Lawfare Daily: Frank Dikötter on the Early Years of Chinese Communism

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Everything is scripted. And in great detail, that the most interesting thing is that behind that facade, from 1942 to roughly 43-44, extraordinarily

violent purges took place in that very sane place. It's the law fair podcast. I'm law fair, senior editor, Michael Feinberg.

“Here today with Professor Frank DeCoder,”

who is the milliest senior fellow at the Hoover Institute

out of Stanford University, and also chair-professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. The danger, reading, is that so often within communist systems, the people within these dictatorships and observers outside occasionally

tend to believe that the next leader, the next leader, will be more humane. It's the next one, it will be grapes, the double arm. Today, we are discussing his new book, "Red Dawn Over China," which describes the early years of the Chinese Communist

movement and how it eventually exercised a stranglehold on the history and society of China. I don't want to start with the book itself or any specifics of your narrative just yet. I want to begin by observing something

I've noted in reviews of the book. And these are admittedly coming from more journalistic leaning outlets rather than academic ones. But there seems to be a good amount of surprise at the level of violence your book describes.

And it's interesting to me as somebody who used to work in governments that people didn't expect this, given the area you're covering, given the global region, and given the percentages involved. And I think that this unpreparedness

for the malevolence and violence which occurred in the early years, the Chinese Communist parties consolidation of power can largely be traced to a historical problem.

“And I think that's reflected either implicitly”

or explicitly in the title of your book. And so I'm going to start by asking you to talk for a few moments about somebody else's work. Your work is called Red Dawn over China. There is a much earlier book by a journalist named Edgar Snow

called Red Star over China. And I think your book really provides a necessary corrective to his arguments and his portrayals. And so I was wondering if you could sort of set the scene of your own work by discussing his.

Yes, so Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in the early 1980s. And only very recently did I realize that he and this family only lived a few streets away from me.

I may even have cross paths with his daughter who was doing Spanish as I was doing Chinese and Russian at university. But anyway, I read the book like so many other others. And of course, it was an introduction

to not only Mao Zitong, but of course to China and communism. And at heart, of course, a gripping tale, but a sefantasy. Edgar Snow, naive journalist from Missouri, invited to visit the communist in 1936, 1936,

is the end of what Mao and subsequently others refer to as the long march, which in essence is a long defeat, as they try to escape from the clutches of the troops of the central government. And are a mere 6, 7, 8,000 to arrive somewhere far away

At this point in time, there are about 40,000 followers

of communism in China, a country of half a billion people.

In other words, it doesn't represent very much at A. So Edgar Snow comes to the rescue of the speak by becoming their mouthpiece and tells the tale as the communist would like it to be presented to the world, the sort of tale of David and Goliath,

the communist fighting to good fight. More in tune with the spirit of the modern age, trying to liberate hundreds of millions of people from the bonds of feudalism, imperialism, militarism, fascism, all possible evils

that you could imagine. So Edgar Snow, published this book a year later,

“3637, I believe, translated many languages”

and puts Mao on the map and provides them with this great narrative. And I think that has very much shaped the way we understand it. Of course, it becomes the official narrative from 1949 onwards as the communist do manage to conquer a quarter of humanity and the red flag

goes up over the forbidden city in Beijing. It becomes the official storyline. Two days very day with a few modifications here and there, a story of liberation. And of course, it's a great story,

but once you start looking at the evidence of which

there has always been a great amount, I should say,

when you realize it's not quite red star over China, it's something very different altogether. And not two things which I think are very striking, even without starting to dig into all the material that was left behind by the communist themselves.

“And of course others who were interested in them,”

that the archives of the growing down, the British, the French also have numerous reports that can help you trace the stories of the speak. But the two things really are, first of all, as I already pointed out, that 15 years after the foundation

of the Chinese Communist Party in China, so 1921, the summer, established with help of the Soviet Union, the common town, the communist and international sense agent, who helped 12 chaps in a room established a party

that represents just over 50 people, that's 1921. By 36 or about 40,000 followers, sort of the first thing that's very clear is that they have very little appeal. You just have to look at the numbers.

