and my father spoke up against Mouse policies he was arrested tortured driven inane and my mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father she refused and my mother was made to KNE on broken glass um she was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and
threw stones at her the desire to write never left me so in the following years when I was working as a peasant and as a Barefoot doctor as a steel worker and the electrician I was always writing in my head with an imaginary pen today I
have the pleasure of interviewing Yung Chang her first book Wild Swans has sold over 15 million copies worldwide the US Diplomat George Kennan described the Gula Caro pelo he said this is the greatest and most powerful single
indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in Modern Times And when I read that quote I realized this is exactly how I describe your books um Wild Swans obviously but also your biography of Mao titled Mao the unknown story both of which we'll talk about
today um it is a true honor to speak with you thank you very much for having me so we will get it to Ma and his atrocities in a second but let us Begin by would you mind laying the scene for us what was it like you grew up under in China under m
let's begin there what was it like as you as you started to grow up during this time I was born in China in sichan in 1952 so I grew up under mou um when I was a child I led quite privileged life because both my parents were communist
officials and we lived in this compound with um um you know servants CS drivers it was very class-ridden society and I grew up so much taking um class and privilege for granted that when I first came to Britain I thought Britain was wonderfully classless and my of course
My Views were slightly modified over the years um and then in 1966 when I was 14 ma launched his culture Revolution which was his Great Purge and my father spoke up against Mouse policies um so as a result he was arrested tortured driven
insane he was exiled to a camp and died um tragically prematurely and my mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father she refused as a result she went through over 100 100 of these Gastly denunciation meetings which
were everyday features in China at the time and basically the victims were put on the stage and their arms were ferociously Twisted to the back and their heads were pushed down and they were kicked and beaten and my mother was made once made to new on broken glass um
she was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and threw stones at her um but she survived and today she still lives in changu age 92 my family was scattered and I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas and worked as a peasant and then as a
Barefoot doctor which was a doctor basically without any training because ma had said the more books you read the more stupid you become so schools were closed you know books were burned um I mean China was literally a cultural desert without books cinemas theaters
museums for 10 years um and um then I became an electrician and again there was no training so I had five electric shops in one month um and then in 1973 partly you know after Nixon's visit to China I mean but more more also because for the internal political
reasons and universities began to reopen and I was able to get into such one University to learn English uh but you know our teachers had never seen foreigners themselves because China had been closed to the outside world after the Communists took power in
1949 so our textbooks were written by these teachers um who' never been abroad I remember the first lesson was Long Live chairman Ma and the second lesson was greetings um because the Chinese in those years when we bumped into each other and we
said which means where are you going have you eaten so those were the English greetings I learned so when I first came to London I used to go around and ask people where they were going whether they had eaten um well the only foreigners I had
um spoken to were some Sailors in the port in South China where we as English language students were sent to practice our English so um and that was when I was 23 um but um I of course we we we were at the Port eagerly waiting for our Sailors and we had no idea what must be
on their minds how different this must be from their expectation of a port life in 1976 ma died and China began to change and in 1978 um I there was a national exam to to select the people to go abroad for the first time under communist rule
going abroad was based on on the academic basis and so I did very well at the exam so so I became one of the first 14 people to come to Britain and I as far as I know I was the first person to get out of such one Province a province then of 90 million
people to come and study in the west so when I got my doctorate in linguistics at the University of York in 1982 um I became the first person from communist China ever to get a doctorate from a British University so okay so I was um in
Britain and for 10 years I didn't want to think about the past um because it was too painful and my my father died my grandmother who brought us up and died and uh there was too you know I just I just wanted to spend time enjoying the West um I had actually
always wanted to be a writer um when I was a child I loved writing um but when when I was growing up on the M it was impossible um to dream of even become a writer because nearly all writers were condemned you the sent to the gulag and
driven to Suicide some were even executed and even right for oneself was dangerous um I wrote my first poem when I was 16 only the 16th birthday in 1978 U I was lying in bed publishing my poem when I heard the door banging and
some Red Gods had come to raid our flat and if they had seen my poem I would get into trouble and my family would get into trouble so I had to quickly Rush to the bathroom to tear up my poem and flush it down the toilet and so that ended my first Venture in
writing but the desire to write never left me so in the following years when I was working as a peasant and as a Barefoot doctor as a Ste worker and the electrician and when I was spreading manure on the Patty Fields I and um um
checking electricity supplies on top of the electricity post I was always writing in my head with an imaginary pen and but I couldn't write in China when I came to Britain I for 10 years I didn't want to write and then my mother came to stay with me in
1988 and first time she told me the stories of um of her life and stories of my grandmother and now while I was listening to my mother um I thought I I must write all this down and then I realized how much I wanted to be a writer and how much I had always wanted
to be a writer and so um I when after my mother left I transcribed the tapes she left for me 60 hours of tape recordings and then I wrote wild swangs um which was published in 1991 first um and I became a writer yes and um I mean that saying you became a
writer is understating it the the global impact of Wild Swans has been um tremendous and in fact I you know I um a former guest of mine uh Sarah Payne recommended it to me and I read it and it's it's the most moving book I've ever
read it's it's truly tremendous let me Begin by asking what what it was like growing up there in terms of the psychology of living in a totalitarian system you mentioned in the book that until very late you could not even bring yourself to question ma despite seeing
the consequences of his policies and the cult of personality that was there um tell me about the psychology of living in a system like that well when I was growing up in China um and you know we were all subject to intense brain washing and
indoctrination uh when we were children ma was we were told you know Ma sorry ma was like our God and if we wanted to say what I say is true we would say I swear to Chairman Ma so ma was ma had been given this Godlike status um so and also at the same time
