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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
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.
- [00:20]
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- [00:46]
Rana Mitter
Exclusions apply.
- [00:47]
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- [00:50]
Rana Mitter
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- [01:18]
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- [01:56]
William Dalrymple
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand and me, William Dalrymple. And welcome back to our series on Mao Zedong. We're delighted to welcome back our very good friend, now and hostage, Professor Rana Mitta from Harvard Kennedy School is back with us and he's going to never be able to leave again.
- [02:14]
Rana Mitter
Are we gonna be let out of the box at some point?
- [02:16]
William Dalrymple
Maybe. If you're good. We'll see how it goes in the next couple of episodes, shall we? Rana not promising anything.
- [02:20]
Rana Mitter
You have to throw some bits of chicken or something in there.
- [02:23]
William Dalrymple
Now remind us, Willy, where we were in the last episode.
- [02:25]
Anita Anand
We were in Stockholm Syndrome with Rana increasingly fond of this pod as he told us how Mao had consolidated his power at the very top of the People's Republic of China. We saw how his policy of cleaning the house before inviting guests saw Mao crack down on the party and private businesses before he began rapidly industrializing under the first five year plans. We also saw how the hundred Flowers campaign, a brief moment of openness culminated in the brutal crackdown of the anti rightist movement.
- [03:02]
William Dalrymple
It was a very strange thing, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, because what all it did was sort of locate the people who were going to annoy him in the future, very successfully. Over the next two episodes, we're going to be telling you the dramatic, harrowing story of the final two decades of Mao's rule.
- [03:18]
Anita Anand
So, Rana, by 1958, Mao is 65 years old. What's happening internationally and particularly I was intrigued last year by the comparison with India, which is still in very sort of peak Neruvian mode.
- [03:33]
Rana Mitter
Yes, absolutely. So very briefly, you get a sort of global tour, at least a global tour of the Northern Hemisphere. The United States is under President Eisenhower and is sort of getting geared up in the Cold War. Meanwhile, Stalin, of course, has died just a few years before in 1953, and his successor, Khrushchev, has come to prominence after a certain amount of internal scuffle within the Soviet leadership, Mao's deciding more and more that he's not that keen on Khrushchev. We'll get back to that, I suspect. Meanwhile, over in the rapidly decolonizing world of Asia and Africa, the mid-1950s marks the period when we see a lot more independent states in both of those areas. Places like Malaysia, Vietnam, all finally throw off colonial rule, become independent, and in fact, the first of the African colonial states, Ghana, the Gold coast, becomes independent as well. So we see the Cold War and decolonisation coming together. Both of those are meat, drink and an extra bit of snuff on top for Cel, who of course is a very big fan of both of those issues.
- [04:35]
Anita Anand
Did he take snuff, did you say?
- [04:37]
Rana Mitter
No? Well, I'm not aware of him doing so. Perhaps I should have used that. No, you know what, I'll tell you what, I'll say meat drink and a really manky old jam jar full of kind of old tea leaves, which apparently he did used to like. Rather than sort of taking an elegant porcelain cup, he would have one of those kind of horrible sort of, you know, super railway worker style old jam jars with tea leaves in it. I think he used that instead of actually brushing his teeth. That was his, oh, great dental hygiene regime.
- [05:02]
William Dalrymple
Well, apart from not having a sparkly smile. I mean, this is very much, you know, we're talking about the 50s. It's an era of the mind game. And Mao was very, very good at the mind game. And I'm particularly taken with the famous swimming pool incident.
- [05:15]
Anita Anand
Yeah, it's a good story.
- [05:16]
William Dalrymple
Do talk us through this. It's a great one.
- [05:18]
Rana Mitter
Yes, indeed. The swimming pool story is a very good example of exactly how this sort of, you know, psyching out and mind game thing would work. I mean, it happened on Khrushchev visiting Beijing and he had to essentially, you know, be hosted by Mao. Mao was the host in that case, so he could dec. Decide how the two of them would actually be wined and dined. And Mao decided that they should spend at least some of their discussion in the swimming pool. Now, this was actually a really sort of major troll of Khrushchev because Mao was, you know, a pretty good swimmer, as it turned out, and swimming turns up at various points in his life too. Khrushchev, it seems, was not. So he had to sort of bob around at the edge of the swimming pool, you know, wearing kind of armbands, while Mao is sort of doing lengths up and down and lecturing him on how he, Mao, is the real spirit of socialism.
- [06:03]
Anita Anand
A rubber ring, maybe?
- [06:05]
Rana Mitter
Well, we don't know the exact details else, but certainly I think Khrushchev was not crazy about having to be thrown into the chlorinated water while Mao basically lectured him while, you know, showing off his swimming. Swimming skills. I wouldn't put it past Mao to have learned some of that from Stalin, who was a master of exactly this sort of thing. In 1945, when the predecessor government to Mao, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai Shek, sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate to sign a Soviet agreement. Stalin didn't start the meeting till, I think, about 10pm because he was an insomniac and he wouldn't preserve any food. He basically made sure everyone was incredibly tired and incredibly hungry and then started haranguing them. And I think it was only about dawn when they finally got everything sorted out, that he allowed anyone to have any breakfast.
- [06:50]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, and Stalin was just always doing these ridiculous things. I mean, turning up two hours later that he was meant to turn up, just to keep people waiting, keep them on edge, keep them feeling uncomfortable. I mean, it does feel like it's just straight out of a Stalin Soviet textbook. But they're on the receiving end of this. And tell us this, Rana, because apart from sort of testing the resolve of poor old Khrushchev who looks like a marshmallow bobbing up and down in a hot chocolate, he is testing Soviet loyalty when it comes to the Taiwan Strait crisis because there's something serious he wants out of this humiliation, isn't there?
