341. Chairman Mao: The Clash With Stalin (Ep 4)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaPoduk.com In this episode we ask Kamazudong transformed a devastated nation into an industrial power. This is a story of economic ambition, social transformation and totalitarian power. But it's also a story of tragedy. Join us as we discuss the first turbulent decade of the people's Republic of China. Hello and welcome to MPa. We are picking up the story now in 1949 at the dawn of the people's Republic of China. Last time we saw Mao, we saw him surviving the long march out manoeuvring his rivals during the Japanese invasion. And then ultimately declaring that the world's most populist country was a communist republic. I mean that's quite an achievement in a short space of time. Runner give us a portrait of China in 1949. It's not in a happy situation although things are better presumably than they were in the middle of the Chinese occupation. No, I would say that if one chose one word to describe China in 1949, I think it would be dislocation. It was still very much a society that was living in the post-war. In other words, the end of the World War II period and the aftermath. And if you think about Britain or France in 1949, you can see why that would be a perfectly appropriate comparison for China too. But China had also had this devastating civil war just after the end of the World War, which saw these mighty armies, millions of men fighting for the nationalists, millions more fighting for the communists, smash large parts of the country apart, particularly in the areas such as Northeast China, Manchuria and around the Yangtze Valley, where it was important to seize control. So all of this had led essentially to a highly dislocated society, refugees fleeing in all sorts of directions, urban middle class people worrying what the arrival of the communists and their victory might mean for their everyday lifestyles trying to flee many of them fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong and other places, many had to stay behind. I would say that one other word I'd use describe it was a time of uncertainty. Nobody, including the communists themselves, knew quite what it meant to set up this new, unprecedented socialist state on China's territory. And that was the great experiment that would now begin. And, Rana, let's not forget in the last episode, you know, we talked about tons and tons of gold being removed by the Shanghai Shaq leadership and taken to Taiwan. And you've got basically a country that is trying to declare its new future, which is significantly poorer than the other major powers. Even before the communist victory in 1949, the nationalist China, which was there after World War II, was weak, poor, you know, smashed into pieces by the Japanese invasion. Yes, it had global standing, at least as a new member of the permanent five on the UN Security Council, which has been inaugurated in 1945, 46, but in terms of actual resources, it was very weak indeed. And that was something, of course, that Mao was very aware of, which is why the only place that now ever went outside China in his life was the Soviet Union. He went twice in 1950, both times to visit Stalin, essentially both to boast about his victory, having, you know, essentially being this driving force and ultimately leading the Chinese Communist Party to conquest of the mainland, Trump said a bag for cash, basically. He needed money. He needed urgently. The United States was not going to recognize the new communist regime. China needed reconstruction urgently. The only kid on the block who was going to do that was the Soviet Union. And therefore turning to Stalin was an absolutely top priority from Mao's point of view. What was a relationship? How did they get on? Two clashing titans. Very, very prickly in some ways. Really? On the one hand, Mao, greatly admired Stalin. He regarded him clearly as the Dwyerne of a successful, ruthless and effective socialist leader. Stalin, I think, was ambivalent in that he didn't really rate the Chinese Communist. He thought they were kind of peasant rabble. And he was, I think, quite surprised when they actually managed to get to power. He was basically like the sort of absentee dad who is always off seeking other relationships, all driving a fast car. And then comes to your football gamer, yells at you about how you haven't scored any goals. But at the moment, you have to pay for college. He'll grudgingly dip into his pocket and come up with the cash. That sort of Stalin to Mao, I would say. He never quite, I think, took him seriously as this person who had led this genuine and transformative revolution in China. But in the other hand, he realised that actually Mao was a considerable figure and was in the end financially and politically supportive of him, although not without lots of terms and conditions along the way. I mean, Stalin is somebody who liked to purge, though. I mean, I don't know whether he sort of takes that lesson literally from his experience of meeting senior Soviet officials, but he does have this methodology of cleaning house as he calls it, you know, saying, you know, his house, meaning China must be swept clean, fleece, bed bugs, and rubbish before any guess, meaning foreign diplomats like these senior Soviets could be let in. I mean, what does that mean exactly? Does that just mean, right, we kill anybody, doesn't agree with this? At times, yes. Essentially, think about the language, the metaphor of cleansing. I mean, this is something that's used by a lot of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to argue almost for a kind of biological purity for the kind of society you want to bring about. I mean, in the case of China, it's not based on race, it's based on class. But one of the things that underpins this idea is perhaps the single biggest ideological transformation that happens under man, it