we could see um how how dangerous it was to question Ma you know this in China there were these periodical political campaigns and many people were victimized and the biggest crime was to question ma um and my father in the cultureal revolution suffered
tremendously um and it was also because he s questioning the m so when I wrote my poem when I 16 years old I I already um started to doubt and to dread the society I was in and we were always told you know socialist China was Paradise on
Earth and I I thought on that day actually um if this is Paradise what then is hell because my parents were away being detained um um my grandmother was weeping next door because she's heard you know these Gastly things that
were being done to my mother um so I questioned the society but M never entered my mind and he was beyond questioning you this may be difficult for people to to understand maybe I mean in the West um but in China in those days um there were two most important
things that enabled this brainwashing one is the complete isolation of the society from the outside world from alternative information and from any other information even a parents never told the children you know things that were
different from the party line because they were worried about the future of their children and they were worried that if children bled it would be disastrous for the children as well as for the family um so no alternative information and the other is Terror this
intense Terror um which you really scared the people into suppressing any unorth dogs thoughts um so I was living in that kind of society and it took me a long time to question ma um since my birthday 16th birthday thought in 19 8 68 um for many years I blamed what was
happening in China to Madam Ma and to the so-call gang of four which were basically a assistant of M um but I never D to question ma um and then I remember very well 1976 I had learned a little English and a friend showed me a copy of news week
and there was an article about Ma and there were two little pictures with a caption Madame ma is mouse eyes ears and mouth and suddenly you know Mouse name was spelled out for me and I suddenly realized of course it was Ma you know without
ma none of this could have happened and ma was responsible and you know I'm intelligent person but it took me eight years even from the moment I said to myself I dislike the society to the moment that I felt M was responsible you mentioned that your father uh was a
purged because of his criticism uh of the government at the time and in in fact your father story through the book is you know a sort of tragic tale that um but the uh what I found uh interesting was that the way he criticized a party was to go through the
official mechanism he wrote a letter to Mao which suggests that he even then still believed that sort of the mechanism of the party worked and then you you know it would be imag like somebody has a problem with North Korean
government today and he then writes a letter to Kim Jong-un you know which is obviously you're going to get uh in trouble for that so um tell me about how your father thought about that and in retrospect how should a high official
like your your father was the governor of uh sesan province which you said 90 million people wasn't a governor sorry my father was a governor of a region in initially and then by the time of the cultureal Revolution um the 1966 he was a head of a department oh I see
of the of the suchan party government whatever they were the same a high official a high official what what should he have done when he realized things were going well there was nothing one could do I mean if you try to say your spell out your
thoughts to other people you will be instantly denounced and instantly you know public executed I mean nobody was allowed to say anything against ma um my father and and theoretically in the charter of the Communist Party a party member had the right to write to the
leadership so my father was using that as as the kind of theoretically permitted way to voice his descent um so that's why he wrote to Ma and in any case all these things the atrocities the violence I mean only ma could stop them um so writing to ma was the was the only
way um was the only way he could express his opinion and of course he also said something you know in the context of the denunciation meetings but if they were not were outbursts at denunciation meetings rather than his wellth thought
out expression of descent so this is uh this is something I thought was um confusing when reading accounts about the cultural revolution is China is a society you you know they they've rebelled in the past they've rebelled against the Emperors they rebelled
against the Japanese Occupation they the nationalists were at one point in charge of lots part parts of China the Communist rebelled against them how was Mao able to instill a regime where that became Unthinkable uh despite the fact
that it was an incredibly chaotic and destabilizing time how did the Chinese which as you have a great sense of History how did they allow this to happen well that's a very good question that is the key of a communist Society of a totalitarian Society is the the
control the organization I mean neither the Emperors nor any other rulers under the Nationalist under Chang kek was China so thoroughly organized down to the Grassroots controlled by layers of party organizations um it was it was totally
thorough that's why the 20th century totalitarianism was very different from the previous authoritarianism I mean the key was the control is the this total control um of a society I mean the power highly concentrated at the very top the one
person the thing that's really interesting is Mao is obviously a person who doesn't understand economics and we'll talk about that greatly forward and the disastrous consequences it had because of his um complete ignorance uh when it CES to you know economics and
industry and things like that but what he did seem to have an incredible sense for and Stalin and other totalitarian leaders as well is the psychology of people and how to organize a society that has 800 million people how to organize it so that you know every
society has Petty sadistic uh arrogant uh and cowardly people and how to organize them so that they're elevated and you use them to your advantage so that there's no nook and cranny in the entire Society where a single person can be have a
dissenting Voice or even have an independent life maybe you can talk about the commune life and the way in which how how can you possibly have a society of 800 million people where each person is under such strict totalitarian control how how is that even possible
the thing is that in the cultural revolution for example ma use the young people and use the the bad things in their nature they're prone to violence did destructive you know sadistic I mean any society there were these people but
they were given license to indulge their bad instincts in the culture Revolution now this took place for a couple of years in the cultural revolution then Mal reigned them in You by using the Army and the red guards the
former red guards particularly the most militant most aggressive most sadistic and violent ones were dispersed and they were sent to the Villages sent to the mountains and mean the disobeyed the dis disobedient ones were condemned themselves and they
became the targets of the second round of purges so to speak and all the time ma made sure that the barrel of the gun was in his hand the army so he always needed this person to control the Army for him to make sure he could wreck
havoc and maintain control and he always used the limbo until 1970 uh limia was completely cynical um he would come to mous resue when there was a descent from M's other colleagues like during the famine and when Ma started the culture Revolution and until the day that he