- [07:22]
Rana Mitter
There is. There is a very basic ideological split that is happening between Mao and Khrushchev during this time. So Stalin died in 1953, as captured in Amanda Yunucci's great film, the Death of Stalin. Well worth seeing. And then there's actually something of a sort of a struggle for power within the Soviet leadership. But eventually Khrush comes out on top and he, of course, very quickly repudiates the memory of Stalin. He does, you know, the secret speech which doesn't say secret very long, denouncing Stalin and talking about the excesses of Stalinism. Mao's having none of it. He thinks that Stalin is the business. I mean, it's a very dysfunctional sort of relationship there because Stalin always sort of just kept Mao waiting a little bit, too. He humiliated him a little bit. You know, always made it clear that he, Stalin, was absolutely the unmatchable figure of world socialism and that Mao was, you know, very much a kind of Johnny come lately. And yet Mao greatly admired him for all sorts of reasons. Mao did not admire Khrushchev. He didn't think that he was in the same league. And also he felt that now that Stalin had died, he, Mao, by logical, you know, inference, ought to be the leader of the global communist movement and people should be following him. So basically, yes, he felt that Khrushchev, by compromising, by going for coexistence with the capitalist world and trying to avoid nuclear war, of course not least was essentially, you know, chickening out, that he was trying to find ways to compromise with the capitalist world as opposed to defeating it. And that was why, on a whole variety of issues, including, you know, the status of Taiwan, Mao was very keen to push and goad Khrushchev as far as he could go. And that included Mao basically firing on various occasions in the 1950s up to 1958, missiles on the coast of Taiwan to essentially signal there might be an invasion about to happen and seeing whether or not the Soviets would actually come on board with this.
- [09:05]
Anita Anand
It couldn't happen today, anything like that, could it?
- [09:08]
William Dalrymple
I was just thinking, it just sounds like you're reading the news, the evening news, it all. Plus Sachs.
- [09:13]
Rana Mitter
Nothing new that ever happens in any of these things. Everything goes around and comes around.
- [09:18]
Anita Anand
There's a moment when Mao tests the Soviet Union, doesn't he? He tries to see whether he can rely on them. And in his view, Khrushchev fails. Rana.
- [09:28]
William Dalrymple
But as well as sort of having this slightly, and I think he must have found it slightly delicious feeling of looking down on the Soviets and Particularly thinking Khrushchev was a weak and flabby man. He does also have more than Taiwan on his mind. He wants to present China as a superpower. He wants to show the world that, you know what the world of America and Great Britain doing whatever they want. That is over. We are here now.
- [09:54]
Rana Mitter
Yes, that's absolutely right. The thing perhaps that most differentiates Mao from the Soviets during this time is that he portrays himself not only as a global leader, well, the Soviets do that too, but very much as a leader of the non Western, non European world. And one of the really big turning point moments is the conference at Bandung in 1955. I think we mentioned it briefly in an earlier episode, just worth bringing up here again, because the timing, crucial moment. Crucial, absolutely, yes. Not a Khrushchev moment, but a crucial moment, I think it's fair to say, because just a reminder of what the situation is for China at this moment. So this is mid-1950s. So China is not, I mean, the mainland of China, the People's Republic of China, is not at the United Nations. It's not recognized as the official government of China. That's still Taiwan and in fact will be for another decade and a half. It doesn't get official recognition from the United States of America. That won't happen for more than 20 years in 1979. And in addition, although a small number of Western countries, including the UK did recognize the Beijing government quite quickly, there's still an awful lot of other governments out there that still recognize Taiwan. So unlike the Soviets, who even if they're daggers drawn in the Cold War with the US are internationally recognized. They're there at the un. They're there as part of the global conversation. Mao has to make up his own version of what the global conversation is going to be for him. And for him, he says, well, actually, the obvious place to go is that newly decolonizing world, which later would be known as the Third World and still later in our era as the Global south, but basically Afro Asian is one of the phrases he used at the time. And this conference at Bandung in 1955 was a turning point because two big countries come together, India and China. And keep that thought in mind because we'll come back to the India, China dynamic that becomes very important in just a few years time in 1955. They're still sort of friends, wary friends, but friends nonetheless. India goes for Nehruvian ideas, the ideas of Prime Minister Nehru as being peaceful coexistence and a moral standing in terms of having suffered through, you know, colonialism and now having a right to speak to the outside world through having had that experience, you know, sort of elder statesman sort of sort of thing. China goes much more radical. China says actually it's all very well playing in the system, but actually what you need to do is overthrow the system and it's time for revolutionary diplomacy. And plenty of countries emerging both in Asia and Africa find this an important and in some ways attractive message. And the main thing about that Bandung meeting is that it's not primarily about the United States, it's not primarily about the Soviet Union, it's about Asian, African countries themselves. And in that context, doesn't matter that China's not recognized by the US or by the un. It sits at the heart of that
- [12:29]
Anita Anand
conversation better than Nehru. I mean, does he win that duel? If you like.
- [12:34]
Rana Mitter
You know what, that's a really interesting question. I would say maybe. So I'll say, why? Because if you think about Nehru then and now, he had, I think, an extraordinary international standing. He was taken very seriously in a lot of places. I don't know if you've done a Nehru podcast on empire yet.