You can go on and on and talk about justice and feudalism and imperialism and oppression of peasants, quote unquote.

“But clearly, they have zero impact on any of these issues”

or whether they are real or not. And then the second point is if you start looking at the history a bit more in detail, then you realize it is a trail of violence that they leave behind.

And the chairman, good old chairman Mao, says it himself, he does have a talent for catchy phrases. And one of them is revolution is not a dinner party. And the other one is power comes at the barrel of a gun. And that's indeed what it is.

Now, this shouldn't really come as a surprise. Every revolution by definition wishes to overthrow the old order and can only do so through violence. Violence is something that may or may not upset you

and your listeners are certainly is not something that I cherish at all. I'd rather have reform at the ballot box if possible. And through laws. But of course, there is a large section of the population

who wishes to change things through violence. And that is to come in his cause. The comments are convinced that they are surrounded

by groups so powerful that you must

break their hold on society in order to establish a better utopian society. So the result is violence. So I gave you two say, sayings by Mao, power comes at the barrel of a gun.

Revolution is not until a party. There's another one that dates from the fifth of January 1930. And that is a single spark will ignite the prairie, as a single spark will ignite the prairie. What does it mean?

It means that in his imagination, there are hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants in China who are merely waiting to somehow rise and help the Communist Party gain power. All that is needed is just that single spark

And how do you create that spark?

“You must eliminate the fear that they have”

by slaughtering, killing power holders. So if you could just seize, for instance, a town, a city,

and create your revolutionary base there

then that revolution will somehow expand to the rest of the country and lead to victory. So time and again, from 1921 to 36 to Communist try to seize a town, attack a city, hold on to territory, and eliminate what they consider to be power holders,

look through violence and it fails every single time. So to me, what is most remarkable is not so much the violence. It is the reaction of not just some of the reviewers and readers, but of the historographical field as a whole. And why does it come as such a surprise?

Lannon and Stalin were violence. Mussolini, who was inspired by Lannon, Lannon, of course, was the idea that there must be a revolution, not from below, but from above, by seizing power, you impose the revolution from above,

you're not like to sit and wait for the masses to rise. You're not going to wait for that spark. You must create that spark. So Mussolini is inspired by the fascist of Ireland. Hitler in turn, 1933 is inspired by Mussolini.

It is all string of people who are inspired by it. And the basic principle is violence. So think, you know, signing path in Peru. That's what we are really dealing with. And it's astonishing the extent to which historical

if he has been able to somehow tiptoe around it.

“And I do want to come back to this theme because I think”

the limitations of the historiography, prior to your book, had an outsized influence on American policy towards China, from essentially World War II. If not through today, at least through the era of trying to bring China into the World Trade Organization

and get it to open up economically,

but I do want to delve a little bit more into your book first.

And I want to sort of just ask you, how it is that you came to write this? Because you're incredibly well known. The way I first came across you was of incredibly well-received trilogy on the Revolutionslash Civil War

and the two most apocalyptic events that came after it, the famine, and the cultural revolution. And then you wrote a book about the after effects of Mao's death. But this time you backpedal and go back in time.

And I'm curious why you decided to do that now, rather than continuing this story forward? Yes, there's an intellectual reason. But most of all, there was a sheer pragmatic reason. And so if you work as a historian, I think it's good to bear in mind

that you must be pragmatic. In particular, when you work on difficult countries like China,

never mind North Korea or Russia for that matter,

“in the sense that you must have access to good resources”

or to answer whatever great ideas you may have. You have a great idea, but you can't find the evidence. You cannot have an evidence-based approach. And I think that is actually one of the key issues of history,ography, about China.

That country has been closed. Was closed for decades after 1949. And so many historians were attracted to theories and ideas rather than to facts and evidence, because so little of it was available.

So what was the idea? Well, it occurred to me, this may come as a surprise, because it's a pretty straightforward sort of observation. But it occurred to me that if in China from 58 to 62, quite literally tens of millions of people

were starved neglected, sometimes beaten to death, with an economy that was an absolute catastrophe during the greatly forward, 58, 62. But it occurred to me if these people couldn't run an economy as the 1949.