fell out with ma um which was why ma was suddenly a bit lost because he lost his his the arm with which he controlled the Army and and that in so that's why in 1972 after limel died trying to flee to out of China and things suddenly became better
and then because the ma had to reely on another person to control the Army for him and this other person was D xaing and then suddenly the you universities began to reopen things were much better from 1972 yeah um and and by the this is a great instance of as soon as Mao dies
the gang ofor is rounded up and arrested and the cultural revolution stops so which goes to show you that this was Ma's doing this is also um an interesting example where you know you have these cases where whether it's Stalin in
Russia or ma in China where when the Tyrant dies you know the system automatically improves because nobody else is as crazy as that guy what does it show about if Kim Jong-un died would we should we expect a some sort of reversion to a more sane set of things
again and again we see tyrants die and things are not as bad as they used to be well I haven't studied North Korea so I don't know the in the workings of the regime I mean in that sort of a styl the society really so much depend depend
depends on one person I mean the Kim Dynasty they have AR ranged their kind of succession the the first king king song died and his son succeeded and the grandson then succeeded now it seems that the grandson it has begun to look into a succession
of him by grooming perhaps I don't know his daughter or someone close close to him I mean Stalin um didn't couldn't do that couldn't do the family dast Dynasty thing and I think partly because his children were not like the Kim children I mean
ma also I mean M basically he only car about how he could enjoy life while he was alive indulging his his desires which was mainly power um and he didn't care about um um what what what comes after him I mean he was completely material materialistic
you know in that philosophical way in that sort of way sorry for example when he was in Russia in Moscow he when he visited Lenin's tomb he said it's all very well you know we have visiting Lenin's tomb but Lenin can't feel anything he's dead so he doesn't matter
it means nothing to Lenny um so you know Ma when he died he didn't leave a well struct structured he didn't even sort of didn't even care about his own legacy well I I thought the entire purpose of the cultural revolution was that he was
concerned that because of the great Lea forward that his his legacy would be destroyed in the way that kusf denounced Stalin and therefore that that was the entire point of the cultural revolution was to protect his legacy um that may be a factor but the
main factor was Ma's policy that had led to the Great Famine of nearly you know around 40 million deaths of the people was so unpopular that his number two Lea Chi then spoke up against him again there was no way even for mes number two to
top of him and because basically the you know they under this Tyrant his colleagues couldn't get organized um to which was necessary to top of him they couldn't lay their hands on the Army which was controlled by limo so what DUI did was that in January
1962 um when Ma had wanted to continue his policy of exporting food in exchange for arms Industries to build in order for him to build a superpower so he could dominate the world and Li wanted to stop that and he used this occasion of a
party Congress to speak to the 7,000 party officials in that conference Hall and my father was in there I mean so they these part officials but you know spread over all over China they were the vast vast majority of them were against Mouse policies that had led to
the famine and um so they suddenly found Lei as their champion and so together they managed to stop Mouse policies which was how the famine was stopped from 1962 and Ma was Furious he he didn't like being thoed and being ambushed which he called the
Ambush this is why he launched the culture revolution in 1966 to punish Lei and the party officials um I mean so that's how this Great Purge took place for ma it was much less of uh um it was calculated because he wanted to have his way he
wanted to purge these people but there was also the gut feeling of Revenge and he want to revenge on his number two who died in the most appalling way in the culture Revolution so uh sorry if this question sounds naive but if you have somebody like Lu shiai and d jaing and
these other party officials who are seeing what is happening and in the case of Lui he was denounced before he was um before he was officially purged uh and removed from power right so there was a time when he knew he was going to be purged but he was still in
power it's confusing from the outside of why at that time you don't um if you can't control the Army because Lin B is going to control of it at at that point you don't I don't know try to tell the people what is actually happening go to
the people's daily and say here you got to publish this article about what is what M was actually like go to the all the Communist officials organize a coup why didn't that happen well it did happen in in the my biography there were I have
a couple of chapters um about Lei exactly what you were suggesting what he should have done I mean I mean but I'm going to expand it in my next book um basically Lei knew ma was going to purge him in 1962 after the Congress because he ambushed Ma and so he had started to
build his own power base first of all by stopping the famine making himself popular among the party officials because only they mattered the ordinary people were too far away from Power um and so new became very popular
in 1965 a few years later when Ma were try to purge Lui he found he couldn't do it Andi had been powerful enough to put up a resistance I mean there was a lot of um I mean then ma did this horse trading with limel and so limel spoke you know very forcefully
in support of ma um so there was all that going on and whyi was already sorry then now use the Red Gods to create such violence and Terror in China from 1966 to basically 19 for a few months before he even mentioned lei's name as you said but Lei was already under house
arrest u i mean it's just he didn't make it public so ma first for created this gigantic um upheaval in China um in order to in order to create the kind of Terror that people would only obey him not Lei not even the party but only him
and that's how he operated um so that's why in the cultural revolution his first victims were School teachers you know I was in the secondary school in China I saw how the teachers were being abused beaten up denounced driven to suicide
and so on when Ma actually didn't even dislike teachers and he said for example to Edgar snow that um he'd like to be known as a great teacher or whatever he was a school teacher in his Youth and he didn't even care he didn't care about
them and but he just used the because the teachers were the obvious Target to excite to arouse the the um the passion the violence the atrocities in the Young Red Gods um and so so that's how he he used them as a victim in order to Rouse the
victimizers which were the school children um that's how he he maneuvered he spent quite a few years um before he knew Shi was um before the atmosphere was ripe for him to be able to purge Li so maybe for a context it'll be helpful first to start talking about the Great
lead forward the number you gave was around 40 million people and this this becomes a statistic for people you just think oh 40 million people died whatever it's a number um I I want to make it concrete for people what it how much
tragedy and suffering is involved in just a single person dying for starvation can you talk about the monthlong agonizing process of what starvation is you see it happening to you your family your children your spouse your village uh and what peasant