- [12:52]
Anita Anand
We haven't actually. It's something we must do.
- [12:55]
Rana Mitter
Extraordinary figure, particularly in this era when he's obviously India's rather different from the era of Nehru. Anyway, Nehru's one thing, he's obviously very well respected. But actually I think it's hard to point to large numbers of places where Nehruvian influences the direct and most important foreign policy intervention at this point. Partly because India doesn't really do kind of, you know, it doesn't send out secret guerrilla forces or kind of, you know, pay off countries to try and ferment revolution. China of course is in a very different position. That revolutionary socialist message takes off in Vietnam where of course China is very directly involved in the anti colonial movement.
- [13:30]
Anita Anand
Though a complicated relationship with the Viet Cong.
- [13:34]
Rana Mitter
Very complicated relationship, absolutely. Both then and now, you know, they're both close in terms of having fraternal communist parties that work with each other and of course on occasions, deadly enemy. Vietnam was the last place that China had launched an international war against, of course in 1979. So very complex relationship. The PKI, the Communist Party in Indonesia, where certainly the then right wing military leadership under Suharto launched a coup in 1965 essentially against the then leader Sukarno because he was worried that Beijing's influence was becoming too strong.
- [14:07]
Anita Anand
Lots of killings and people with piano wire strung up everywhere.
- [14:11]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, no, again, there's the year of living dangerously. Film from about 30 years ago.
- [14:15]
Anita Anand
Mel Gibson.
- [14:16]
Rana Mitter
Mel Gibson, I think. Yes. But Indonesia would be another example of where you could see, certainly suspected Beijing influence. And then just take one more example from perhaps a little later on. But not, not I think outside the, the topic really the Rhodesia Bush war.
- [14:30]
Anita Anand
Were they involved in that?
- [14:32]
Rana Mitter
Oh, very much so, yes. There's basically, there's two, two factions, ZAPU and ZANU which are the kind of rival, anti, anti Rhod, you know, white leadership resistance. ZAPU under Joshua Nkomo is supported by the Soviet Union and ZANU under Robert Mugabe supported by the Chinese. And you can tell, you know, it tells you maybe something that it's the Chinese and Mugabe who win out. And in fact to the very last days, you know, until I think about, died in about 2018, something like that, there was a strong connection between Beijing and Harare and Mugabe was always, it's not exactly welcome in Beijing. They would always like take his call, so to speak. So the bond was quite a, quite a long standing one.
- [15:09]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, you know, you mentioned that and you, you praise the question from William about who did it better in the Nehru or Mao.
- [15:17]
Rana Mitter
I praise all of your questions, Anita.
- [15:18]
Anita Anand
You know, Anita, I think your questions are wonderful. I'm just sad there's not more of them.
- [15:23]
William Dalrymple
Thank you, darling. No, thank you. Can I just say, I only care what Rana thinks. But listen, the reason I've interjected is because I once did an interview with a very senior, even currently a very senior Indian politician and he was talking rather wistfully about the differences between what was possible in India and what was possible in China. And I said, well, you really sound jealous. What is it about China that you really like? He says, well, if they want to build a road through a town or a village or something pretty, they just bloody do it. And nobody says anything. And you see this even sort of in Mao's era that he was talking about more recently. But you see this in Mao's era where in this attempt to become a superpower, apart from the influences, the spheres of influence that you're talking about, he starts industrializing like a maniac and he sets this kind of insane target of overtaking Britain and America when it comes to industrial output. And like the Soviets did, he sets these deadlines, within 15 years we will take over the world and it's going to be through steel. We do this and we are going to double production. And he doesn't care at all about the human cost. I mean, I think it's worth pointing out Here that, you know, at the wuchang conference in 1950, he's talking to his inner circle and he says working like this, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one third or 1/10, maybe 50 million. And this is a price he's completely willing to pay. You know, that same sort of find a way or make a way, but we're going to get this done.
- [16:49]
Rana Mitter
Yes. If you have to outline one particular characteristic which I think differentiates Mao from pretty much any of the other top leaders, Deng Xiaoping, Yoshaoqi and others, you know, they're all revolutionary communists. Their hands are steeped in blood. You know, these are not, you know, sort of liberal types. But Mao's utter disregard for the fate of individuals in the face of wanting to achieve what he regarded as massive goals is extraordinarily brutal, even by those, those standards. You can find people who sort of regret one way or another that, you know, omelettes, breaking eggs, you know, all
- [17:26]
William Dalrymple
those sorts of cliches or even faux regret. But at least they try to say, yeah, it's sad.
- [17:31]
Rana Mitter
Well, yeah, whatever. But with Mao, I don't think he regretted it at all. I think with Mao, he actually, I mean, again, going back to what we were talking about in one of the, the earlier podcasts about social Darwinism and about, you know, the, the glorification of violence from a very, very early time, because Mao was reacting against Confucianism, because he was basically thinking that Confucianism had created this languid, you know, kind of scholarly culture that he felt was deadly destructive to China's progress. He went massively other way and felt that basically only violent action not only could be necessary, but should be celebrated as part of that. And that carries on all the way through his life. A point, I should say, which I've explored in one of my books called A Bitter Revolution. And the bitterness in part is because I think that this continuing theme actually of the celebration of violence sits very centrally through Mao's life. And as will come on, I think in the next episode of the podcast, I think it finds its culmination in the horrors of the culture revolution of
- [18:26]
Anita Anand
the 1960s, going back to this mass production and these five year plans. Is it true that people called what came out of these wonderful blast furnaces useless turds of steel?