lasts for decades. And that is that everything in China is defined by your class status. This means that assignments of food, assignments of job, even your heredity, because what class you were born into defines, in many cases, what class you come to, it's about the caste system in some ways, actually. This becomes all dominant in terms of working out who gets what and who doesn't in the new China. So when they're talking about cleaning people out, they're talking about class enemies. And this leads, for instance, to the mass killings of landlords out in the countryside. And is this modeled on Stalin's sort of, you know, killings of the Kulaks and so on? Do they know about this, and are they modeling it, or are they just two very similar authoritarian characters who are both completely ruthless and prepared to wipe out anything in their way? It's the vibe, Rod, and the blueprint, I would say, in a way that I think they probably would not have put it. I mean, yes, there were plenty of people, country, the security chief that Mao had, who had actually trained in Moscow with exactly these sorts of people, you know, the Ogpu, the predecessor of the KGB. But at the same time, you know, China is not the Soviet Union, as Mao was paying to point out on various occasions. And therefore different tactics we use at that time. So yes, there was certainly awareness of Soviet history. Obviously, the Chinese tent to look at it in a rather more favorable way than those from liberal countries would do. China has its own traditions of these things too. First of all, as you mentioned in previous episode, internal purges within the party had been very commonplace during its rise to power. So the extension of that purge mentality to the wider society was also something that came in a sense naturally. And you get it during the process that is rather, you've must have been called Giger, a Tuddi Giger, land reform, which actually isn't just reform. It's really kind of revolutionary change in which land is seized, from those who are felt to own it unjustly. Many of those people were killed, something like two million now, lords seem to have been killed during the initial phase. Again, the Kulaks in Ukraine and this sort of stuff. Yeah. All of these sorts of things have similarities. But I think it would be mistaken to attribute it purely to Soviet influence. There's plenty of Indigenous Chinese traditions that speak to this too. Brutusness. I mean, yeah, you can do your own brand of terror. And it is a peculiarly Chinese brand of terror that we see with the three anti and five anti campaigns. I mean, this is, we're talking about the year 1951. And we're talking about an enormous number of people who are affected by this. Can you, can you just first of all tell us what these anti campaigns were all about and how many were kind of crushed underneath it? Yes, I mean, there was so many of them in a sense that I sort of passed a general impression rather than necessarily going through every single one because you'd run out of time and run out of patience, I think, after a while, we could do a whole mini series on the anties of Mao. We could up the anti, I suppose. But the point is that if you lived through these things, and many people who are still alive, you know, in their 70s or 80s did live through these things, is that imagine, you know, the sort of unseasing turmoil of every single day, wondering, you know, what was coming along next. I think that you definitely have a sense that class enemies are being defined. This is the three anties, five anties idea that the way in which enemies are defined is through class. Now, but no matter what you're contrasting this with, we'll think about just a few years previous to Chiang Kai-shek who had been, you know, ousted as leader, he very much classed, no, pal, and said, he very much classified the enemy as we know as being the reds. In other words, it was about communist, communist versus anti-communist. Of course, you know, anti-communists were now anathematar to Mao and the party. But furthermore, finding enemies within, particularly when, you know, the foreigners were slowly but surely, who actually quickly but surely, being expelled from China, that foreign influence was harder to find in terms of targets you could see, you know, business people, missionaries, whatever. And so it said the enemy had to come from within. And that was where this use of class definitions became important. So technically speaking, bits of the three or five anties or other campaigns, you know, they bourgeois liberalization campaign might say that they were looking for, you know, people to root out their bourgeois values or something of that sort. But the question of what this actually meant was often heavily defined A by the desire of the party to seek some particular kind of goal of purification. And second, of course, the way it was implemented at the grassroots in which, you know, some official down in Junzhou isn't taking personal dictation from Chiang Min Mao as he now is. He is the Chiang Min, by this this stage, you know, visually, takes up championship in 1945, just even before power. He's not going to get personal instructions from me. So he has to interpret what this means as it seems better to him. And generally, he'll find that urring on the side of highly enthusiastic radicalism is better than holding back. Right. Okay, because you want to please daddy. I mean, it's a little bit of that going on. And but what you see, if you sort of zoom out of it, is pretty much in a sort of private enterprise because this is a Mao quote directly. We must probably execute 10,000 to several tens of thousands of embezzlers nationwide before we can solve the problem. It's a seizure isn't it? Of assets because this is a new country that needs money and will pretty soon with career entering the fray need a lot more money. It is in part a seizure of