And the chances were that they couldn't do that before 1949. So others thought, what did they actually do, as opposed to what did they think? Because so much of the historical fees is about what they were thinking. But what the policies are, as opposed to what they actually did.

That was number one.

So the idea came during COVID. There was an in Hong Kong.

“Of course, I wanted to cross the border, but it all closed down.”

Couldn't cross that border, stuck in in Hong Kong for over a year, really. And it occurred to me that there were in the library, books that had been smuggled across the border, that had been printed on Beijing in the 1980s,

for internal consumption only. Or in China, it's called "Nable." It means that they were not printed to be sold, to be put in libraries for the greater public. They were really for the eyes of top officials,

only printed in very limited numbers. And these volumes really were collections of archives that had been compiled by the central archives in Beijing and collaboration with provincial archives. So in short, but we're about 250 to 300 volumes,

“which assembled every scrap, every ever written by any communist,”

from roughly the early 1920s to roughly 1940, '89s. And enormous amount of material. I can't say I read all of it. I had students work with me on it. And that really constituted the sort of foundation for it.

And I thought, with that material, plus of course, other material, from the French archives, from the KMT, the gourmet down, the central government that went to to Taiwan after 1949, there was enough that to really

start looking at it from a much more critical angle.

So the trick was to find enough evidence to really tackle a fairy tale. This is interesting. You mentioned, Hitler, you mentioned Stalin and Lenin, you mentioned Mussolini, or I apologize.

You did mention Stalin, you mentioned Lenin only. But you did mention Mussolini and some of the authoritarian movements that were roughly contemporaneous, if not a little bit before Europe. And it brings up in almost pop culture puzzle to be.

I have a lot of friends whose families emigrated from the mainland, or went to Taiwan and then the United States, largely because of events like the cultural revolution. In other words, they were what we would today describe as political refugees. And even they who have, if not firsthand,

familial knowledge of the suffering and violence that occurred under Mao, still treat Mao as almost this kitchie figure. And I'm not immune to it either. I remember when I first started working the Chinese problem set with the FBI, I took great pride in this cigarette lighter somebody

had given me that had Mao emblazoned on it. And when you opened it, it played in cheap electronic tones, the sun shines east. Now Mao is responsible for more deaths than Hitler. He's responsible for more deaths than Mussolini.

He's responsible for more deaths than Lenin and Stalin combined.

And we would never in a million years have images

of any of those individuals among our pocket litter, or our everyday carry tools. Why is it that among the general populace, among those who have not looked into archives, or had to deal with communist party policies, why does Mao get a pass

where other dictators do not?

“Yeah, I think this is an extraordinarily interesting question,”

and it's a very difficult one because we're talking really about the first of all human beings. I mean, why do people react like that when it comes to Mao? And then we're coming to two broad groups you mentioned. One is in the victims of the cultural revolution from China,

and then outside as. So when it comes to the victims, of course,

there's always the good old story that, you know, the emperor,

the king's good, his servants are wicked. That's an old tale, they're from the middle ages, you will find it everywhere. And with every dictator, it only Stalin knew. Now, if only Mr. Dini knew what kind of horrors are being perpetrated by his fascist followers on the ground.

Yeah, I think it actually starts with Zara Alexander, and the trope is, if only the Zara knew how his surfs were being treated by the landowners, this would never go on. Yes, of course, a powerful universal myth that the man at the very top is simply doesn't know.

And you hear this quite a lot, the chairman simply didn't realize what was happening.

sophisticated information system.

And he initiated, most of it.

“But the other point really is why, nonetheless,”

Mao abroad, among people who should not better, gets a pass. Now, to be fair to the other dictators, China is a big country. So the base, you know, we're talking really about a country that is the size of Europe.

It's an absolutely massive country. So if you merely mess with about five percent, that is a great number of people, that's a great number of people. And also to be fair, I have seen, once, in my 20 years in the Hong Kong, I did see what looked to me like a local chap,

“walk around with a Hitler t-shirt, but there's only happened once.”