- [18:40]
Rana Mitter
That sounds about right. Just to give you a bit of a backfill, what we're talking about here. So in 1958, Mao decides that, and it really is Mao that essentially the economic reforms which have taken Place including redistribution of land to poorer farmers, involved, by the way, the killing of something like 2 million rich farmers or not frankly, that rich in the wider scale of things, but, you know, very arbitrary class categories and also the sort of partial socialization of factories and the creation of work units in the city. It's not enough. He wants to go into high gear, as Anita's saying that, you know, he wants to. I'm not sure that he said actually he wanted to take 15 years to take over the world, but he said 15 years was something which in those days was a big deal, which was 15 years to overtake Britain, a major Chinese goal. Unimaginable challenge for the, the Chinese point of point of view and basically the way that they went for it was mass collectivization, collective farms, but also collectivization of industry. And to meet industrial targets, which was central, set, you know, pretty much almost arbitrarily, they had to basically find, you know, cut down railings in parks and sort of melt them down because bits of iron would then fulfill the quota. Even though actually the iron you produced from that, as you said, were like, you know, sort of iron turrets that actually had no particular, particular use.
- [19:55]
William Dalrymple
They're taking down railings, they're taking down steel that is useful to try and make quotas and producing, shall we say now, substandard steel. But at the same time this sort of self mutilation that's going on, raana, like, you know, sort of dismantling your own infrastructure. There is also this war, weird war on nature that occurs at around the same time, like there is no time for things that are natural. Now can you tell us a bit more about this? I find this fascinating.
- [20:20]
Anita Anand
Is that a formal title, the war on Nature, like the war on terror?
- [20:25]
Rana Mitter
It's not a formal title of Mao's, but actually there's a very important book by the scholar Judith Shapiro called Mao's War on Nature, which exactly is in this vein. Essentially one of the things that comes as part of the sort of wider belief in a type of communist science is that nature can be completely controlled by humans. And I would say that this comes in part from this phenomenon of Lysenkoism. In other words, the idea, you know, put forward by pseudoscientists really in the Soviet Union under Stalin, that socialism changes the nature of the naturalist world. And therefore you can basically find ways through kind of socialist force of will to increase crop outcomes or, you know, produce more steel, whatever it might be, because you're doing it the socialist way. Now, in the case of what actually happens in China. Let's take agriculture. This means that, for instance, peasants are encouraged, Farmers are encouraged to plant seeds much, much closer to each other in rows of, you know, corn or wheat or barley, because under socialism, the seeds will cooperate with each other and grow much more fully, whereas in the capitalist world they would have competed with each other, because that's the nature of capitalism. So there's not much point having them close to each other. You'll be shocked, shocked to hear that this socialist agriculture did not, in fact, lead to a much richer crop, but actually just devastating crop failures. Because if you plant seeds too close to each other, they won't sprout.
- [21:54]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, I mean, that's not even the worst of what they did. And I think there was the slogan with the Maoist slogan, man must conquer nature. And forests were chopped down because. Because, you know, the wood feeds the furnaces and that helps make the turd steel, as we're delightfully calling it now. And so you're setting yourself up for an absolute catastrophe. The thing, though, that I always remember is his four Pests campaign and poor old sparrows get it in the net.
- [22:22]
Anita Anand
Sparrows are not popular with Mao.
- [22:24]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, you've got rats, flies, mosquitoes. Why sparrows? Why the poor old sparrows?
- [22:29]
Rana Mitter
So as far as we understand it, Mal got it into his head that sparrows were bad because they eat seeds which are being sowed in this, you know, socialist manner. However, it also turns out, of course, that A, sparrows don't eat that many seeds, and B, they also control other pests. So basically the destruction of the sparrows meant that some of those insects and other pests then you know, multiplied in number and eventually, I think they had to end up sort of importing, you know, hundreds of thousands of sparrows from the Soviet Union, socialist, revisionist sparrows coming in from Khrushchev's nest to deal with the question, yeah, and what's this business
- [23:06]
Anita Anand
about beating cymbals to keep the sparrows airborne so they drop from exhaustion? Is this all rubbish?
- [23:12]
Rana Mitter
Or basically, by stopping them landing so kind of scaring them off so that they couldn't land anywhere? You know, some of them, at least, eventually kind of just, you know, they keep on beating their wings, they can't find anywhere to land and eventually they die.
- [23:21]
Anita Anand
We had a locust invasion on the farm here in Delhi once, in the middle of COVID if Covid wasn't bad enough.
- [23:29]
Rana Mitter
Oh, yes.
- [23:30]
Anita Anand
And I fended them off by putting on Maria Callas at volume 10, and it did the job and they landed next door. They didn't like Maria Callis.
- [23:38]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. I mean the thing about the symbols though and the sparrows is, I mean the eye watering numbers that go with this, it's an estimated 1.1 to 2 billion sparrows fall out of the sky from exhaustion or being killed or poisoned or whatever it is he's up to. And then you do have these terrible locusts and plagues of insects who eat things. So I mean it is fascinating. Let's take a break here now. Join us after the break where we discuss what happens if you don't have, you know, the pest eaters, but you have lots of pests and you also have this aggressive form of farming that has been born out of some nutter's head which is going to really, really deplete the possibility of making food.
- [24:24]
Rana Mitter
So good.
- [24:25]
William Dalrymple
So good, so good.