assets. I mean, there are business people, so there's no, it's kind of, you know, red capitalists who at least in the initial period, which is called the new democratic period, seek to work with the new regime. And that works in some cases, particularly places like Shanghai because, you know, the people who are coming in, often these are sort of, you know, literally people coming out of the countryside, these car drays don't have the capacity to be able to run factories or power stations or all of the infrastructure that's needed to keep things going. But the end goal, as you say, is always clear. The idea that it's going to be more revolutionary change and that new democratic period, which, you know, at least initially, lolled a lot of people into a full sense of security, was never intended in Mao's mind to last forever merely to be a sort of way station to solidify the regime and then work out where things go. It also radicalized, you know, with the attacks on pre-evidentity, as you put it, because very early on in the life of the new regime, Mao made the decision to go into the Korean War. And because China was then essentially on a war footing, even though of course it was not under-attacked directly on its own territory in the way it happened in World War II, wars always give states excuses to expropriate property and to take control of resources. Harry Truman actually tried it the other way around to, he tried to seize the steel mills in the United States to aid the Korean War effort and was pushed back by the Supreme Court. No Supreme Court is going to stop Mao. So when he wants to seize private property, there's nothing in the way. So run amid all this political terror and this expropriation, life was also changing dramatically for ordinary Chinese citizens, given the picture of what's going on. Everyday life shifts in a whole variety of ways, but perhaps one of the most obvious places, and I wonder if it's actually still in many cases with us today in China, you know, decades later, is the change in the workplace. China is turned into a socialist command economy, not completely top down, but of course Stalin again is a huge influence here and we know that Stalin's short course on economics was something that was very influential on Mao, even though Stalin didn't know that much about economics and ordered Mao. So I'm sure it was a fruitful meeting of minds. But the idea of a Soviet style command economy was certainly on the minds of those who were involved like Yusha Chi in that sort of change. And what that meant was that for instance in a factory, units were created the term downway, meaning work unit became a kind of staple of everyday life. And there's work units, a little like in the Soviet Union, control all of your life. The ideal scenario would be that you would be born in kind of the downway, birthing home or hospital, you know, you'd be school in a school that was attached to the unit. You would then find work there, have a kind of lifetime employment, and maybe the funeral parlor that dealt with your dispatch from this earth would also be attached to the downway. It was essentially the answer to the question of how can a country which was devastated economically where people's lives were so precarious day to day deal with that question. And the answer they came up with was a sort of authoritarian, well-ferished socialist wraparound in which your entire working life would be subsumed to a unit control by the Communist Party. But on the flip side, that party would provide all of the life provisions that you would need from cradle to rave. Was this envisaged as a sort of a lissium? I mean, it sounds incredibly grim. Could it be framed in such a way that this was at the period in the context progress, the modern world, the future, heaven? It depends who you are and where you are, I think. Everyone's experience is going to be different. I think for an awful lot of people, particularly those who are used to freedom of labour and entrepreneurship, but basically being shoe haunted a job they might not have wanted and not be very good at would have been a pretty depressing experience, I think it's fair to say. Also, these are not just workplaces, they become communities and communities, particularly in with looking ones, can become extremely fraught sorts of places where relationships, bribery, these sorts of things matter a great deal. But I suppose if you're a landless peasant and you've been living the most precarious life, suddenly having something that you're anchored with, with somebody saying, will look after you, we'll make sure that you have food in your belly is quite appealing. I want to just look at women, I'm surprised, surprise, all look at women for a moment. In the first episode, you were talking about a young, malraling against the arranged marriage, railing against women, I think as he put it, almost being forced into big rapes in their relationships and how he was against it. Now he's got power, now he's got the chops to do something about it. Does he do anything for women or was it all talk? It wasn't all talk, but the results are highly compromised. But Chinese Communist revolution since its earliest days has always talked about the importance of women's rights and feminism. But it's always in practice made class-based arguments, placed above feminist arguments. In other words, that feminist arguments can only be an aspect of class politics as opposed to being important in their own right. Nonetheless, if you want to turn to things that really do change women's lives during this period, there are plenty of them. One is a new divorce law in 1950, which makes it much easier for women to separate from their husbands. That provides not only for women, for men, of course, a newer and perhaps more accessible means to deal with the unhappy marriages and other things, which of course are very much part of China, like