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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:21]
Anita Anand
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- [00:22]
Professor Rana Mitter
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Anita Anand
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Professor Rana Mitter
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Anita Anand
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Professor Rana Mitter
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Anita Anand
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Professor Rana Mitter
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- [01:18]
William Dalrymple
in this episode we ask how Mao Zedong transformed a devastated nation into an industrial power.
- [01:26]
Anita Anand
This is a story of economic ambition, social transformation and totalitarian power.
- [01:33]
William Dalrymple
But it's also a story of tragedy. Join us as we discuss the first turbulent decade of the People's Republic of China.
- [01:54]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to with me, Anita Arnand.
- [01:57]
William Dalrymple
And me, William Dalrymple. And we are delighted to welcome back the veteran of the Long Empire Pod March, Professor Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the brilliant Bitter Revolution, China's Struggle with the Modern World. Rana, welcome back.
- [02:14]
Professor Rana Mitter
Great to be here, Will. And at some point, I assume you're gonna let me out of the room, but maybe not just yet.
- [02:18]
Anita Anand
Not yet, no. Because you know what? We can't, because we're continuing our series on Mao. We need you. Okay. And we are picking up the story now and 1949 at the dawn of the People's Republic of China. Last time we saw Mao, we saw him surviving the Long March, outmaneuvering his rivals during the Japanese invasion, and then ultimately declaring that the world's most populous country was a communist republic. I mean, that's quite an achievement in a short space of time.
- [02:48]
William Dalrymple
Rana, 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?
- [02:57]
Professor Rana Mitter
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. 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 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 to 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.
- [04:12]
Anita Anand
And Rana, let's not forget in the last episode, you know, we talked about tons and tons of gold being removed by the Chiang Kai Shek 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.
- [04:30]
Professor Rana Mitter
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 had just 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 been this driving force in ultimately leading the Chinese Communist Party to conquest of the mainland, but also to beg 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. Was the Soviet Union. And therefore, turning to Stalin was an absolutely top priority. From Mao's point of view, what was their relationship?
- [05:37]
William Dalrymple
How did they get on? Because, I mean, two clashing titans, very,
- [05:41]
Professor Rana Mitter
very prickly in some ways, really. On the one hand, Mao greatly admired Stalin. He regarded him clearly as the dwyenne of a successful, ruthless and effective socialist leader. Stalin, I think, was ambivalent in that he didn't really rate the Chinese Communists. He thought they were kind of peasant rabble. And he was, I think, quite surprised when they actually managed to get to power. You know, he was basically like this sort of kind of absentee dad who is always off kind of, you know, seeking other relationships or kind of driving a fast car, and then, you know, comes to your football game, yells at you about how you haven't scored any goals. But at the moment, you kind of have to pay for college. He'll kind of grudgingly dip into his pocket and come up with the cash. That's sort of Stalin to Mao, I would would say he never quite, I think, took him seriously as this person who had led this genuinely transformative revolution in China. But on the other hand, he realized 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.
- [06:46]
Anita Anand
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 of fleas, bedbugs and rubbish before any guests, 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 who doesn't agree with this at times?
- [07:17]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yes, essentially. Think about the language, the metaphor of cleansing. I mean, this is something that's been 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 Mao, and 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, you know, mass killings of landlords out in the countryside.
- [08:20]
William Dalrymple
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 modelling it, or are they just two very similar authoritarian characters who are both completely ruthless and prepared to wipe out anything in their way?
- [08:35]
Professor Rana Mitter
It's the vibe rather than 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, Kangchong, 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, China is not the Soviet Union, as Mao was pains to point out on various occasions, and therefore different tactics were used at that time. So, yes, there was certainly awareness of Soviet history. Obviously the Chinese tend 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 we 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. It during the process that is rather euphemistically called 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 2 million landlords seem to have been killed during the initial phase.
- [09:42]
William Dalrymple
Again, the kulaks in Ukraine and this sort of stuff.
- [09:45]
Professor Rana Mitter
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.
- [09:56]
William Dalrymple
Ruthlessness.
- [09:57]
Anita Anand
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 just, first of all, tell us what these anti campaigns were all about and how many were kind of crushed underneath it?