- [24:27]
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- [25:58]
Anita Anand
Welcome back. Rana. Tell us how these policies eventually lead to what some call the greatest famine in human history.
- [26:07]
Rana Mitter
The Great Leap Forward is one of the most catastrophic events really in human history history and it's caused by essentially a massive miscalculation which is then exacerbated by I think criminal negligence is the only way you can all criminal unwillingness to face Facts. One of my former teaching colleagues gave me a sentence which sounds like the most banal thing, but actually it's really, really to the point. He said the history of the Great Leap Forward is the history of Chinese accountancy. And that sounds like, oh my gosh, what is that supposed to mean? What he meant, of course, was that the Great Leap Forward was supposed to be on its face, a kind of highly rationalized bureaucratic system of working out what China could produce and then, you know, working upwards so that you would produce, you know, enough food for everyone to, to eat and crops that could then be exported to increase China's GDP and everything would be great. And that depended, of course, on accurate statistics being kept and passed on. And of course none of this actually happened. I mean, when you get, first of all, these kind of methods being used that we discussed just before the break in terms of how socialist aggreg agriculture could increase crops but actually ended up destroying many of them, you find that in fact the countryside is simply not producing the kind of level of crops that are needed to keep body and soul together, let alone export. But basically because all the figures are being fiddled by officials who are too terrified to give the real information in case they get arrested or, you know, kind of fired from their, their jobs, they pass on statistics upwards saying yes, it's all going great and we're kind of producing huge amounts of grain and products and up, you know, in the cities and then, you know, beyond that to Beijing. The guys at the top are saying, oh, well, this is great. Well in that case we can export lots to the, so Soviet Union. So you have the kind of obscenity of out in the countryside there isn't enough food for people to eat while the grain is being seized and exported from the country to bring in money for the state. This is very much a rural phenomenon. And that's significant because of course, shortly before this, the system which still exists today was started up in China of a sort of Soviet style internal passport system. It's called the hukou or household registration scheme. And it basically means that you can't just simply wander around wherever you want in China. You have to sort of have it internal permission. So people in the cities were no longer really kind of interacting that much with the countryside. They were kind of almost separated off. And while people in the cities, you know, found there was a certain amount of deprivation, the devastation was really out in the countryside where essentially it turned into mass starvation. About 1959, 1960, 61, it became clear in the Countryside, there simply wasn't enough food to go around. But when the news came through to the top leadership, including Mao, he basically chose to ignore it. He didn't exactly deny it, but he basically said, well, you know, we need to keep going. And if I think at one point he said something like, if things are not going so well, then let's just not say anything about it and keep going. And that led to one of the great confrontations of that period, which is the conference, Communist Party top level conference held at Lushan in 1959, where he was confronted by one of his most important lieutenants, you might say Punga Ho, been one of the great generals of World War II, the guy who commanded one of the few major set piece battles that the communists had fought during World War II, the Battle of the Hundred Regiments, 1940. Kind of grizzled character, military veteran, you know, well respected. And he had got information, I think, not least from his own home area, that people were starving to death. So he confronted Mao at this conference. Right, and was purged, promptly purged. Mao made it very clear that he would not, not permit any talk of this sort. And that of course shut down discussion for years.
- [29:43]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, and so, I mean, you've got, you know, people who dare to say the truth to him being purged. You've got, you know, these Sputnik harvests being reported that everything's fine, nothing to see here. And in the meantime, just put some numbers on this Rana, it's estimated, and tell me if this sounds right to you. 30 to 50 million people die between 1959 and 1961.
- [30:03]
Rana Mitter
I think most responsible scholars, including some from within China itself, have been very, very brave. And you know, obviously it's a completely taboo subject even, even now, have put the number of people who either starve to death or, you know, essentially kind of, you know, population losses in those sorts of numbers, certainly tens of millions of people. And I think very few people, you know, asked honestly about this would, would, would dispute that for obvious reasons. It's still very difficult to get a really accurate number because the Chinese Communist Party is not, you know, fully releasing the archives to let people know exactly what went on. It's worth, though, if I may mentioning a couple of things that are well worth bearing in mind if one wants to get a sense of this scale. The book that I think really exemplifies bravery, you know, beyond measure, but also the difficulty in dealing with this is a book called Tombstone by Yang Zhisheng, a Chinese journalist and historian who painstakingly compiled huge numbers of documents. I mean, he was. He had an official position in China which came. Gave him permission to get into various archives and, you know, places where there are documents. But I think people in there didn't know what he was actually doing. And he produced this astonishing book, which, of course, you know, can't get it in China, but it is published elsewhere and it's also translated into English, I think. Stacy Mosher. So that's well worth looking at to get an idea of how a Chinese, a dogged Chinese investigative historian has looked at this question. But the one thing that always struck me as extraordinary, but from the point of view of the Party, so fortunate in getting away from responsibility, is that unlike the Cultural Revolution and unlike many other famines around the world, including in China, again, like the 1942 famine, which is a really big wartime famine, there are no photographs that we know of of people starving during the Great Leap Forward.
- [31:45]
William Dalrymple
That's true.
- [31:46]
Rana Mitter
I'm sure they must exist somewhere. I'd be staggered if they didn't. But I assume that they're kind of locked up very, very deep in some archives somewhere, purged. And you will not find, you know, pictures of starving peasants in the streets or the streets in the villages.
- [31:59]
William Dalrymple
Well, sort of the bloated stomachs and rib cages that, you know, even from, you know, fairly recently, you know, you have those images seared into your mind.