any other society at that time. But also, actually, as the scholar Jennifer Altehanger has pointed out, based at Oxford University, that it gives people an idea also about what legal rights they have in their lives, because if you're going to get involved in divorce under the new settlement, you also have to learn how the law operates. And this puts into people's eyes or ears the idea that actually legal remedies are available to them, which they can use as ordinary people, highly flawed and problematic and subjected to a whole variety of terms and conditions. But it's about a mindset as well, so that becomes important at that time. As convoluted as it might have been, though, over a million women filed for divorce in the first year, I mean, some kind of floodgates opened. On the other hand, you can see, so something that is ambivalent at least is on those work units I've mentioned, women were given work points, basically. I mean, men and women were both given work points to check that they'd fulfilled their quotas, very Soviet. But women had to do more work to get the same number of points, in many cases, as partly because allegedly they would be working more slowly or they wouldn't have as much bodily capacity and therefore to make up their numbers that have to do more. And obviously, as is so often the case, the type of work which got counted was usually manual factory work, say, whereas looking after children generally didn't get counted quite so much. So many of the distortions of life that came from the pre-Native 49 period, even though they were rethought in a feminist mode, was still arranged in many cases according to what was really best for a highly masculine society that was choosing to industrialize and associated that kind of progress and development with the values of factories and the manufacturing of heavy products. And if that isn't dark enough, tell us about the campaign to suppress counter revolution raise. I mean, essentially one of the things that emerges very early, and perhaps unsurprisingly, in the CCP that Chinese Communist parties rule on the mainland, is paranoia, essentially, the fear that there are traitors from within who are seeking to subvert the regime. And like many paranoids, just because your paranoia doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Yes, very mild. The situation in the early 1950s, which is completely different from what might think of now. The PRC, the People's Republic of China under Mao, is still an unrecognized state. It's not recognized in the United Nations. It's not recognized by the United States of America. A few countries, including Britain, actually, have given a diplomatic recognition. But overall, Taiwan is still maintaining that actually it's the Republic of China. It's the true government of China. So, first of all, it's not like Mao can send off his representative to jet to New York or Geneva to speak at the UN and say, here we are in the world. And therefore, maybe come very dependent, of course, on the Soviet Union as a result, but the alliance between the Soviets and the PRC lasts, you know, for about a decade. But the second thing is that the fear that Chiang Kai-shek, you know, maybe coming to take back the mainland, is real and not wholly implausible. When we know it didn't happen in the end, we know, actually, that almost certainly Harry Truman and indeed, you know, Eisenhower would not have actually supported Chiang Kai-shek to re-tek the mainland. It would have been a hopeless task. But Mao didn't know that. And I think Chiang didn't know that either, you know, at least for a few years, he'd nurse some hope that he could help to engineer World War Three and get the mainland back. So, the fear that there would actually be Guangming down nationalist, nationalist party spies in the cities or villages isn't wholly without foundation, even though, of course, the party turned it into an excuse for a sort of paranoid purge of people who have nothing to do with the party whatsoever. It was like a horror show. It was like, you know, sort of the traitors, but not on telly. I mean, you sort of have these sessions where, you know, you have somebody just being richly humiliated with this tall dance cap on their heads or, you know, placards around their neck saying, you know, I am a counter-revolutionary. I am anti-all of the efforts of Chairman Mao. And it was all about humiliation, degradation, and sometimes physical abuse as well, right, Rana? Yes. And this tactic comes from the rectification movement of the 1942 to 1944, where essentially exactly these tactics, psychological pressure, ideological conformity, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes physical coercion and violence, came together to force people into a new sort of mindset. So, all of this was, by way, of essentially running an endless series of campaigns to turn China into a highly politicised society. The term politics in command was often used at that time. And everything, culture, economics, you know, everyday life, you know, ideas of family life, were turned into an aspect of that social change. The argument being, from the point of view of Mao and others at the top levels of the party, particularly the radicals who supported him, that the need for transformation in China was so complete and so total, but anything less than complete 24-hour a day, you know, reconversion of people, simply wouldn't get the job done because people would slip back into the old ways of Chenko-shek. So it feels like 1984 by George Orwell, that what you need to do is you need to shatter all the traditional bonds, family, friendship, and all you must have is, I mean, all well, it's the party, but here it is Mao, the state. We're going to take a break here. If you don't like breaks, if you don't like to take your ponds with breaks, you know, just join our club, mpapoduk.com, mpapoduk.com. For the rest of you, here's an ad break. 