life was like during during the Great Leap Forward well June the great deep forward my family was among the privileged so I personally didn't starve but there was a lot of starvation around us um for example I remember when I went to school I was um I was eight uh I was
8 n and when I went to school one one day I was munching a steamed bread and a a young lad a child a boy thought it over and snatched the bread from my mouth and I then he stuffed those into his mouth and disappeared and then afterwards I told
when I told my father my father was very sad and he sort of he touched my head and said you know you are very lucky you know other children are starving and another thing that happened their home was our our maid our domestic
help who come from a village and her family had been classified as a landlord which was one one of the categories of the desirables destined for discrimination um and um horrible treatment and um I remember very well one day she she after visit to her
family she came back and um she was weeping and remember we lived in this Courtyard and she had so much FL floods of tears that the frogs that were actually thriving in the courtyard were leaping up and down so that was in my memory as a child and my
grandmother with whom she was very close was sitting in the mosquito net and also crying and said the Communists are good except all these people are dead I mean so I I was because that this was so much against my indoctrination about the Communists
that's one of the few things I heard that made me really scared and um and then and before she her whole family died in fact before that her mother came to see her to report the news that her father and um the brothers or something had died and
her mother as soon as she came into the house she threw herself on the on the ground and C out to my mother and said you know thank you you know for having save my daughter otherwise you know they are she would have been dead I mean after soon after the mother went back
she died herself but when she came she was already like a skeleton you know as though any wind could blow her away it's just unter terrible and the one thing that made my father speak up during the culture Revolution which is only a few
years later was um he felt so guilty and he volunteered to go to stay in the village um and and then he saw these horrible things which I didn't see I mean he and and one day A man was sort of Walking On The Ridges of the paty fields um unsteadily and suddenly he
disappeared and my father rushed over and this man um had had died um it's just like that just my father just for his month of living in in the in the village he was he came back um very seriously famished and suffering from this illness called
animals which was because of lack of food um and um oh yes and I even my family and we all and we all drank this this little thing this little seed that fed on urine I remember we all had to collect urine we don't pour throw away our urine we
collect urine in order to grow this seed which was supposed to have a lot of um um vitamin or a lot of some some nutrition that could sustain people and I remember how revolting the taste was I mean we I didn't suffer much because my family put
all our food together and the adults were starving I knew my mother my father and my particular my grandmother um in order for for us children um not not to starve and also now today if you read if you see the Memoirs of China's super
riches I mean I think most of them had memory of the of my generation of the generation who had lived in the countryside they all um remembered being hungry yeah they as as children when how hungry they were in The Villages and that that sort of was partly what gave
them the impetus to to change you while we're on this let me just ask about this before we returned the greatly forward now that you mentioned it so xan ping actually had very similar experience to you in that his father is also a high communist
official he also gets denounced and purged Jan ping is also has to go through these denunciation meetings and then he has to work as a peasant um and in fact there's a story where he tries to come back but his mother uh to get a
meal from his family but is supposed to be an exile but his mother then chases him away and denounces him and you so it's like gruesome stuff right and then when he gives these speeches he talks about we need to return to Marxism leninism and maong thought how is it
possible that somebody who has gone through your experience can still have any sort of sympathy left for ma or Marxism leninism I I actually don't understand I'm afraid I I don't understand either I mean don't fully understand the is and I mean everybody
is different um a lot of people had similar experiences um and they still um with Sam's praise um and wanted to return to the ma year I think only you know not seriously return to my but they were dreamed of the perhaps the
tied you know the control or something of the mouth Europe but not really I mean well everybody was different but I mean there were more indoctrinated people than others under the same indoctrination system I mean maybe he
was just not he was just um a more thoroughly indoctrinated and there were many reasons and among the Communist officials whose parents suffered the children of um a lot of them regard identify Mal with the rule of the Communist Party um and they don't they
don't want the Communist Party to be discredited so because they are the beneficiaries of of communist rule I mean you this is not not necessarily she he um but but in a more General sense because I haven't studied she again I don't know the in the workings of the of
the uh of the regime um but I think a lot of children of the commun old Communists in spite of the sufferings of from their parents they still want China to be under this one party dictatorship and I think one reason now is this made them a lot of
money I mean the all the Corruptions or the you know whatever if you are if you're associated with the regime you stood to gain you stand to gain so I think that that is one very important reason um we which would not they would
not have all the Privileges if the party ended its its one party dictatorship yeah which and you know in no other Society is a tyrant like ma still respected by the current regime with Germany nobody's nobody is you know yearning for the days of Hitler uh
there's a few people in Russia for example stalinism is because of Putin's um changing of the curriculum but it it's not a common thing whereas in China the the regime officially uh derives its legitimacy from ma it hangs as his picture off T square and this is uh this
is doubly Insidious not only because this is a gruesome mass murderer killed 50 million people more than anybody else in history but because his victims were the people of China the people who are expected to um bow down to his figure
and respect him are his own victims or the children of his victims it would be like if a picture of Hitler hung off the Temple mount in Israel or something right so I mean yeah I guess maybe the question then is how do the Chinese people who this happened to the Chinese
people in living memory how are they okay with um having the figure of Mao up on tan Square why is there so respect for Mao in China well first of all um China as you said is still a Communist Regime uh um for many years I mean that
was underplayed partly because the memory is fresh and partly in the 1980s and '90s particularly the memories were fresh I think that was probably the main reason um and gradually after that um the memories of pain were gradually fading
um and particular a generation two generations have grown up without suffering um and so given that there is no religion for people to worship you know unlike any time in Chinese history and before now there was confusion ISM you you could have something to hang on