- [10:20]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yes, I mean, there were so many of Them in a sense that I sort of perhaps give a general impression rather than necessarily going through every single one. Cause you'd run out of time and run out of time. Patience. I think after a while we could
- [10:28]
William Dalrymple
do a whole miniseries on the antis of Mao.
- [10:31]
Professor Rana Mitter
We could up the ante, 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 unceasing 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 3 antis, 5 antis idea, that the way in which enemies are defined is. Now bearing in mind. Question of what are you contrasting this with? Well, think back just a few years previous to that. To Chiang Kai Shek, who had been, you know, ousted as leader. He very much classed, no pun intended, 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 anathema to Mao and the party. But furthermore, finding enemies within, particularly the time when the foreigners were slowly but surely actually quickly but surely being expelled from China, that foreign influence was hard to define in terms of targets. You could see business people, missionaries, whatever. And so instead 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 antis or other campaigns, you know, the bourgeois liberalization campaign, might say that they were looking for 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 Zhengzhou isn't taking personal dictation from Chairman Mao as he now is. He is the chairman by this stage. He officially takes UP chairmanship 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 erring on the side of highly enthusiastic radicalism is better than holding back.
- [12:30]
Anita Anand
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 an assault on 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 Korea entering the fray, need a lot more money.
- [13:00]
Professor Rana Mitter
It is in part a seizure of assets. I mean, there are business people, sometimes known as kind of 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 the people who are coming in, often these are sort of literally people coming out of the countryside. These cadres 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 there's going to be more revolutionary change. And that new democratic period, which at least initially lulled a lot of people into a false 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 with the attacks on private enterprise, 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 attack directly on its own territory and the way it had been 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. 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.
- [14:25]
William Dalrymple
So Rana, amid all this political terror and this expropriation, life was also changing dramatically for ordinary Chinese citizens. Give us a picture of what's going on.
- [14:36]
Professor Rana Mitter
Everyday life shifts in a whole variety of ways, but perhaps one of the most obvious places, and a way that'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. 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 nor did 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 Yer Xiaqi, in that sort of change. And what that meant was that, for instance, in a factory, units were created. The term tanwei, meaning work unit, became a kind of staple of everyday life. And those work units, a little like in the Soviet Union, would control all of your life. The ideal scenario would be that you would be born in kind of the Dunwe birthing home or hospital. You'd be schooled 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 attacked to the Dun Wei. 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, welfarist, socialist wraparound in which your entire working life would be subsumed to a unit controlled 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 grave.
- [16:12]
William Dalrymple
Was this envisaged as a sort of Elysium? 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?
- [16:26]
Professor Rana Mitter
It depends who you are and where you are. I think, you know, everyone's experience is going to be different. I think for an awful lot of people, particularly those who are used to, you know, freedom of labor and entrepreneurship, basically being shoehorned at 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 inward looking ones, can become, you know, extremely fraught sorts of places where relationships, bribery, these sorts of things matter a great deal.
- [16:58]
Anita Anand
And 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, you know, we'll look after you, we'll make sure that you have food in your belly is quite appealing. I want to talk. Just look at women. Surprise, surprise, I want to look at women for a moment. In the first episode, you know, you were talking about sort of young Mao railing against the arranged marriage, railing against, you know, sort of Women, I think, as he put it, you know, almost being sort of for, you know, being raped 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?
- [17:35]
Professor Rana Mitter
It wasn't all talk, but the results are highly compromised. The 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. And that provides not only actually for women and for men, of course, a newer and perhaps more accessible means to deal with the unhappy marriages and other things, which of course were very much part of China like any other society at that time, but also actually, as the scholar Jennifer Altehenga 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 gonna 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, you know, terms and conditions. Conditions. But it's about a mindset as well. So that becomes important at that time.
- [19:00]
Anita Anand
As convoluted as it might have been, though over a million women filed for divorce in the first year. I mean, some kind of floodgate has opened.
- [19:08]
Professor Rana Mitter
On the other hand, you can see. So, you know, something that is. 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, they'd 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 pre1949 period, even though they were rethought in a feminist mode, were 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.
- [20:10]
William Dalrymple
And as if that isn't dark enough, tell us about the campaign to suppress counter revolutionaries.
