EPISODE 352： THE CHINA FILES - CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
126.64447
Summary
After 1949, Mao Zedong was the dictator of the entire country, the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party. The man who, with a single word, could order executions, and took young girls as young as 13 and 14 to be brought up to his inner chambers.
Transcript
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Welcome to the first part, The China Files Part 2, Chaos Under Heaven.
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In part one, we talked all about the decline and fall of the Qing Dynasty, the last empire
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We talked about World War II, and we talked about the Chinese Civil War, as well as the
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rise of Chairman Mao himself, Mao Zedong, going from the son of a peasant farmer to
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go on and become the most brutal revolutionary leader the world had ever seen.
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But after 1949, Chairman Mao was now the dictator of the entire country, the undisputed leader
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The man who, with a single word, could order executions, could order young girls taken
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to him, which he did many, many times, some as young as 13 and 14, to be brought up to
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his inner chambers, massive bed that he used to use.
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But the first thing that he began to do with that power was something called the agricultural
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Well, the agricultural reforms, and possibly in a response to his father, in a response
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to the way that he talked about his father brutally treating him, brutally beating him
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and his brothers, the Chinese Communist Party went into every single peasant village, and
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If you owned land, that land was taken for you.
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Landlords, landowners, were shunned, publicly mocked, in some cases, brutally executed by the
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Millions of people died in this exercise, in this activity.
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These were called legitimate grievances against the landowners.
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Mao himself actually described it as this, in 1950.
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Land reform in a population of over 300 million people is a vicious war.
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It is more arduous, more complex, more troublesome than crossing the Yangtze River, because our
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This is the most hideous class war between peasants and landlords.
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It's hard to tell how many landlords were actually systemically murdered by the Chinese Communist
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But it wasn't just landlords that were targeted.
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Mao soon realized that factory owners, factory managers, and academics all caused problems for him.
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Because Mao came up with something called the Baihua Ying Dong, the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
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And at one point in 1956, Chairman Mao encouraged intellectuals, academics, writers.
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Tell us the truth of what you believe our country has been up to since the founding of the People's
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Well, it shouldn't begin to be very hard to tell you what happened to all those people.
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Because every single person who spoke out against Chairman Mao was locked up, discredited.
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Many of which were pushed to suicide or persecuted to the point where they decided to take their own
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lives rather than live through continued persecution at the hands of the authorities and at the hands
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Hundreds of thousands of leaders, leading intellectuals, professors,
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were targeted in what was called, and you're going to love this, it was called the anti-right-wing
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Because any criticism of the party was seen as right-wing extremism.
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And you're going to hear that phrase over and over as we talk more about this.
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Because right-wing extremism, according to Chairman Mao, was the enemy of the revolution.
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And anyone who opposed him was a right-wing extremist.
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In fact, the historian Jun Chang wrote, it was a year before the intellectuals gained courage
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But in terms of the education system, there were bitter complaints about copying the Soviet
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Union, the fact that Marxist-Leminism was held up as orthodox doctrine to be accepted
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without question, wider social criticism focused on the authoritarian role, and various abuses
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Because the new elites were simply the people that Mao put into power.
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And for every person who came out, they were criticized, they were persecuted, many of whom
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They said, if you don't understand the importance of the peasantry, you must be sent down.
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These intellectuals were sent to work on farms themselves as indentured servants and slaves.
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It wasn't as intense as it would later become during the Cultural Revolution.
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You didn't yet have the mass killings of priests and nuns, the rapes.
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But during this period, the Chinese Communist Party, like all Communist Parties, understood
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that only one ideology could be allowed to operate.
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And so any church that remained in China, any individual congregation, had to be forced.
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The priests themselves had to swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party.
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And if they were a foreigner, be deported from the country or even worse.
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Because in a communist revolution, they always come for the priests first.
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Because for communism to take hold and take root, there cannot be any higher power than the party,
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And they appoint themselves and the revolution, the new morality.
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Because as we're going to learn, the revolution never ends.
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As the 10-year mark of the People's Republic was rapidly approaching, Mao became impatient.
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Mao was upset because utopia had not yet been reached.
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Millions more had been taken out of their positions of power and sent to serve as peasants.
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The peasants, then, had been placed in charge of the farms, in charge of the factories, in charge of industrial output.
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Mao then decided that industrial manufacturing and agricultural growth needed to move, quote,
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And so, Mao came up with a new policy, a new plan, that he called the Great Leap Forward.
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The first was to industrialize the society, industrialize the economy in order to catch up with the West.
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The second was to transform China into a collectivized society, where full socialism would be achieved.
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This was done through collective communes, where those massive farms that we talked about earlier would no longer be owned by any one individual.
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Where you wouldn't even live in your own home anymore.
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No, you'd be served food at cafeterias and canteens.
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You'd be given the ability to have a collective meal.
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You would have collective work, collective education, collective life.
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You would live at the beck and call of the state.
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By the Great Leap Forward, this was announced by Mao.
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Mao said, we need to follow a different path than the Soviet Union.
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We need to figure out a way to organize all peasant labor, eliminate waste, inefficiency.
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And of course, Mao realized that the only one to be able to direct all of this, of course, would be Chairman Mao himself.
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Communism is paradise, and the people's communes are the way to get there.
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Land, farm buildings, tools, livestock, all of it was confiscated by the government, even private homes.
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Philip Short, who was a historian, wrote, officially, everyone was supposed to have at least six hours sleep every day.
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But some brigades boasted of working up to four or five days without stopping.
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And Mao said, we need to find ways to make more.
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China has to make more steel and make it faster.
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So Mao decided to come up with a new policy called backyard furnaces because we needed to take the old iron.
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Well, the Soviet Union had their massive smelteries.
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In China, they decided to have backyard furnaces.
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So all farmers and anyone in China who owned iron, you were then ordered by Chairman Mao to go into your backyard with your hammers, your sights, your equipment.
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And to smelt all of it down in your backyard furnaces.
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Even household implements, cooking utensils, ladles, pots, woks, pans, everything smelted down.
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Now, did this lead to a new birth of a bountiful harvest for China?
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Did these massive communist policies lead to the greatest export and bountiful harvest that we've ever seen in the world?
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Because unfortunately for us, the same way that this was tried under Trofim Lysenko, the founder of Lysenkoism, complete pseudoscience in the Soviet Union.
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This led to the greatest mass humanitarian crisis in world history.
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Some estimates say it was as high as 47 million.
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There's an incredible book called Hungry Ghosts that I urge you to read, but I don't urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
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Excuse me, I do urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
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Because it shows the abject horror that the people of China, the Lao Baixing, had to live through under the Great Leap Forward.
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Even today, they call it the Three Years of Famine.
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Though, of course, in official propaganda, they say it was due to natural disasters.
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That peasants were eating things like sawdust, leather, seeds, animal manure.
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In Sichuan province, there were reports of peasants eating soil itself.
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And there was something else that spread throughout China that began to rear its head.
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If this flesh can be a way for us to live, then why shouldn't we?
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Sometimes, and there are reports of this happening to families eating their own family members.
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In some cases, there are even stories of parents killing their own children.
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All of this in Chairman Mao's quest for a communist utopia.
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His quest to make everything equal under heaven.
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His quest to right the wrongs of a capitalist, right-wing, imperialist society.