So I can't say that it's something one does see very often. But as you pointed out, the plenty of Mao paraphernalia and t-shirts and caps and what have you not. But a reason to be well-known academics in Europe and possibly even the United States, who do Chinese studies, and who will appear to speak in public,

in what is roughly referred to as the, you know, the Mao jackets. So why? I think it boils down, at least as far as Europe and the United States is concerned. I think it boils down to something reasonably straightforward. And that is that so many others find it difficult to believe that Chinese communism is communism.

But Chinese communism is communism. The idea of Chinese communism is not really communism. That's the idea, it's something else that really Democrats waiting to emerge. That agrarian reformers, people who are concerned about the wealth of the majority, that are those who really wish to tackle bureaucracy or nail liberalism or capitalism or whatever evils we think they might exist. So that the other side of the world

and they provide a powerful alternative to what it is that we do not like.

“So I think that's actually one of the key issues.”

So it's a mistake that a great many of us make, not least of course leaders of a variety of countries, not listed United States of America. As you know, and I point this out in the book, during the Second World War, Americans began to believe that the communist Stalin was the one who told them in the first place. You'll remember I mentioned the communist international Stalin that abolished it in 1943 to make sure that the communist parties elsewhere did not

look like mere puppets installed by Moscow. He told those parties, you must look genuine. And he told the Americans, they are margarine communists, margarine communists, he laughed them of is that these are not real communists. I've nothing to do with us. The Americans bought it and portrayed them as agrarian reformers. People who really should be integrated, included in any government that China wanted to have after the end of the

Second World War 1945. Now of course with the Civil War, once the flag goes up, the red flag

goes up, or the Americans have to fight them in Korea. Still they didn't learn the lesson, Kissinger Nixon, a rapprochmal with China in 1972. Kissinger comes up with the idea that somehow the Chinese communists are not really communists. They are confusion. There's a confusion past. Confucius, the great ancient sage is the one who really guides the way they think that culture society, et cetera, et cetera. Well, we know where that led. And then it goes on and on.

It was the same with Bush after the Tiananmen massacre on the 4th of June 1989. And of course Bill Clinton and so many others who told us that if only China could become a member of the WTO, then they would become responsible, stake holders, participants in the international, although with economic reform, gradually the democratic reform would also emerge. They would become participants in the much greater liberal war, while that didn't quite work out, did it.

Nah, no plans for such a ending. Besuch the red-capciona-leadness world in February, with Euron Mellitz, Dürr Omer, or in the Canal, the Typen von Neben, an Indian-alloy-yagginger. Indeed, our interactive exhibition with the elite tour with audio guide and a classic, and not the Parve Young, the whole world of red-capcion,

Now, in this point, the E-slash recruiting. I'm Theresa and my experiences with all entrepreneurs started a shopping trip.

I'll tell you when the shopping trip is already the first day, and the platform will make a no-problem.

I have a lot of problems, but the platform is no longer a step away. I have the feeling that shopping trip is completely optimized, everything is super simple, integrated and balanced, and the time and the money that I can't invest in there. For Adam in Vax toum, yet the cost of those tests, I'll shop if I point to the E. You hit the nail on the head, there is this very pen glossy and strain of viewing China as your

“democracy in waiting, or as a liberal socialist republic in waiting, that I think,”

I don't think I'm being inappropriate by saying this, it infects American policy from the earliest days forward, and it's interesting because I read your books, I think as they were coming out, I forget what year the tragedy of liberation was published, but before it I had read Barbara Talkman's still well, and the American experience in China, I had read E.J. Kahn's The China Hands, which deals very much with John service.

And you talk a lot, or no, but considerable ink is expended on both general Joseph Stilwell and the Foreign Service Officer John service, and earlier portrayals of them were very lotatory for the most part. They were viewed almost in this orientalist fashion as sort of latter day Richard Burton's who had gone to this foreign land and been able to pierce the veil and really understand this foreign society, which was now of importance to the United States,

and they were harshly defamed by anti-communist crusaders, later on in their lives,

“and the way they were treated was a tragedy. But I think we can now, with the archival”

work that we have in large part due to scholars like yourself, say that the way they were treated later may have been inappropriate, but the best that can be said about them is that they were wholly naive in dealing with the early Chinese communists, if not in one of their cases in outright co-opty.