- [20:17]
Professor Rana Mitter
I mean, essentially, actually, one of the things that emerges very early and perhaps unsurprisingly in the ccp, the 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 you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Yes, Bear in mind the situation in the early 1950s, which is completely different from what we might think of now. The prc, the People's Republic of China under Mao, is still an unrecognized state. It's not recognized at the United nations, it's not recognized by the United States of America. A few countries, including Britain, actually have given it 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, they become very dependent, of course, on the Soviet Union. As a result, with the alliance between the Soviets and the PRC lasts for about a decade. But the second thing is that the fear that Chiang Kai Shek maybe coming to take back the mainland is real and not wholly implausible. We know it didn't happen in the end. And we know actually that almost certainly Harry Truman and indeed Eisenhower would not have actually supported Chiang Kai Shek to retake the mainland. It would have been a hopeless task. But Mao didn't know that, and I think Chiang didn't know that either, at least for a few years. He nursed some hope that he could help to engineer World War III and get the mainland back. So the fear that there would actually be Kuomintang 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 had nothing to do with the Party whatsoever.
- [22:05]
Anita Anand
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 ritually humiliated with this tall dunce cap on their heads or, you know, placards around their neck saying, you know, I am a. I am anti. All of the efforts of Chairman Ma. And it was all about humiliation, degradation, and sometimes physical abuse as well. Right, Rana?
- [22:30]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yes. And this tactic comes from the rectification movement of the 1942-44, 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. So all of this was by way of essentially running an endless series of campaigns to turn China into a highly politicized society. The term politics in command was often used at that time. And everything, culture, economics, everyday life, 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 that 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 Chiang Kai Shek.
- [23:31]
Anita Anand
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, in Orwell, 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 pods with breaks, you know, just join our club. EmpirePoduk.com for the rest of you, here's an ad break.
- [24:03]
Professor Rana Mitter
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- [24:26]
William Dalrymple
That's cool, man.
- [24:27]
Professor Rana Mitter
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers. Rated PG 13. Now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney.
- [24:36]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back, Rana. How secure is Mao in 1953? Is he feeling paranoid and still feels that there are class enemies behind every steel works? Or is he now sort of just enjoying being in supreme power and feeling confident?
- [24:53]
Anita Anand
Is he having fun, Rana? Is he tyrannizing with a smile?
- [24:57]
William Dalrymple
Rana?
- [24:58]
Anita Anand
Is he happy? Is he really really happy.
- [25:01]
Professor Rana Mitter
I think he's never happier than when he's basically getting other people to do what he wants. 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. 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, again, if it was a purge or it was real or whatever, with a couple of rival leaders very early on, Gao Gang and others, at 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 state, 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, this is perhaps going to. Being 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'll get to. But at. At this stage, I think it's fair to say that internally there were figures, Liu Xiaoqi 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 perch 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 been 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 he probably felt by 1953 actually, that it was time for a breather in a sense that, you know, the external pressure that had been there for three years during the Korean War was no longer quite as urgent, and that probably led him to the path that he's on at that stage.
- [27:17]
William Dalrymple
And Stalin has died, hasn't he? 53 is the year Stalin pops his clogs.
- [27:21]
Professor Rana Mitter
Stalin also dies at 1953. So that's an important moment too. And actually, because he takes over and it's not clear, there's a sort of triumvirate which eventually ends with the rise of Khrushchev. And it takes a little while. Mao certainly regarded himself so you talk about things that made him happy. He certainly regarded himself as now being the senior leader of the world communist movement.
- [27:38]
Anita Anand
Stalin is dead and gone, but Mao keeps the flame burning 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?
- [27:58]
Professor Rana Mitter
Absolutely. Of course, China still has five year plans, even today, in fact, but now they're all 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 of 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 Leap Forward, he would be talking about surpassing Great Britain. This might or might not seem like an impressive milestone now, but at the time, the idea that Britain, which was still one of the biggest economies in 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, mass pursued, or 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. Mao, 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 in 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.
- [29:54]
William Dalrymple
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?