- [32:08]
Rana Mitter
Very much so. And the lack of visual is one of, you know, visual content is one of the things that helps shape or fails to shape our understanding of these things in the 21st century.
- [32:17]
Anita Anand
I do think Jung Chang has stories of cannibalism and 35% of some communes dying. Does that sound and credible?
- [32:28]
Rana Mitter
Sure, yeah. I mean, again, cannibalism is a story. I mean, you hear that through much of Chinese history. It's. It's something that, you know, when there are famines in general, it's always reported that, you know, the. The people are reduced to eating each other and that, you know, the. The young people die and the old people die and so forth. I mean, 35% sounds perfectly plausible.
- [32:49]
Anita Anand
Very high, isn't it?
- [32:50]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, certainly we do know know from the records that we have. And again, you know, I say do look at Tombstone by. By Yang Qishung. Extraordinary accounts of the horror that was visited on huge numbers of people in the countryside in China during the Great Leap Forward.
- [33:07]
Anita Anand
Rana. One of the issues which is, I think, never really kind of mentioned much in China, but which is still an absolutely massive thing here in India, Where
- [33:16]
William Dalrymple
I'm speaking from Hindu Chini Pai Pai
- [33:19]
Anita Anand
Sino Indian war particularly remembered today under the Modi government. This is regarded as one of the great failures of, of Nehru's sort of understanding of the world.
- [33:30]
Rana Mitter
Well, yes, and I, I, I, I've on various occasions I think, you know, talk to various kind of now quite senior and, and grizzled members of the Indian military who have usually over a peg of old monk or something will tell you tales of what it was being a young officer in the Himalayas, you know, facing the reds on the other, the other side. I think the Sino indwelling 60 it is a very interesting and extraordinary event for a couple of reasons. One is that of course China and India launch into war, you know, what is basically the end of the great leap forward. This is a time of huge internal trauma for China. So the idea that they would also decide essentially to get involved in a border war at this time is I think an extraordinary choice in some ways. More than that, I think one of the other things that's really interesting is the disparity of memory. As you say 1962 even now, I mean, you know, it's only 70 years ago, it's a very long time ago is still remembered as a huge trauma for the Indian military. A terrible event, defeat in a sense which must be understood and analyzed and never be allowed to happen again. And events such as the galwan Clash of 2020 when Indian troops get beaten
- [34:32]
Anita Anand
to death by Chinese men with barbed wire staves.
- [34:36]
Rana Mitter
Yes, extraordinarily brutal, the battle between the two. And literally hand to hand combat in a way that much the world thought in the era of drones and so forth would never happen again. So it matters a great deal in Indian military thinking. China talks about the Sino Indian War of 1962 very little. You know, there are researchers who do work on it, but it's really a minority pursuit. And I would say that one of the things that more generally defines the relationship between India and China is that India worries about China a great deal and China really doesn't think about India all that much.
- [35:10]
Anita Anand
It doesn't take India at all seriously, does it? There's an extraordinary sort of feeling of dismissal whenever you talk to, to Chinese about India.
- [35:16]
Rana Mitter
It's just that, yeah, you know, the Chinese are really obsessed with the United States as the United States indeed is obsessed with China. And other actors such as Japan also loom quite, you know, heavily in their, in their minds and India just doesn't fit into that kind of category. I mean there are things that the Chinese and the middle class tend to think about India, which include, you know, the idea that actually it's a place where you might go for sort of spiritual renewal and so forth. I don't know what India thinks about this, but, you know, there's almost a kind of rather classic sort of Herman Hesse type view about some of this sort of thing. But, yeah, I think it's not a rivalry of equals in the mind of the Chinese.
- [35:52]
William Dalrymple
And that bothers Indians so much, let me tell you, because they know it and they hate it, and you can hear them over your pegs of old monk grumbling about it. You know, they're not taken as seriously as they should. But just to cast our mind back to what the world is doing in 1962, when this Sino Indian war that no Chinese really care about very much was going on. This is in the middle of the Cuban missile crash crisis. So you've got Chinese forces launching coordinated attacks across this disputed Himalayan border with India. And it is. Is it deliberately brilliant timing, Rana? Is it timed? Because everyone's looking at Cuba, everyone's turning their attention somewhere else. So he thinks in a brilliant way, let's do it now.
- [36:32]
Rana Mitter
Good question. I couldn't give you a definitive answer on that, not least because Foreign Ministry archives in China are not necessarily very accessible. There was a world where actually they began to release them in the early 2000s, and they suddenly sort of shut everything down about 2013, and they'd never been opened again. But again, one thing I certainly can say is that Mao and those around him kept a very close and beady eye on what was happening in the wider world. And they certainly also regarded, essentially more as, to use a good Marxist kind of jargon word, adventurist views of the world as being a good thing. In other words, things like detente or trying to kind of calm down tensions. This was not Mao's, you know, preference at all.
- [37:12]
Anita Anand
Not his vibe.
- [37:14]
Rana Mitter
Not his vibe, indeed. So. So I'd say that the idea that, you know, there might be a confrontation between the US and the Soviets in Cuba or elsewhere, he would have taken that not only with. I was gonna say with equanimity. I think more than that. I think he would have taken it with enthusiasm, actually.
- [37:27]
William Dalrymple
Oh, right. Interesting. And this is. I mean, we should say this is really. This has deep British colonial roots because it is the uncertainty of the status of Tibet that kind of fires these. These problems off between India and China.