Yeah, I'll start with John service, because the interesting thing is that I'm not the first

one to write about them, I should say that. I'm probably the first one to write about a number of aspects of the rise if that's the term of communism in China, but our books that have been written about aspects of these two, but the interesting thing is that I do mention in the book, something I haven't seen elsewhere, Jonathan Mercky was a great journalist, actually formed John service when he was in a retirement home, and actually John service wanted to get something

office chess before he died, he died a few years later. And when I asked whether he had betrayed the central government, the KMT on the Chancash, I could say, yes, he had actually given the order of battle to a spy linked to Richard Sorge and the whole, the whole Moscow spy network. So yes,

“that was not being merely naive, that was really trading in secret, right?”

And then when it comes to stillwell, the interesting thing is that if you actually read his

early reports, because we'll always talk about stillwell from roughly 40, 41, 42, 43 onwards,

but he was there during the late 30s as a military attache and his reports, although the tone is somewhat peculiar, he has his own particular cynical way of looking at a China, which later on becomes straightforward, I think, pretty much racist towards Chancash. But nonetheless, what I'm trying to say is that he was a pretty astute observer, and he himself says in 1936 that Chancash,

Republic of China without violence that had never been realized before. So he's actually quite, quite

complementary in 1936, of course, the tone changes a few years later. But in a nutshell, both are

“convinced that Chancash and the Republic of China, free China, that's what is called as an”

internationally recognized government that represents hundreds of millions, is basically rotten to the core, and the communists who neither of them have actually seen or visited, because they are in Yanan, the communist capital in North East, which is pretty much closed until about 43 when the first American start arriving, very carefully selected Americans. So they're free to visit free China and criticise it as they wish, although on the other hand,

they've never said foot in Yanan, yet praise it, praise it to the sky. So once the American

start arriving, carefully selected journalists from 43-44 onwards, what they are shown is, of course, the showcase, as in any communist regime, Bernard Shaw, the playwright, of course, went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and as a playwright, did not quite realize that what was put up for him, was a great play by Stalin, it was the same with Yanan, that means model schools, model farms, and model prisoners, model farmers, you know, who sing songs and appear to be happy,

it's just one giant show. So some of the archives go into great detail that they'll tell you, but some of the propaganda team will go back and and tell off farmers who fail to look up and greet the Americans as they drive past in a bus on the way to Yanan, and they go so fast to say up, this village locked up dogs, and that makes it look unnatural. So everything is scripted in great detail. Yet the most interesting thing is that behind that facade, from 1942

to roughly 43-44, extraordinarily violent purges took place in that very same place, with some 15,000, if not more people who have to go through to wringer, you know, tortured, occasionally purged some of them shot or disposed of in, in, in, in another way, it's a very

“vine and purges from which mal really emerges as, as the key central leader. So a great contrast between”

public image presented to outsiders and the end of workings of the party. So I guess this is a more philosophical question, but it's one that we have often applied to other nations that have gone down a sort of tyrannical path. AJP Taylor did it famously with Germany when he wrote the course of German history in which he argues essentially the road to Hitler and the Holocaust begins with Otto von Bismarck's Wars of German Unification. It is a very wiggish interpretation

of history, but it does make me ask, given how mal started, and given the tenor in tone of the communist parties early takeover. Do you think the excesses is too regal word? Do you think the tragedies and the terrors of the cultural revolution and the great famine and even the depredations under the gang of four later, are these to a certain extent baked in to how the communist party originally

“takes power? Are these inevitable or is there an off ramp at some point that gets missed?”