- [30:17]
Professor Rana Mitter
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 up to that point, the owner only kind of successful, depends on your definition of success, but certainly kind of persistently existing social estate of that size and significance in the world. And obviously, 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 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 out of 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'd never been to China. They read about it in a book or they read about the theory, but never went there in practice. So things like, yeah, let's have an urban proletarian uprising in Shanghai. Well, thanks, guys. A, there's an urban proletariat, B, when we tried next best thing, Chiang Kai Shek 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.
- [31:58]
Anita Anand
But I want to know just on 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, I mean, what level are the people living at?
- [32:23]
Professor Rana Mitter
Broadly speaking, in many cases, yes. The period from 1949, you know, up to the mid to, yeah, mid-1950s, I'd say, does have a lot of stabilization as well as upheaval and revolution. So yeah, you know, schools, education systems are opened again after the war, money is put into them. Partly they're interested in education because they need to propagandize, but also they need to realize that literacy, numeracy, all these things are part of the system. There's a fabulous book by my colleague here at Harvard, Arunav Ghosh, 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 Nehru socialism and Maoism socialism, not the same type of socialism. Back in the 50s, China and India were very close. Hin tin bhai bhai, you know, India and China will be brothers.
- [33:18]
Anita Anand
Oh God, Hinda chini bhai bhai, which the Congress Party's still punished for that sort of legacy from Nehru and to explain it to other people who don't know what this is. So Nehru is saying he's sort of envisaging this brave new world post British colonialism, where these powerhouses of India and China will join hands together and they will cooperate and it's going to be marvelous. And of course then there's a Chinese invasion of Indian territory. So this phrase of Nehru's Hindu chini bhai, bhai, Hindus and Chinese are brothers, is still a stick to beat them with.
- [33:51]
Professor Rana Mitter
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 bloc of economic cooperation. So as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, these countries are taken over by communist governments and become part of a new economic block for the 1950s. China is part of that too. So China exports pork bellies to Hungary or the Soviet Union or 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 dyslexic.
- [34:40]
Anita Anand
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 the Hundred Flowers is, you know, inviting intellectuals to have 100 different ideas in the garden to criticize, criticized the Communist Party. The flowers that are blooming are different political doctrines. I mean, surely that doesn't feel very Mao, but he does it. I mean, is that what happens? Sort of a widening of the debate at this time?
- [35:23]
Professor Rana Mitter
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's used the time to say, we're doing so well. You are seven years in 1956 and we're stabilizing, the economy's 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, we're doing well. Tell us what more we can do. That's the idea, I think. And you can see actually that there is plenty of this in different ways in the Chinese tradition. Again, the ideological version of democracy that the Chinese Communists 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, that was it, 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 appear that Mer genuinely thought that 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 a bit of this that the other. And he'd probably been okay with that.
- [36:43]
Anita Anand
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, it's going to take any kind of criticism.
- [37:04]
Professor Rana Mitter
This is the problem as it turned out, because first of all, when he
- [37:08]
William Dalrymple
doesn't like criticism, he just doesn't like criticism.
- [37:11]
Professor Rana Mitter
When he opened up the floodgates. And by the way, from what we know about the Politburo meeting which was decided, his comrades I think knew him pretty well. Said chairman, not sure this is a good idea. Why don't we just sort of keep going this sort of, you know, opening up suggestions. But again, it's the two parts of Mao. This is 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 Peking University who loves sitting around drinking tea in the back room debating Marxist theory or, you know, what's gonna 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 pretty much till the day he dies. Even that ballad with Richard Nixon in 1972 when he comes along, has got that sort of playful along with the ruthlessness. And that's why he was so difficult to figure out. But just sticking with the 1956 and the hundred Flowers, whatever Mal thought he was doing, that's not what happened. Huge numbers of people around the country, you know, peasants who are complaining about being herded into collective farms, which was 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 or whatever, you know, from the highest to the lowest. Everyone writes in saying, I've got complaints. And this is really tough, terrible. And one of the best examples of this is a young man who got very famous actually called Liu Binyan, who in the 80s would be one of China's best known dissidents. And finally was condemned in the 80s during the crackdown. There are a couple of writers, Liu Binyan and Wang Meng, who would go on to become very famous as sort of internal dissidents almost in the 1980s. But they write short stories, inside news about a newspaper kind of under communist rule, another one called the Newcomer in the Organization department, which is about kind of bureaucrat working in the communist system. And they're both stories of slow disillusion as these young idealistic men come in in these short stories. It's fiction, but obviously lightly disguised fiction, and discover the system is sort of, you know, it's furred up. The old bureaucracy still maintains itself. People aren't really kind of being sincere and wanting 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, he saw all 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. This is basically kind of, you know, covering. Retconning, I think is a technical term.