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Try Atio for free at attt.com slash empire. Welcome back. Runner, how secure is Mao in 1953? Is he feeling paranoid and still feels that there are class enemies behind every steelwork? So always he now sort of just enjoying being in supreme power and feeling confident. Is he having fun, Rana? Is he too nice with a smile? Is he happy? Is he really happy? I think he's never happier than when he's basically getting other people to do it. So I think yes, at that stage, he probably is extremely happy. When he said is Mao secure in 1953, I don't know whether you meant is he secure in his position or is he psychologically secure in himself because the two things obviously go to each other. So I think in practice, it's fair to say that he certainly was safe at that point. I think he really was from the attempt of any of his rivals to launch a coup against him. There was a sort of brief attempt. We don't know if it was a purge or it was real or whatever, with a couple of rival leaders very early on, Galkang and others in the beginning of the period of rule, but essentially they were purged again. And I think it's fair to say that in 1953, the likelihood that any of the actual top leaders really would have pushed Mao out of the way was pretty minimal. Not least since by that stage, he'd basically manipulated the internal party systems to make it clear that he was by now the absolute supreme ruler. But what there was still in 1953, and this is perhaps going to be secure in the other sense, as far as we can tell, was a certain amount of space, limited space for a genuine debate in the leadership about what should come next. The period of complete my way or the highway would not come until a few years later, particularly after the Great Leap Forward, which we will get to. But at this stage, I think it's fair to say that internally there were figures, Lujache and others who could push back in various limited, but real ways, about where policy should go in terms of economics and society in particular. So the chances of Mao being knocked off his purge in 1953 are pretty low, I think, at that stage. The greatest danger, I think, he would have thought was external intervention that might lead to the collapse of the regime. And having, of course, in 1953, being privy to a final ceasefire, an armistice, still with us to this day, between the western side and the North Korean side in the Korean War, I think it probably felt when I was 53 actually that there was, it was time for a breather in a sense that, you know, the the external pressure that had been there for three years during the Korean War was no longer quite as urgent. And that probably led led him to the path that he's on at that stage. And Stalin has died, doesn't he? 53s a year, Stalin pops his clogs. And Stalin also died to die 53. So that's an important moment to actually, because he takes over and it's not clear, there's a sort of triumvirate, which eventually ends with the rise of Chris Chau, but it takes a little while. Mao certainly regarded himself. He would have thought about things that made him happy. He certainly regarded himself as now being the senior leader of the World Communist Movement. Stalin's dead and gone, but Mao keeps the flame because you know, very much. Five year plans, five year plans are something we associate with the Soviets. And then Mao comes in in 53 with his first, but not last five year plan. Now, in effect, what does he want and what does he put his people through to get there? Absolutely. Of course, China still has five year plans even today. In fact, the Nathana were about AI and quantum, but they still very much exist. So he has taken that along with other things from Stalin's short economic history, the Soviet Union, which is a kind of handy guidebook for how to run a command economy with ruthless authoritarianism, which he was very keen on. That five year plan is basically Mao's idea of how to get at high speed to an industrialized economy. Amongst phrases he'd use, he'd use it later on the decade when they get to the Great Ford. He would be talking about surpassing Great Britain. This might not seem like an impressive milestone now, but at the time the idea that Britain, which is still one of the biggest economies of the world with a huge empire even at that stage, could be something that poor China could overtake was really a pretty fantastical kind of ambition. So that's where he was going and he was fairly explicit about that's what he wanted to do. It did involve various quite complex bits of thought in the leadership about how you got there, because we mentioned before the land reform movement, the violent redistribution of land to poorer farmers by taking it away from rich farmers, but actually of course giving a poor farmer a small patch of land is not the way towards mechanized agricultural success. When we think about Stalin back in the 30s, one of the many reasons, including sort of violent paranoid thinking that Stalin destroyed the Kulaks is that he wanted to industrialize agriculture, make it a sort of mass pursued rather kind of, you know, something that was done on a kind of large scale rather and removing landlords was one way to do that. Now I think in as much as he thought about this and he was not a kind of, you know, agricultural economist by any means wanted to move in a direction that some ways went against what they'd said in the first few years, which is everyone gets their own small patch of land. Now it's almost, but we need to actually then kind of throw the switch in the other direction to get to the next stage of economic development. You mentioned him looking over his shoulder at Stalin and the fact that Stalin's gone now and he's the senior communist on the block. But is he, I mean, the fact that he's using this language of five-year plans, which is a Stalinist