It's, I was an incredibly difficult question. First, I want to really point out something I said

early on. I want to re-emphasize it. There's very little in the 1920s and 30s in China, there's very little appeal of communism in China. Let me put it that way. But the far greater people in any European country who find communism, interesting than in China. So it is a minor philosophy. It's a minor political movement. Had it not been for the Japanese

and subsequently the arrival of one million soldiers sent by Stalin, who crossed the border into

Manchuria in 1945. Had it not been for those two, 37-45, communism would never have had any

appeal at all. So it's really minor. So that's point number one. But the broader question,

“really is about the sort of DNA. Is there something in the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party?”

I would say there's something in the DNA of any philosophy that wishes to have, or to pursue, or to maintain a monopoly of power. I'd go a bit further. I would say you could really subdivide the history of humanity of the last two, three centuries into two trends. Those who

against all odds believe that power must be restrained, that there must be a separation of powers.

It starts, of course, with the French philosopher Montesquieu, if not before, with checks and balances and freedom of expression and opposition parties, and you name it, you familiar with it. And those who believe that that system is item manipulated, or is weak, or will not work, that there must be a monopoly of a power. So these are antagonistic philosophies, and they are the two philosophies that play out throughout the 19th and 20th century,

in fact, two days, very day. In other words, democracy versus dictatorship. Now, once you have a monopoly of a power, without much constraint, is inevitable that there would be great abuses. I mean, the greater the power, the greater the use. So to that extent, yes, it is very much part of the DNA of any communist party. But then, of course, it varies enormously. The number of people who today are put to death in the people's Republic of China, and, of course, nothing compared

to the 1980s, which was nothing compared to the 1960s, et cetera, et cetera. So communist parties

“do change over time. I think what you do see overall is that threshold of tolerance do change”

over time, that even communists can no longer get away with what they were doing, say, 20 years ago, 40 years ago, or 60 years ago. So in that sense, of course, one point is do change. But then again, there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee. And it's interesting because the tension you talk about between democracies and dictatorships, it's not just between different political tribes. We see it play out in miniature within individual intellectual movements. And I'm going to talk about France

for a second, but I promise it is to set up a question about China. The dichotomy you were describing

made me instantly think about the sort of intellectual fuselage between Jean Paul Sart and Albert Camus, where Sart is, I don't think I'm overstating the case to call him a Marxist or even a Stalinist opologist, whereas Camus, particularly in the rebel, takes a much more humanistic view to push back against that and it ends up destroying their friendship. And we see a, I'm also like a Kabuki version of this. I know I'm mixing Asian countries. But we see a play acting version of

this in the period after your book concludes, where Joe and Li is sort of popularly thought to be a moderating force on Mao. And we know now that that probably was not true. But at least within China, there is this myth that there were individuals within the communist party who tried to push back and temper the more aggressive dictatorial impulses of Mao.

“And I said, I think that's a myth to a large extent. And my question is, is there anybody within the”

communist party for whom it's not a myth? Do they ever produce somebody like France produced in Camus or Ramon Iran who is part of the culture but uncomfortable in willing to push back against it? Yes. Well, the simple answer is of course I'm a great admirer of Camus and they more

I never mind see him on the blue ground. But the key points, of course, they were, they were

free to express their opinions in France. Whereas in China after 491 is not free to express one's opinions. There were other opposition that may have been would have been underground. They fit within the ranks of the party as you pointed out was this idea somehow that Joe and Li pushed back. And occasionally he did. But he was just as ruthless as many others. It's just that he pursued very different goals. So he's well known in the 1920s and

30s. So having ordered the execution not only of Communist party members who betrayed the

cause but their entire families and relatives has happened with the master spy master Goucher in

“drunk when he was apprehended in Shanghai in the early 1930s. So I think a dozen family members”

were buried face down which is not exactly something that is seen as respectful of a body in Chinese culture. Joe and Li during the cultural revolution had his own sort of witch hunt against anyone who would criticize him in the past and they all used the cultural revolution to get rid of

the real or imaginary enemies. But the point really must be that when you read through the archives

what is so extraordinarily interesting is that there are so many just ordinary people who despite the odds, despite the tyranny, despite the purges, despite the fear, despite the the terror, the knock on the door in the middle of the night are just so stubborn, so stubborn, this refused to let go to the extent that sometimes you despair, you think, why, why are they as a woman who studies German culture during the cultural revolution and she writes to Mao to say

that all these red guards who come to parade in front of him on Tiananmen Square that it