to and then there was Ma malism I mean which didn't didn't didn't obviously openly in do violence and atrocities it could sound quite attractive um which is why Mouse Little Red Book was invogue for a period in the west um and so people hang
on to that and in a postm time money was the God but some people a lot of people made money but a lot of people lost money not only lost money but had you know was um were disadvantaged in this money is God Society I mean you know in the society
where there was no proper regulations and law and people who were not very Savvy with money lost out they were ConEd they were you know they were whatever so there were some people who probably yearned for a more Simple Life where you know you were given what you
were given you they wouldn't like to be stared and they wouldn't like to be a political victim but a lot of people could live a very simple life more of being just fed um I mean there may be a certain Nostalgia um but the most important
thing of course is the promotion of the regime I mean particularly since she came to power I mean you know you were you were taught from school all these lies about ma um and so people grew up with this um um regarding ma as God like
back to my childhood yeah how what has been the impact of your books you know wild Swan sold 50 million copies your biography of ma is also a bestseller I know they're banned in China but have they secretly been able to access how was that Revis their understanding of
their own history well when these books were first published in 19 the 1990s and year 2000s there were lot of lot of lots and lots of ways to get them into China Hong Kong for example and Taiwan um pirated editions which there were many
many many um but now I mean since particular Mr she came to power in 20 like 2012 2013 and China has a total clamp down or of ban of banned literature and you could go to jail if you um and for an official to possess these books I mean ban books including
mine you you you could face you know gly punishment which you you don't want to face and for the general population as well and when you enter China now you see on this screen uh warnings of not to bring in bad literature um and not not particularly
not to bring in um books that um said not very nice things about the previous revolutionary leaders or or revolutionary Martyrs or someone so total total Camp down forbidding of people doing research on History trying to understand the history um which which
created another generation of brainwashed people and there was one also one very important thing the Chinese are very pragmatic and they don't want trouble they're very different from a lot of other peoples um and so parents who exper who had bad
experiences under the mou tend not to tell their children and so there are lot of children who were gen just genuinely not getting any alternative information um from different from the uh from the official line yeah I do want to get back
to the actual uh Great Leap and cultural revolution in a second but on this theme um you know aian Ping's own daughters got studied at Harvard a bun Chinese Elites are their kids are studying in America uh when they take power in a
generation or two will they still be devoted Marxist leninist I can't imagine them having coming back from Harvard and then uh still believing in well I mean in the West in the American universities yeah there were a lot of marxist I mean I you know a lot
of people if they're interested in the subject I mean they come to the west to have their views confirmed and Ma you know for example W ma biography was published there were some academics who public even published a book a collection of their criticisms
against our book and the title was was M really a monster I mean you know the preface was rate him by by someone who was of a senior lecturer in lsse London School of Economics I mean the language was maist language you know Ma was a great a great Revolution great Marxist
leninist and so on I mean so I mean I mean the West would certainly not put off the this um put off a potential M success yeah I'm glad you brought that up actually because I read that book actually in preparation for this
interview and because I wanted to see if there were criticisms that I I should have be aware of and honestly the I mean there were certain quibbles about the the part before Mao got into Power about the Long March and stuff which I don't know enough about to
comment but the actual when they start talking about the important things the great Le forward to culture Revolution they are not at all contesting the facts it is the most um uh the the most sort of um excusatory language of it is the
same sort of stuff by the way that is said about Cuba and stalinist Russia of well the literacy went up and this and that um North Korea today has high literacy are you going to say that North Korea was okay that the ex actually can you talk about this what what do you
think explains the Western uh some parts of the left who want to find excuses for these regimes whether it's Venezuela or whether Edgard snow Edward Snow writing his um book about Mao there's a sort of need to excuse these um these communist
regimes and socialist regimes why are what explains this from what I know I think there there were people who had Illusions about these regimes and a lot of the academics um who were kind of um controlling the faculties um to do with Ma and in universities
probably had got their um their their sort of Illusions because they had access to um Edgar Snow's um book they were radicals in the 1960s I mean they you know they want to hang on to their own no sorry let me just not get into the subject sorry I
I'm I'm faltering on this because I don't know I don't know why but I mean I don't know why I don't know why they are like that I mean they they they don't they don't know the facts they they they don't care to know the facts and also I think probably some
people think oh China is always been awful you know under the empress and so on and so somehow the orientals must feel differently um I I know when you know when Danga ping visited America in 1979 and established diplomatic relations with America um with
Carter and um he he was seated at the banquet with some uh um with some some deluded film star or something and then then people were saying to him that when they were visit when they visited China and they seem professors who'd been
subject to force labor and but they told they were told that they enjoyed it because all these hardships and being in the labor camp had turned them into the new men and dang xaing just said they were lying um but I mean they were lying I mean to the
westerners um who who didn't know the truth just took their words for it and they they didn't know people couldn't tell them the real truth even in um in the case of Stalin in Russia there was a famous New York Times Reporter who was doing the Russian
coverage for the New York Times and there would reports would come in about the uh the Ukrainian fabine or these other atrocities and he would write his columns you know no this is not happening I think there's a famous headline that says Russians are hungry
but not star um oh so actually let's talk about Danga ping and I want to ask about so during the cultural revolution he is exiled and purged and his his son because he is known as a I don't know what the black um but basically the five the blacks
know that's one one of the racist side of the the Chinese study black is bad so song was one of the five blacks and you know so his son is chased out of a window by Red guards the doctors refuse to operate on him because he's DJ Ping's son so he's
paralyzed for life um and he's forced to do manual labor this guy who was basically kind of running China under ma he's doing manual labor out in the countryside when he comes back into Power after the cultural revolution how
