. Okay, these are the wars. 00:13:40 Now, I promised you a simple framework. Here's the simple framework. Simple framework should have three to five things because that's all about any of us could really handle on short notice. And so I got four here. And I'm going to use Clausewitz's definition of great leadership to analyze Mao. According to Clausewitz, in a general, two qualities are indispensable. First is an intellect that even in the darkest hour – and Mao had many of those – retains some glimmering of inner light, which leads to truth. And second, the courage to follow that faint light wherever it may lead. The first of these qualities is described by the French term, coup d'oeil. Coup is a glance, d'oeil is an eye, taking in a situation with a glance of an eye. And the second is determination. 00:14:23 Well, Mao had these things in numerous areas. I'm going to first discuss Mao the propagandist, that's how he starts out. And then I've got what I say here is Mao the social scientist. But what he was really good is data analysis, data collection and analysis. He truly understood the countryside because he collected all sorts of data about it and analyzed it. And then I will go on to Mao, the operational military leader, winning and fighting battles. And then at the end, I'll talk about Mao the grand strategist, integrating all elements of national power. So that's my game plan. That's the simple framework. And away we go. 00:15:00 All right. Mao began his public service career as a propagandist. And if you look at his early biography, he's born in 1893 to a prosperous but not particularly well-educated father who tilled his own land. Mao hated his father and he hated farming, so he left as soon as possible. After the 1911 revolution for a little while he worked as a soldier, didn't like that. He joined and then dropped out of a series of vocational schools. He tried being a, what was it? A merchant, a lawyer, I'm missing something else, a soap maker. Imagine Mao, three stages of personal hygiene, whatever. 00:15:39 It was not to be. f vocational schools. He tried being a, what was it? A merchant, a lawyer, I'm missing something else, a soap maker. Imagine Mao, three stages of personal hygiene, whatever. 00:15:39 It was not to be. But he eventually gets an Ed degree, so he can go off and be a primary school principal. Okay, imagine setting your child off to the psychopath doing show and tell. And then he joins the Communist Party. And it's during the First United Front so he also joins the Nationalist Party. And he has very important positions. If you look at, he's in the National Party, he's at their central headquarters, and he's the minute taker. So he's the fly on the wall listening to everything. 00:16:10 And then he's a stand in for the head of the propaganda department, which is probably where he learned a great deal about the importance of propaganda. And here's what he says early on, “the Communist Party can overthrow the enemy only by holding propaganda pamphlets in one hand and bullets in the other”. And if you look at the original organization chart of the shadow Communist government, you'll see there are only what, six departments there? One of them is a propaganda department. If you have no power, words are, is, your initial way into gaining power. I'm now going to use a framework from my wonderful colleagues, Mark Genest and Andrea Dew, this is theirs, about analyzing strategic communication in terms of messenger, message and medium. And I'll go through each three, all three. 00:16:59 What you see here is a propaganda poster. It's a woodblock print. That's the medium. And it's a very easy way to reproduce pictures back in the day. The message is about a model laborer, this “always emulate Wu Man Yo”, lucky us. And to do all the nice things he does with whatever is going on there. So that's what that is. Now, messengers were the delivery system, the broadcasting system for the Communist Party. So you've got the Communist Party, but you've got to reach an audience. And that's what these messengers are doing. And so they go into local areas and they identify local grievances for attention by the Communist Party, which when it fixes them or fixes somebody, that will generate loyalties and allegiance. So these propaganda personnel would be identifying local bullies to come in and deal with them, organize mass rallies. During battles they're going to double as medics, after battles, they're going to propagandize POWs, between battles, they are helping on troop morale. But what they're really doing is reporting back to Communist Central exactly what's going on. 00:18:10 And civil and military messengers differ. For civil messengers, they would be activists, maybe in the local government, labor unions, peasant organizations, women organizations, any number of these things. And it's there, it's your broadcasting system to reach a population and mobilize it. Military messengers are a little different. Every single military unit had about a 20-member propaganda team. That's a lot of people. According to Mao, the propaganda work of the Red Army is therefore first-priority work of the Red Army. This is very different from soldiering in the West.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.