“reminds her of the Nazi parades under Adolf Hitler. That's what she writes. An extraordinarily”

courageous and she must have known that when she sent that letter off, she would end up in prison as of course she does. There's so many ordinary individuals like that. It's quite extraordinary. The question really is, are there any who managed to go all the way to the top so to speak? People who might keep their cards very close to their chest and somehow see what the issues are and try to put for a sort of more humane communism if there's such a thing.

I think they do exist, they're very rare, but the Hoover institution has the diary of an extraordinary man called Leré, who really joined the cause at a very early stage. And when all the way 49 on was all the way through the Republic of the people's Republic became a secretary of Mao was purged in 1959 for speaking out against the famine. It was rehabilitated some 20 years later when quite high up in the state organization, but nonetheless captors absolute faith that somehow

there had to be separation of powers. But you can find a few individuals who realize that a monopoly of a power is the root cause of all these issues that appear time and again, and he's one of the few who really, really sees it. But of course he doesn't go all the way to the top.

“He's silenced again, but they do exist, they do exist. I think the danger really is that so often”

within communist systems, the people within these dictatorships and observers outside occasionally tend to believe that the next leader will be more humane. It's the next one will be great. Here is Mao, the moment he died, well, then Xiaoping will be our savior until he sends in some 200 tanks and a hundred thousand soldiers to crush an arm civilians and Beijing in 1918. Now, Jiang Zemin will be our savior, or I remember teaching Pin coming to Hong Kong before 2012.

Yeah, I will confess my view of Marxism in practice to put it politely is skeptical.

And it's interesting, you talk about how communism never really takes hold as a mass movement

per se in China. And it's interesting because if you actually, and I realize we're getting a bit far afield of China here, but if you actually look at the nations that do have communist revolutions, none of them are the ones either in name or in characteristic that were originally predicted by Marxian analysis as where it would take place. None of them are industrialized, none of them at mass labor movements. Most of them are very poor agrarian, or if not agrarian society,

societies where a large portion of the population is not living a mechanized lifestyle.

“And I think that's what's so interesting to me and why I'm fascinated by the period covered by”

your book is, if you had told somebody when Marx first started publishing his works, take your pick whether we're talking about the manifesto or his works with angles, capital, if you had predicted at the end of the 19th century, or even a little bit earlier, that the longest lasting communist regime would be in China. People would look at you like you were insane. Yeah, that's, it's very true, not only that, but of course, with all due respect to

the populations involved, I somehow doubt that after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or the conquest of power by the commons in China in '49, or under Paul Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the majority of the population were really interested in following the

“tenets of dialectical materialism. No, I think they were largely interested in staying off the radar”

and avoiding attention of those who had taken power. The point where these regimes invariably have to come up with something else, which is generally a cult of personality, which we saw very much happen with Mao, and we are very much seeing it now, I think, with Xi Jinping, to a degree we have not in the post-cultural revolution era. Absolutely, absolutely.

So there is, of course, always something about the leader since the leader represents the general

will, and must make, I mean, this is the irony of all communist parties that must be one person, ultimately, who makes the decisions for the greater good. And party discipline means that once that decision has been taken, all of us must follow. But nonetheless, the cult of personality under Mao is cox, something quite extraordinary, and has reappeared with Xi Jinping, is absolutely no doubt

“about it, who would, great extent, I think the China today is something that is looking”

forwards, if I may phrase it like this, this may sound rather paradoxical, but it's looking or to North Korea, and Xi's North Korea is a sort of model, but North Korea being a much smaller, much easier to control. North Korea, and the economy that works better. So we've talked about Xi Jinping, we've talked about Mao, we've talked about Joe and Li, and these are names that are familiar to most people. For our last topic of discussion,

I want to point out that your book contains an enormous cast of characters, many of whom are not well-known, to not just popular audiences, but even people like myself who worked in the world of psychology, not as historians as practitioners of other things, but there were dozens upon dozens of names with which I was not previously familiar, and I wanted to just ask and closing, "Who do you think are the really underrated players in this saga that

deserve more attention from future generations of historians?"

