Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…What explains the credulity of these people in the US and Britain on the Soviet Union's claims about everything from its economic growth to the way it dealt with its own populations? Why were some people so asleep to this? I don't know, but I suspect that the sins of the West are really obvious because we have an open press. And for anyone who'd been through World War I and had any male member in the family who'd been at the trenches and came back and talked about it, it was pretty horrific. And you can't believe that anything's going to be worse than that. Or if you go to China under Chiang Kai-shek, he had a semi-free press and that's how we know about things. You look at the incredible corruption going on there, you go, “Well, how can anything be worse than this? Well, actually, it could be a lot worse than this. You talk in your book The Wars on Asia and elsewhere about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and how they industrialized the region and at the end, it had 50% higher GDP per capita than the rest of China. And it was the most industrialized part of Asia outside of Japan. Japan also colonized Taiwan. We see those are some of the wealthiest parts of Asia now. And then we also see the impact of the communist counterfactual in other parts of Asia. In retrospect, what should we make of the impact of the Japanese occupation given the wealth of Korea, Taiwan, these other areas now? And how much the industrialization under Japan mattered?…

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