How Mao Conquered China: Grand Strategy and Civil War
Professor of Strategy and Policy, U.S. Naval War College
Dissects the interplay of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Soviet intervention in Manchuria, Nationalist fiscal exhaustion, and Communist rural mobilization from 1931 to 1949.
In this episode, Prof Paine looks at Maoist China. How did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster? How did the patriotic hero inflict history’s worst catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbered 5 to 1 make decisions like "let's have peasants make iron in their backyards" and "let's kill all the birds"? Lecture is followed by a Q&A with me. The first nationwide famine in Chinese history; Mao's lasting influence on other insurgencies; broken promises to Chinese minorities and the peasantry; what Taiwan means. Huge thanks to Substack for hosting this!