Oh, that's a really difficult question, so first I apologize because I always tried to keep the

try to boil it down to, you know, I meant my statement is a compliment, not a criticism.

I realized that I realized it's not a criticism, but nonetheless there were so many more names that I didn't mention that I tried to keep some sort of, you know, check on the number of names that I mentioned, but the point really is that with the sort of standard history that we have had to read about China and Mao, Mao's a central figure, Mao appears out of nowhere,

“he's the key figure, and of course all the other sort of minor people in that.”

For one name, who is reasonably well-known, but not an assuddin' is punk pie, so punk pie is the one who, well before Mao, we're talking about 1927 to 20a, establishes a Soviet along the coast north of Hong Kong, not too far away from here, and really has an absolutely ferocious reign of terror in which he really forces local people to take stabs, quite literally, with a knife, at people the analysis class enemies, where he points out time and again, it is better to kill 100,

100 innocence, than have a reactionary survive, where he points out that if we don't kill them, they will kill us, it's a sort of extraordinary red rain, drenched in blood, but it really,

“if you don't understand that, then I think it's very difficult to understand the rest of communism”

in China, but then there are so many other characters in there. I would say my reaction would actually be the Russians, and not just the Russians, I'm Dutch, but when I mentioned the the foundation

of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, it would never have happened without an envoy sent by

Lenin called Hank Snavelite in 1921, so this man was, was Dutch, come and turn agent, had experienced some of organizing workers and strikers in Indonesia, and he was the one who managed to get 12 quite can tankerist members who couldn't agree on anything into a room to establish the communist party of China, and these 12 people represented some 50 odd other people strewn throughout this huge country, so Hank Snavelite and of course Mikhail Borodin, who is the man who against all odds,

commands a major army about a quarter of a million people by 1926, and rules of a vast

process of China that a Soviet could have gone that far as quite extraordinary, so we tend to underestimate the rule that the Soviets have played, and that of course is also the history of communism, without Lenin and Stalin, there would not have been a mal, but of course the Chinese are very keen to raise them from history, but in turn Mao helps Kimmel Song in North Korea, not to mention Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam, but the Vietnamese to test Chinese, very keen not to mention

this help at all, and on and on it goes, not to mention the disputes between the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, Paul Thorne. So the Soviets played an absolutely huge role, and to me, the key person

“who has been extremely well studied, but appears on, I think, no less than 68 pages in this book,”

is Stalin, it is Stalin who makes so many of the major decisions, who so often comes to rescue the communist party, when it is on the verge of just vanishing into nothing, nothingness, in 1936 at the end of the long march, it is Stalin who says stop fighting Chankeshak and the central government, create a united front and fight those that everyone in China is dying to fight namely to Japanese, and it still takes six months for the penny could drop for Mao to think, oh that's actually

a good idea, but this is a country that is keen to fight Japan, yet all the communist can do is go on about the fascism of Chankeshak and how the central government is propped up by imperialist powers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, without any sort of popular resonance whatsoever, it is Stalin who comes up with a united front, it is Stalin who tells Mao by the end of 1938-39

1943 tells Mao to testify, your Marxism, we have abolished the communist international,

“you must adapt your communist party to local conditions, that is Stalin who does that, and it's”

interesting because this isn't just a lacuna in Chinese history, if you look at the major biographies of Stalin, whether Robert Conquest, Simon C. Bagh Montefory, this is not a relationship that

gets many pages, we'll see if Stephen Koch can corrects it in his forthcoming third volume on

“Stalin, but perhaps that's a good place to leave it today, before we weighed too much into Soviet”

history at the expense of Chinese. So, Professor DeKutter, thank you very much for joining us today, this has been an incredibly illuminating conversation, and I look forward to whatever archival research of yours comes next. Thank you!

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