thing. Is he looking at the Soviet Union and thinking they've done this well, they've done this badly? Is he copying them or is he very much forging his own way as he did with the rural revolution? I think not to give you the historian's answer, but I will give you the historian's answer. I think it's both. Yes, but yet. Mao always has huge admiration for Stalin and for the Soviet Union. You know, it is, at up to that point, the only kind of successful, you know, depends on your definition of success, but certainly, you know, kind of persistently existing, socialist state of that size and significance in the world. And obviously, you know, particularly post-Nuclear weapons, the Soviets become a really important player in global politics. So all of that are things that Mao admires and he understands that the economy and the Soviet ability to mobilize the economy, bearing in mind that they didn't, either in the West or East, nobody at that point knew what we now know, which there were huge flaws within the Soviet economy that made it ultimately very inefficient. This is the 1950s. This is the era when people are drawing in the West and East on Port wartime planning. And the Soviets having the five-year plan was the sort of biggest, baddest, most effective one of those plans that lots of people in the Western world thought, well, actually what we need is more state planning to actually succeed. So Mao wasn't at a place in doing that. And yet he knew, and all of his comrades knew as well from the 1920s onwards that the Soviets and Stalin, specifically, were capable of giving spectacularly bad advice because they never been to China. They read about it in a book or, you know, they read about the theory, but never when they're in practice, things like, yeah, let's have an urban proletarian uprising in Shanghai. Well, thanks, guys. I think there's an urban proletariat, B when we tried next best thing, Shankar Shet comes round and guns us all down. So not doing that again. And both of those vibes, you know, admiration along with a certain frustration that the Soviets really couldn't seem to learn, didn't seem to know what they didn't know, both exist at the same time. But I want to know, like, just sort of a very basic level. If you're going to redo your playbook and you're going to learn from the Soviet mistakes and you're going to ignore what they don't understand and you now realize that they aren't the God of everything when it comes to revolution, does he manage to put food in the belly of most of his people? Do you have with these, you know, sort of five-year plans? Do you have people being fed? Are they eating? Are they housed? Are they, you know, what level are the people living at? Broadly speaking, in many cases, yes, the period from 1949, you know, up to the mid into, yeah, mid 1950s, I'd say, does have a lot of stabilization as well as upheaval and revolution. So, yeah, in schools, education systems are open to get enough to the war, money is put into them, partly the recent education because they need to propagandaize, but also they need to realize that literacy, numeracy, all these things are part of the system. There's a fabulous book, one I colleague here at Harvard, Aron Avgosh called Making It Count, which is about the way in which Chinese statisticians go to India to actually learn from another country that isn't the West, but which is also newly independent or newly kind of autonomous and using math, science, and statistics to try and create an exciting new sort of socialist society. Obviously, narrow socialism and mouse socialism are not the same type of socialism, but back in the 50s, China and India were very close, so Hintin Bye Bye, you know, in India and China will be brothers. Oh, God, Hintichini Bye Bye, which, you know, the Congress party still punished for that, you know, sort of legacy from Nairu, and to explain it to other people who don't know what this is. So, Nairu is saying, he's sort of envisaging this brave new world post-Pretish colonialism, where, you know, these powerhouses of India and China will join hands together and they will cooperate and it's going to be marvellous. And, of course, and there's a Chinese invasion in India territory. So this phrase of Nairu's, Hintichini Bye Bye, Hintichini's and Chinese are brothers, is still a stick to beat them with. And, underpinning everything is that during this period, it does stabilize in some important ways, because there's a very important economic relationship with the Soviet Union. The Soviets basically helped to insert China into the kind of alternative eastern block of economic operations. So, as East Germany, Chaksevakia, Poland, these countries are taken over by communist governments have become part of a new economic block. For the 1950s, China is part of that too. So China, you know, exports pork bellies to, you know, Hungary or the Soviet Union wherever, and it gets back machine parts in return. And being integrated into that economic situation, something which changes in the 60s when the Soviets and Chinese split is an important part also of improving people's day-to-day lives and also creating a more stable society in a country which started the decade extremely dislocated. So, I mean, a more stable society, and what I'm getting the impression of is that, you know, this is quite a successful endeavor. A lot of people do suffer, but, you know, as you were saying, people largely do have food in their bellies and they have somewhere to go to school and they have somewhere to live. Is he then, I mean, is it from that sense of security that we have in 1956, the Hundred Flowers campaign, which is, I mean, it looks like, you know, the Hundred Flowers is, you know, inviting intellectuals to have a hundred different ideas in the garden, to criticize the Communist Party, the flowers that are blooming are different political doctrines. I mean, surely, that