- [37:42]
Rana Mitter
Yes. I mean, even today, there is huge disputes in the large parts of the province of northeastern India called Arunachal Pradesh is claimed by China as being their territory. I mean, it's currently under Indian jurisdiction.
- [37:56]
Anita Anand
Arunachalis can't get into China because they don't have a Chinese stamp on their passport. I've known Arunachal writer friends who try to. To get to China and they get turned back at the border.
- [38:08]
Rana Mitter
Sounds about right. So, you know, this is. This is an issue that China certainly isn't letting go, nor is India, to be, to be fair. But at the same time, it's clearly one of the things that continues to be a big running sore and can sometimes be a deadly one, but it never sits at the absolute sort of top level of Chinese consideration, partly because you mentioned Tibet and the conquest of, you know, essentially what we'd regard as the main part of the Tibetan Plateau happens in 1950, and China has kept it completely and massively under control since then.
- [38:39]
Anita Anand
And this is after the moment that the Dalai Lama escapes and arrives and moves to India.
- [38:45]
Rana Mitter
He stays around for a while and then disappears, I think, in 1959 to head to Dharamsala in India, of course. So at that point, essentially China then, as now, has very significant control over much of the Tibetan plateau, some of which is also in the provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan. And therefore the level of sort of uncertainty existed during the nationalist period on that Western border doesn't exist in quite this way. So the Indian border is more about sort of trying to push for as much territory as possible. It's not because I think the Chinese really think that there's some fundamental security issue that needs to be solved there.
- [39:22]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, but so, you know, Chinese forces, forces do push in quite substantially into Indian territory and you have a huge number of casualties. But then China declares a unilateral ceasefire. And I'm trying to understand what's the thinking behind suddenly, okay, you know, we're ceasefire now, and why in, you know, exactly a month after the initial attack, do they decide they've had enough?
- [39:44]
Rana Mitter
Yes. So I put it so I couldn't give a definitive reason until the archives are open. I don't think anyone can necessarily.
- [39:50]
William Dalrymple
But I could have a guess, Rana, have a guess, have an educated guess, guess.
- [39:54]
Rana Mitter
How about an extrapolation? I think that one of the things that's very notable about the way in which China has dealt with its border disputes is that unlike some countries, Russia, you know, in Ukraine at the moment, to give a, you know, very current example, it can be quite ambivalent about how far it wants to push the Main comparison I think of is the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which is about five weeks long and again, it's even more brutal in terms of numbers of death than the, the, the war with India in 1960.
- [40:26]
Anita Anand
I have very clear memories of watching it on television at school and be very frightened that this was a kind of world war coming with these massive rocket salvos firing off.
- [40:36]
Rana Mitter
And in that particular case in 1979, essentially it was becoming clear, I think quite quickly that the Vietnamese were getting the better of the Chinese. And so Deng Xiaoping, I think very sensibly decided that he would declare victory and go home and basically said, well, we've won basically. And then, you know, all the troops withdraw and they go back into China. I know that from behind the scenes that actually this was hugely traumatic for the Chinese army at the time not to be able to declare a genuinely complete victory. I don't think that was quite what was going on on the India front, but I think the sense of, and this might sound ambivalent compared to what I said before, but I think it's worth noting there are always cautious elements too. Now, could you find figures, I'm going to say, like Zhou Enlai and others who maybe just think that actually this could be dangerous. You know, the end of the Great Leap Forward is a very perilous time in terms of China's domestic political economy. You know, people are starving to death, they're having to reintroduce kind of limited form of market socialism. This is one of the things Deng Xiaoping does that gets into trouble in the Cultural Revolution. Do you really want an all out war with India on the border as well? At the same time, I would be very unsurprised, you know, to find out there was a, basically, you know, a conversation at top level, they're saying, well, we've shown the Indians that, you know, we know how to put a bit of stick about. Let's leave it there.
- [41:48]
William Dalrymple
Let's not overextend at this point. Got it. So Rana, you know, you have a cessation in hostilities against India, but what you do find is a ramping up, up around about the same time of hostilities against his own people. And these are people that he deems to be rivals or people who can get in the way. And the weapons he chooses against them are, I mean, honestly, children, aren't they? The Chinese youth is sort of launched against them.
- [42:11]
Rana Mitter
Yes, there's a whole set of campaigns that happens at exactly this moment that we've just talked about 1962. Because Mao is convinced by this stage that he's being sidelined by the other members of leadership because basically he's so powerful, they can't really say, you got those breaking forward horribly wrong. But in practice, that's really what they're doing. They have to reintroduce a sort of limited form of market socialism to, you know, get food moving around the country again. And there is something called the Socialist Education Campaign, which he launches, you know, response to try and remind people that it's important to be kind of faithful to the revolution first. You get also a kind of push to learn from the pla, the People's Liberation army, to try and stress military values. And this character Lei Feng, who is the. The sort of. The rustless screw, as they call him.
- [42:55]
Anita Anand
What is meant by the rustless screw?
- [42:58]
Rana Mitter
Well, basically like a sort of screw who you can keep turning, hold a piece of machinery together. He never rusts because he's always working hard. He's a sort of model worker figure,
- [43:05]
William Dalrymple
like Stakhanov Stakenov in Russia. Sort of a similar kind of Stakhanov thing.
- [43:10]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, yeah, exactly that. Whether he actually existed or not is not entirely clear, but certainly he becomes an archetype at that point.
- [43:15]
Anita Anand
But we have to learn from.
- [43:17]
Rana Mitter
We have to learn from Leif. We have to learn from the pla.
- [43:19]
Anita Anand
And the Little Red Book is of this period, isn't it?