I from the outside I don't understand how he uh doesn't immediately denounce Ma what the horrible things he did how how did he allow he there's a quote from he says we must be careful not to overemphasize the crimes of ma or something um for somebody who is so
personally harmed by Ma how is he not immediately condemning ma this is something I don't understand and I also think he made a big mistake if he had dissociated from ma like kusov had with st him I mean it would not have just
been the right thing to do but it would have been the popular thing to do because there is a ground great ground swell of you the sentiment for denouncing ma or at Le dissociating from ma not just from the population from the victims which
virtually everybody was in China but from the leading Elite from his Co most of his closest colleagues I mean for the few olders who were in favor of he could easily have dealt with them like kusov had dealt with the stalinist the hardliners but he chose not
to what got into his mind I haven't studied him very carefully but I I did know something about him I think I think he he was probably thinking that if you reject ma it's inevitable that communism will collapse in China I mean unlike kof's time in
1956 he could denounce Stalin without endangering the Communist rule in Russia but D at his time could not well at least probably he thought could not have denounced the m without endangering the rule of the party yeah because this we're talking about 1980s
late '70s ' 80s now there is a ground you know it's near it's gorbachov's near gorbachov's time um so I think that's probably his Devotion to the party yeah and but I think he he might have been right in and then obviously the the point is that he would have been
right to say that well this is actually inherent in the Communist Regime in Russia when in the 80s when they have uh glassos and perisa and they talk openly about the gulak system that is one of the main contributing factors and people
say well how can regime that allowed this to happen be allowed to exist anymore how can this be our governing regime and that does lead to the collapse yes exactly exactly exact which was why by the way Mr she's argument I mean because he was against the goov
against the paror glass noos and he's exactly that I mean the the Communist Regime would collapse I mean that is you know in today's terms that is the wealth the money you know that associated with the power um and in the book you uh you
point out that Ma is acting in his uh self-interest and selfishly doing all these things but it it seems to me that a strong if not motivation at least of enabling factor and organizing Factor is definitely provided by the ideologies of
Communism and socialism which um which sort of organizes soci Society uh otherwise it doesn't make sense to collectivize farms and to close down shops and it also necessitates the uh purges because communism is a science it has to work and if it doesn't work there
must be internal capitalist sabots who must be you know condemned brought out and killed do do you think that isn't it the communism and socialism the of the heart of the issue here I I think some people would undoubted they think that
way but having researched ma for 12 years my conclusion about him was he was highly pragmatic and the Communist ideology suited him um I mean he joined the Communist Communist party not because he was a passionate believer but
because it gave him a life livelihood I mean he was asked to open a leftwing Bookshop selling communist and leftwing literature and his lives were changed and before that he was poverty stricken and uh and then and then that started
his life but I mean the few things about the ideology that you just mentioned for example the collectivization it's highly conducive to M's requirement to what Ma wanted which was a food he wanted this food from The Peasants if they had been private Farmers they would
Farm their food first and and pay tax so to speak pay to them and then it's far more difficult to control these hundreds of millions of peasants than to organize them into units into communes um then it's much better to control and M said so himself the are the the the
you know the what did say the great advantage of collectivization the communes is easier to control is it so this was um not just the ideology abstract ideology but it's for you know for what he wanted to get yeah but then at least we can say the
the one of the problems with the ideology is that it attracts and is highly conducive to to um opportunist like Ma and Stalin and uh the Kim family but so let's go back to the greatly forward and and these communes the these communes are really what it's like to be
a peasant is like chatt slavery can you talk about the working conditions how hard they worked while not being given food um the punishments tell us more about what the peasant life was like well I was working in the commune for
several years in the in the cultureal revolution in two places and our lives consisted mainly of work I mean there were fixed hours you were given you were allocated food and you know Fuel and other things depending on how many hours you
worked so so your life is is centered on work I mean you know then everything the commune controlled everything if you want to travel go somewhere you need the commune to give you um a kind of a a note a kind of a passport to allow you to travel um if
you want to get married you have to get permission from the commune and during the famine this is how m ensured that the peasants didn't rise up in arms because the control from the commune I mean there was a thing and they every now and then the regime would would
issue the stiff orders to stop peasants fleeing their Villages I mean if they The Peasants did manage to flee into the cities and the bag for example for some food the communes were told to get them back so the commun is is this thing we to
control to control our entire lives and of course when I was in the communes I was again in a privileged position because when we were sent down from the cities we were guaranteed a certain food I mean it's too complicated the details
but basically the the communes is is the organization it may be in some ideology but in reality is how the party controls China's 500 million peasants I mean there were only I think some some a few tens of thousands of communes I mean imagine this highly
concentrated organization yeah so people were not no longer individual Farmers yeah like um like what they were before the Communist Rule and this is exactly also what happened in Russia and and when the famine happens again they're not allowed to leave Ukraine
they they're forced there road blacks are they're forced to starve there um so you have this really remarkable anecdote in the uh in the book about um talking to these peasants about what um life was like during the Great lead forward while
while you're working there because now there's no fuel left all the trees are taken down and how at the time so many of the village starved the because they were all distracted keeping the furnaces talk about the how the the the effort to
double steel output and how how that what what what catastrophes that caused well basically um Ma's ambition after he took power in China was to build a superpower to to um dominate the world he needed to buy these machines military industrial complexes mainly from Russia
and from Eastern Europe and but he didn't have the money to pay China wasn't rich as today so he exported food so he needed a lot of food whereas in China traditionally we didn't we never produced enough food to feed the population the Emperors banned food
export and bought a lot of food into China I mean so traditionally China was a food importer for a few hundred years and Ma stopped that so to start with there was always a food problem throughout his rule um and now the Great