- [39:41]
Anita Anand
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, you know.
- [39:49]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yeah, no, he got the fancy language out like 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 with many aspects of. Already in 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 told you not to do this. And he said, well, you know, it'll all be fine. He go back and 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 one way of doing it.
- [40:25]
William Dalrymple
It's not just a couple of people that get sort of shunted out. At this point, 550,000 people are officially labeled as rightists and punished. This is a nationwide crackdown.
- [40:36]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yes, 1957 is the big anti rightist crackdown. Not they know really right wing in any meaningful sense. One of them, for instance, is Dingling, the feminist author we mentioned a few times across the PADKA podcast, who sent off the Heilongjiang Province.
- [40:48]
William Dalrymple
I love Dingling. We were very keen on Dingling.
- [40:51]
Professor Rana Mitter
Okay, well, she gets sent off into internal exile in the frozen far northeast of China. And so do various other people at this stage, many of whom don't reappear until the 1970s.
- [41:00]
Anita Anand
So you've got sort of these two faces of Mao. One is, you know, it kind of reminds me of Stalin. Be the poet, but couldn't help a purge or two. Got to have a purge or two.
- [41:11]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yeah, well, you know, poets are as poets does. Ezra Pound was a fascist and ended up
- [41:19]
Anita Anand
so fine. But I mean, we shouldn't make light of the fact that, you know, apart from some people being sent to whatever China's equivalent of the Siberian wastelands are,
- [41:28]
William Dalrymple
there are substantial executions, 100,000 denounced, 10,000 arrested and 1,000 executed. I mean, some massive purge.
- [41:38]
Anita Anand
And just the idea of the terror creates a wave of suicides because people just don't want to go through this at all.
- [41:42]
Professor Rana Mitter
Yes, and that becomes even more apparent, you know, a few years later in the Cultural Revolution where many, many 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 numbers of people, as we 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 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 could 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 of its children.
- [42:35]
William Dalrymple
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 difficult circumstances and huge numbers of people in poverty. Who at this point is doing better?
- [42:57]
Professor Rana Mitter
If we're in 1958, I would say that in terms of, of internal poverty and economic circumstances, you're fairly even because India is still so poor at this stage and it will 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. The problem, of course, as we know, is that they then start getting put. 50, 57, 58. We go into high gear on putting people into collective farms, which we now know are not generally particularly economically efficient, successful. 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. Nehru's idea of India as a new post colonial actor that brings ideas of peaceful coexistence to the world is very, very popular, particularly with the large numbers of countries that are now going into that stream of colonizations 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 Bandung in Indonesia.
- [44:20]
William Dalrymple
The Bandung conference. Yes.
- [44:22]
Professor Rana Mitter
And parade their way as 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 Bandung, not. Not the Soviets, not the Americans.
- [44:37]
Anita Anand
We are sort of seeing, I guess, amou with his confidence at something of a peak. But he is on the cusp of 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 gonna let you out. You've gotta stay with us for that one, too. Thank you so much for being with us again. I mean, it's such an education. Absolutely wonderful stuff this. And you've got some exciting news, Willi, about some special episodes that are coming in the series as well.
- [45:04]
William Dalrymple
Yes, we're gonna be homing in on some very personal aspects of living life with Mao with our old friend Jung Chang, who's gonna be coming on the POD to talk for bonus episodes about her personal story. This is like a sort of parallel to Raana's big picture. We're gonna zoom in on Jung Chung's mother and her youth under Mao and how it looks from the point of view of one single family.
- [45:37]
Anita Anand
It is a really extraordinary story. If any of you have read Jung Chung'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 empirepoduk.com so yes, you can get access to these special bonus episodes just for our club members.
- [45:54]
William Dalrymple
Cheaper than the price of a frothy coffee a month.
- [45:58]
Anita Anand
That's true. But for now, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.
- [46:04]
William Dalrymple
And goodbye from me, William Durrymple.