doesn't feel very mal, but he does it. I mean, is that what happens? It's sort of a widening of the debate at this time. Basically, yes. I mean, again, there are arguments about this and, you know, in some ways, it'll remain debated forever. But broadly, yes, let a Hundred Flowers bloom, let a Hundred Schools of Thought contend. You know, this is the slogan that she used the time to say, we're doing so well. It was seven years in 1956, and, you know, we're stabilizing the economies improving, we've got this thing going with the Soviet Union. So, let's take a moment to actually open up and take constructive criticism. Got to be constructive, but constructive criticism as to what we can do better, you know. We're doing well, tell us what more we can do. That's the idea, I think. And you can see, actually, there is plenty of this, in different ways in the Chinese tradition. Again, we, you know, the ideological version of democracy that the Chinese Communist put forward was not a liberal multi-party democracy, but the idea that you would have different opinions taken to create what was called the mass line. And then, once you got the mass line, you know, that was it, you know, you'd stuck to the party line, and you're not allowed to dispute it. But the process that gets voices in there, at least initially, is supposed to be quite open in the way the party thinks about it. So, that's in a sense what they're thinking about, opening up beyond the party to wider society to get constructive ideas, because it would have been the most genuine, you know, the things were going so well that people would say, yeah, you know, there's some problems, but basically, you know, we think things are on the up and up, and here's what I'd suggest you could do with it, and he'd probably be okay with that. The thing is, most suggestion boxes in big corporations have anonymous boxes for anonymous tips, for a reason, because even, you know, sort of your most mid-level manager does not like criticism. So, I'm just trying to think how somebody like Mao with the paranoia that Mao has had before, with all of the denunciations and everything else, is going to take any kind of criticism. This is the problem, as it turned out, because first of all, when he doesn't like criticism, he just doesn't like criticism. When he opened up the floodgates, and by the way, from what we know about the Polar Bureau meeting, which has decided, his comrades, I think knew him pretty well, said, Chevin, not sure this is a good idea. Why don't we just sort of keep going, and just sort of, you know, open up suggestions. But it's, get it, it's the two parts of Mao. There's one of the reasons that he's such a devastating, terrifying, fascinating character. He's both the paranoid authoritarian advocate of coercive violence, who Brooks no argument, and he's still that library assistant at peaking university who loves sitting around drinking tea in the backroom, debating Marx's theory, or, you know, what's going to happen to world politics. And, you know, you can't do that unless you have people to kind of argue back and forth with. And they're both Mao in a pretty much till the day he dies. Even that battle with Richard Nixon in 1792, he comes along, has got that sort of playfulness along with the ruthlessness. And that's why he was so difficult to figure out. But just thinking with the 1956 and the 100 flowers, whatever Mao thought he was doing, that's not what happened. Huge numbers of people around the country, you know, peasants who are complaining about being heard into collective farms, which is beginning to happen. They didn't like that. Professors saying they couldn't get near the western books. They needed to kind of keep up with the fields of physics or chemistry. But, you know, from the highest to the lowest, everyone writes in saying, I've got complaints. This is really terrible. And one of the best examples of this is a young man who got a very famous, actually, called Liao Bin Yan, who in the 80s would be one of China's best known dissidents. And finally, it was condemned in the 80s during the crackdown. There are a couple of writers Liao Bin Yan and Wang Meng, who would go on to become very famous as sort of internal dissidents almost in the 1980s. But they're right short stories, a little inside news about a newspaper kind of under Communist rule, another one called the newcomer in the organisation department, which is about kind of bureaucrat working in the communist system. And they're both stories of slow dissolution as these young idealistic men come in in these short stories. It's fiction, but obviously, it's like disguise fiction and discover the system is sort of, you know, it's ferdar, the old bureaucracy still maintains itself. People aren't really kind of being sincere and wanted to change and so forth. And these short stories got their authors into very big trouble just a few months later, when Mao reversed the switch. She saw this complaint coming in. He almost did himself discredit by actually saying, actually, it was all a trick. I knew there were all these kind of evil spies around. And I made them declare what they thought so that I could find out. This is basically kind of covering retconning, I think, as a technical term. But you don't believe him because I mean, he does say, you know, I was luring the snakes out of their layers is what how he put it, but you don't believe he was doing that at all. Yeah, he got the fancy language out like nobody's nobody's business. But I think he's retconning. I think he had no idea quite how much everyone was really, really, you know, very, very disillusioned many aspects already of the first years of the regime was profoundly shocked and decided to come up not least for credibility with his fellow Politburo members. You know, when they were like, well, we're told you not to do this. And he said, well, you know, it'll be fine. You're going to say, ah, but actually what you didn't know was that I meant it all along. So basically Mao could never be proved wrong on anything. So, you know, that was what we're doing. It's not just a couple of people that get sort of shunted out at this point. 