Leap is basically to import vast quantities of uh technology and Equipment mainly from Russia that's why it's called the Great Leap he wanted to build industrialized whatever system um in in the few years um to be fast fast fast you know that
that's what he what he said I mean that's why his demand for food was vastly elevated M demand for food and this food had to come from The Peasants I mean so he basically seized this food to to export to Russia and the Eastern Europe knowing his people would die of St
salvation and there was a time M well kept saying seemingly philosophically I mean death is a good thing if if we don't have death you know we and the Earth can't contain us you know this seemingly philosophical things were were taken at face value by some academics uh
you know but what he really he said these things to his officials in order to harden their heart when they when to seize the food from The Peasants seeing how pitiful their conditions were and that's the origin of the famine is as
simple as that is food export I mean Lei is number two and his main target in the cultural revolution it was thanks to a visit back to his old village that made up his mind to stop Mouse policies cuz he went back to his V Village his brother-in-law had
died of starvation his sister was on the edge of of dying of starvation he saw the villages saw the just heart-rending things and then he he know he opened them open the lid of of a of a work a source span and he saw there was nothing
just water a few drops of grain and he was he he did a very unusual thing and he bowed to The Peasants and just said you know I'm very sorry and it was after this in 1961 he made up his mind to stop Mouse policies which led to the cultural
revolution and his his tragic death and then you also talk in the book about how these peasants Not only was all this grain being exported which caused them to starve but they weren't even allowed to harvest their grain because they had to talk about the the turning their own
walks and their own stuff into iron and you spending time doing that instead of farming so ma was ma was partly defeated by his own ignorance about economy I mean because if you when you when you want to build a modern super industry
you needed steel and steel was the most important thing and China's still producing cap capacities in the 1950s was very low so he had this idea of making the whole population to to make steel I mean it's it really is quite ridiculous because I was a primary
school I was six years old I was in the primary school and I remember that my main occupation was somehow my contribution to steal which is every day we walked on the street trying to find the little Nails the cogs something
still to and to hand in to our teachers because there is a backyard furnace in our school or the teachers had to had to feed things into the furnace the furnace also had to be kept going 24 hours a day it couldn't be you know couldn't go off I mean to feed that
furnace consumed everything I mean in my Village I mean they we we struggled every day to find a little fuel with you know fast forward to 1960s and because the mountains which used to be covered with great trees have been laid bare to
for for the fuel to feed the backyard furnaces um and the teachers were um exhausted in my school and so we were organized to babysit for them when I was a child um it was just it was hugely wasteful hugely wasteful I mean this I mean because for all this effort um this was
1958 um actually most of what the bankard furnaces produced were completely useless so he died ma died thinking of himself as a failure because China was still poverty stricken at the time of his death and he felt himself a failure
but he was partly sabotaged by his own ignorance about the economy oh the other thing about M ignorance was because food was so important and because sparrows eat food so he ordered the whole population to D to to um to to kill sparrows so as a child I said with
other people in our Courtyard we beat the source spens to make a tremendous thing so The Sparrows will will drop on the on the ground and so the all these people will will go and um will will will will go and catch the sparrows and it was just catastrophe
because he not only killed sparrows but many other birds other birds as well and and of course the the the worms they pests insects pests they were they flourished without their their natural enemy um so it's it's it's the it's a
unbelievable situation um that has consumed China for you know more than two decades just just the complete lack of sense here it would honestly be a joke if if obviously you didn't know it led to 40 million debts but the thing is you know
in the west I I indirect know somebody who was a was a steel magnet it was a great steel producer and he thought M's um steel bankard furnaces were brilliant idea I mean talking about you people in the west not just the academics but many other people completely
irrational um and I think maybe in their in their eagerness to to find an alternative to the Western capitalist democracy say say more about that I know we did touch on that earlier when we were discussing you know why are people
still defending ma but what motivated at the time and even still now uh people were so disillusioned with Western capitalism that they thought they would rather have Ma I think there were lot of people like that I with a Young Generation I mean they grew up um
after the collapse of the Soviet Empire I mean a lot of facts have come out um so people are no longer probably so stari and so wishful thinking about the Communist regimes but there was a time in those years in the um in when when communism seemed to be going strong in
so many countries um a lot of there were lot of wishful thinking westerners um as I said they may be pursuing for a for an alternative to a society they have a lot of discontent with I mean so they so wanted for such miracle to happen and they they believed
in what in there otherwise might have rejected as as fantasy yeah speaking of which tomorrow I'm interviewing Neil Ferguson who has written a biograph volume one of his biography of Kissinger and volume two which will cover this period will will come out later he's
writing it right now what what should Kissinger have done differently should should should they not have tried to open up China under ma what should have the policy of the United States at the time China was not opened up by kinger
and Nixon I I lived in China then I knew after Nixon and Kissinger's visit 1971 72 China was not opened up um I mean all the liberalization see you know relaxation after Nick Nixon's visit was mainly because of the collapse of limia and Ma
lost his arm his arm with which he control the army so I think to say Nixon and Kissinger opened up China is wrong that's not the case Kissinger I think kinger is very very smart person I think he probably was too fascinated with power I mean ma had the
kind of power he could turn the lives upside down um of a quarter of a million of the world's population I think he was very fascinated with Ma I mean he said nice things about ma um and even um after ma died you know with the regime um was
Reviving ma there were a few people Reviving M like the current Mr shei and his political rival Mr B um who with whom Kissinger seemed to be very close he attended this rallies um to eulogize ma big Ries and L lending his his whatever status he had um to the Chinese
regime's effort to stick with M's Legacy um I think that's unforgivable yeah that's one thing and the other thing is China's opening up to the west and that happened only after ma died in 1976 and D xaing came to power I knew
this very well because I was one of the first Chinese to be able to leave China um in 1978 I mean to see you know to that's the very beginning of the opening up I think it's a good thing I mean China has grown I mean you know sort of teaching M