- [43:22]
Rana Mitter
Yes, I think the Little Red Book emerges as part of the Learn from the PLA camp campaign and is first distributed in China to the army. In fact, I think it sort of spreads out from there, bearing in mind this is the kind of rise of Lin Biao, the Defense Minister, who is beginning to be designated, thought of as potentially Mao's successor at some point. So this is one of the things that emerges, that the army and the pla, you know, gets stressed as an institution that has particular standing at this. At this point.
- [43:52]
William Dalrymple
But this is the. I mean, Willie. Willie mentioned the Little Red Book. But then, you know, the Little Red Book, in my head at least, is the era of chanting, you know, sort of not thinking for yourself, but reading the same doctrine again and again and again, being able to recite it from memory. It is so Orwellian and nightmarish.
- [44:08]
Anita Anand
Father is close, mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.
- [44:13]
William Dalrymple
Well, exactly. Yeah. I mean, exactly that. I mean, what was the aim then? To say, you know what, Children of China, we are the ones that matter. Not your mum, not your dad. Legitimately. Family ties are bourgeois. We don't want them anymore. Is that what the message is?
- [44:27]
Rana Mitter
Yes, yes. So you can look both backwards and forwards on that. In some ways, what you might call ideological capture. You know, the idea that by reading specific things, you shape minds in some ways goes back about 20 years previously when we mentioned the previous episode of the podcast, the rectification movements of the 1940s, where getting into the Communist Party meant that you had to be, you know, essentially know, pretty much off by heart, 22 key texts, 18 of which were by many, Mao. So, you know, this idea of using texts as a means to control thinking has that flavor to it. Breaking down family lengths was also very big in the Great Leap Forward. At the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, you get these sort of collective socialist canteens in which kind of household cooking is abandoned to make way for kind of big collective kitchens. The idea was that the organization, not the family, would provide your food. The place where, directly inspired by Ma, the breaking up of family links would go the furthest was less than a decade later, later, you know, a few hundred miles away, a thousand miles away in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where family links were completely destroyed. In that. That sense, you know, nobody was really allowed to acknowledge family connections. That was never quite true in. In China, but it wasn't true in. In China really at that level. But the idea that the party should take a kind of superior status compared to the family. Yeah. And also, if you think about it, go way back to, you know, one of the first episodes of the podcast with the May 4th Movement Movement, Mao's writing very early on about how arranged marriages, forced marriages, and Confucian family life in general is this sort of hideously destructive force which is destroying, you know, China's society. With that sort of thought in his mind, why wouldn't he get to power and then start to think about how to destroy the traditional Chinese family?
- [46:07]
William Dalrymple
Oh, God. I mean, again, the human cost to people who've already been suffering for such a long time. You know, the most precious thing that you have have left. You don't have wealth, you don't have the guarantee of having food, but you have your children, and you don't even have that anymore. In 1966, Rana, there's something really interesting that happens. There are rumors flying around that Mao is dying. Was he sick at the time? Where did those rumors come from? How true were they?
- [46:30]
Rana Mitter
Possibly rival factions? It's always useful. I remember that way back in the days of the jiangxi Soviet, about 1930, one of the party newspapers published an obituary of Mao which Suggested in those days that someone didn't, you know, wish him entirely well. Obviously he was much more powerful by the 1960s. But it's possible people were sort of muttering, oh, yes, yeah, not looking very. He was old, he was bloated, he clearly wasn't looking after himself. I already mentioned his dental hygiene left a lot to be desired. And I think that, you know, beyond that suggests a general lack of personal care.
- [47:03]
Anita Anand
How old is these? It's early 70s. But this point, is he.
- [47:06]
Rana Mitter
Yes. So he's basically born in 1893. So if we're talking about say 1966, the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, then at that point he is, what, 73 years old. And it's worth noting in later decades, one of the reasons that Deng Xiaoping basically pushed to have people retire by the time they were about 66, 66, 67, 70 was in part because I think of this way in which Mao had sort of gone on and on and on. But certainly at that point he wants to make it very clear that he has no intention of retiring, you know, from the, from the front line. And so takes famously takes a swim in the Yangtze to show that he's still, you know, hearty and hale of body. I mean, again, even there they can't resist sort of overhanging the Puddy. I can't remember the exact figures, but he probably had them to hand.
- [47:50]
William Dalrymple
But, oh, they said he swam 15km. That's what they said.
- [47:54]
Rana Mitter
In an hour.
- [47:55]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So world record holder, you know, just crazy.
- [47:59]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, Zermark Spitz of the Yellow. I mean, in practice, of course, he would no doubt have been sort of born in the right direction by the currents as well. But even so, the wider symbolism of basically going for the dip in the Yangtze. And again, we need to remind ourselves this was a very un. Confucian thing to do. Basically going and kind of vigorously swimming in the river was not what a Confucian gentleman would have. Would have done. And so symbolically, it was very important to continue to say that he would maintain the legacy of that sort of, you know, social Darwinist survival of the fittest type thinking that, that he espoused back in the 1910s, 1920s, which actually
- [48:32]
William Dalrymple
makes it so ironic. What happens next? We're going to end here, but look, with this newly invigorated, record breaking swimmer of a Mao at the age of 73 years of age. In the next episode, we're going to talk about the flex that this man who is proving his vitality is going to make and it is the cultural revolution. Join us for that till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me. Anita I on it and goodbye for me.
- [48:58]
Anita Anand
William Durand.
- [49:09]
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