550,000 people are officially labeled as writers. And punish this is a big nationwide crackdown. Yes, 1957 is the big anti-rightist crackdown. Not they never really write wing any meaningful sense. One of them, for instance, is dingling the feminist author who mentioned a few times across the Padka podcast. You sent off the Helan Zhang province. I love dinglings. We were very keen on dingling it. Okay. Well, she gets sent off into the Alexa and the frozen fan-orthy stuff of China and said various other people at the stage, many of whom don't appear to the 1970s. So you've got sort of these two faces of Mao. One is, you know, it's kind of reminds me of Stalin. It wanted to be the poet, but couldn't help a purge. What? You could have a purge. It's a piece of priest. Yeah. Well, you know, the poet, Sarah's poet, stars Ezra Pound was a fascist and ended up in the cage. Well, true. Okay. So it's so fine. But I mean, we shouldn't make lies of the fact that, you know, apart from some people being sent to whatever China's equivalent of the Siberian wastelands are, there are substantial executions. A hundred thousand denounced, ten thousand arrested and one thousand executed. I mean, it's a massive purge. And just the idea of the terror creates a wave of suicides because people just don't want to go through this at all. Yes. And that becomes even more apparent, you know, a few years later in the culture revolution where many made people die technically through taking their own lives, but in fact, essentially psychologically pressured. And again, this is one of the things that you see in the Chinese revolution more broadly. The Chinese revolution directly kills, you know, very, very large tons of people, as you discussed. It also causes events that cause the death of many billions of people as well, which may not initially have been intended that way, but are carried out with such, you know, lack of care, attention to what the consequences will be that essentially they also lead to mass deaths. And certainly people who take their own lives, even though you can argue technically it's their own act, in practice, would never have done so, had it not been for the political circumstances, created around them. So the revolution does all these things, it devours a lot of its children. We mentioned a few minutes ago, India, looking back by 1958, how is China doing compared to India, both of them have inherited wrecked economies, both of them have had incredible uphill struggles against, you know, difficult circumstances and huge numbers of people in poverty. Who at this point is doing better? If we're in 1958, I would say that in terms of internal poverty and economic circumstances, you're fairly even, because India is still so poor at this stage, and you know, we'll take a very long time to get out of that particular circumstance, and that causes all the upheavals that we know of in the 60s and 70s as well. China is also desperately poor, but is undertaking a variety of changes, including that redistribution of land in the countryside, that may do more to improve people's economic conditions. But my problem, of course, we know is that they then start getting put 50, 70, 758, we're going to high gear on putting people into collective farms, which we now know are not generally particularly economically efficient. But let me just add one other element to the question, because I think it's worth remembering, both countries are doing quite well on the international stage. Nero's idea of India as a new post-colonial actor that brings, you know, ideas of peaceful coexistence to the world is, you know, very, very popular, particularly with the large numbers of countries that are now going into that stream of decolonizations in the 50s and 60s. And China, although it's not recognized at the UN or by the US, is a big player in what became known as Third World Politics, particularly in 1955. That's the showdown in a sense where India and China both turn up at Bandoong in Indonesia, at Bandoong Conference, and parade their wares to the emerging number of newly freed or soon to be liberated, Asian and African states. And it's India and China that are making the running in that conversation at Bandoong, not Soviets, not the Americans. We are sort of seeing, I guess, a mouth with his confidence that's something of a peak. But he is on the cast for making what is arguably his biggest mistake. And that's where we're going to pick up in the next episode. Rana, we're not going to let you out. You've got to stay with us for that one too. Thank you so much for being with us again. I mean, it's such an education. Absolutely. A wonderful stuff this. And you've got some exciting news, Willie, about some special episodes that are coming in this series as well. Yes. We're going to be homing in on some very personal aspects of living life with Mao with our old friend, Jung Chang, who's going to be coming on the pod to talk for bonus episodes about her personal story. This is like a sort of parallel to Rana's big picture. We're going to zoom in on Jung Chang's mother and her youth under Mao and how it looks from the point of view of one single family living through all this. It is a really extraordinary story. If any of you have read Jung Chang's work, you know you're in for a treat. And if you want to listen to those bonus episodes, you need to join our club because they offer club members only empire pod UK.com. So yes, you can get access to these special bonus episodes just for our club members. Cheaper than the price of a frothy coffee a month. That's true. But for now, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durinple.