um economic lunacy and the ideology um that has wrecked China and I'm the Chinese people are leading a much better life today and all this could not have happened if the country had not opened up and also through all these contact
with the West any attempt to go back to the maist time would be futile right because people knew what the West was like the people don't want to be really don't want to be isolated again um to lead a life of mous time no matter how they may say they worship the M how
matter no matter how they make make PR pilgrimages to M's birth place and so on but deep down I think nobody wants to go back so I think that's a very good thing this opening up but of course then it country May grow into a manace to the
world I mean that's another matter yeah it's a challenge that the world needs to face now but it's certainly not to make um to to it's not certainly not to to say China shouldn't we shouldn't have the West shouldn't have allowed China to
open up yeah yeah I mean you can't just dismiss a billion people coming out of poverty that's it's the best thing that's ever happened in history exactly so let's go back to the cultural revolution one thing that I find really interesting about you communism
especially in China is the need for the victims to then incriminate themselves to confess when when even Hitler wouldn't have the the Jews and aitz you know talk about renouncing their Semitic ways and you know I've been an enemy to Germany
in World War I so what what was explain why it was important that the victims of these purges had to then talk about oh you know I'm guilty I'm complicit why couldn't they just be ostracized I I think Ma knows people's psychology um
very well um and um I I I think he uses this as a weapon to break people I mean to humiliate them and to break them I mean so even his opponents then started to grow out about their own opposition so I I think that's the main thing I mean it I tell you it's it's not
very nice I mean in China when I lived in China I wasn't denounced but we all had to attend criticism and self-criticism meetings I mean it really is stirs up some very basic discomfort and um upset unsettling upset feelings if you have to criticize
yourself I mean you know not do it cynically because you have to WI our days it's not you you couldn't do it cynically because nobody has reason to understand the whole thing in order to be cynical so you were starting with being quite sincere I mean so it's it certainly
breaks people and also it makes people D it makes people turn people against each other because when people are criticizing each other you create a lot of animosities among the people which is one reason why no opposition can get
organized I mean people can't don't dare to to um talk to each other in case they were denounced I mean um in case they were it's all it's very it's a psychological warfare against his own population which is quite effective so so meaning that it wasn't just a
campaign against political opposition it was literally every part of your life your I think even in the book you talk about embracing your family is anti because it shows you're closer to your family than you are to ma exactly it's
this warm feeling ISM just I mean you know I I was concent to criticized off um because my feelings for my family and D xaing when he wrote to ma about his son the son you talked about who was crippled he wrote to ma to ask M to allow his son to join him so he
could look after his son he and his wife who was so heartbroken seeing his son she wanted to kill herself anyway um D had to preface his appeal with I'm afraid you know I'm committing warm feeling ISM um but could you allow you know my
son to join me to be looked after yeah it's it's device that really separates a society and making people against each other and being on guard against each other yeah I earlier you were talking about why can't people get together because I mean this other person at the
next criticism self-criticism meetings could well say so and so had said this to me and I hadn't report it to the party therefore I'm guilty and talk about the way in which it forced good people to be be immoral you have these quota systems where if you're in charge
of a department or something the M says 5% are wrest 5% or capitalist rotors and so if you don't bring if you don't give 5% of names who are capitalists we going to get denounced then uh then you must be a rightest yourself talk about how
how that aspect of the system well I mean you it's the result is you are in a tremendous um dilemma yeah of either sacrificing you your family and um and other people I which is another way of breaking these people I mean that these are all his his
weapons psychological weapons to force people to do what he ordered them to do why was there such a big reservoir of of support for communist ideas and also the person ality cult that formed around ma in China um what what you know people
give different explanations of the emperor worship beforehand led to this or peasant uh rice farming what what explains why China uh got taken over by this ideology it's again not not an ideology and Ma himself said in 1923 he didn't believe that the Chinese
would go for communism and he thought um communism could only be brought to China by the Russian Red Army and he was right I mean in the earlier years or the Comm the commenton you know the moscow's representatives to China and to other
countries and said it was China was a lot lost cause the people didn't were the last people to go for communism I mean much easier in India for example um so M was wise because after the war uh the second world war the Russian army Red Army
invaded China and occupied the North and Northeast of China a large hunk of land that was more than the entire Eastern Europe so with this the this land stting then supported Ma to to fight a war against Chang kek I mean ma of course was the was M
was the main main man who ensured his success um because during the war against Japan all his colleagues wanted to fight Japan and ma was the only person who was against it and tried everything he could to take advantage of of the war which destroyed
Chang Kai's government whereas ma grew the red grew during the war and so ma was very smart and this is one reason why dang xaing and a lot of other communist leaders um were so totally devoted to ma because they realized if
it were not for ma they would never have come to power right well by the way what do you make of the analogies people make when they say what happened in uh the US and you know other countries a couple years ago with with the BLM movement of
course it's not it's not at all comparable um I mean the culture of loing I mean I think maybe people just saw statues being top hold and I don't know what else I mean you know a few things superficial things the cultural revolution was nothing like that I mean
nobody could you know you couldn't even comprehend the horror of the culture revolution in the society the fear the destruction I mean you know China is really totally destroyed I mean there was no Antiquity in the private hands
you know wiped out taken by the by the regime I I just it's nothing like that you know for 10 years there were no books no Cinemas no theaters um I mean my mother was Cinemas and theaters were turned into um prisons and torture chambers and my mother was imprisoned
you one and um you know I knew how to get code of one book I mean it was how difficult and how much how how impossible that was and we that was a 10 years of the cultureal Revolution um it's nothing like what happened in the west hey everybody I hope you enjoy that
episode as always the most helpful thing you can do is just share the podcast send it to people you think might enjoy it put it in Twitter your group chats Etc just splits the world I appreciate you listening I'll see you next time [Music] cheers