341. Chairman Mao: The Clash With Stalin (Ep 4)

15:46Rana Mitter:And what that meant was that, for instance, in a factory, units were created. The term Danwe, meaning work unit, became a kind of staple of everyday life. And those work units, a little like in the Soviet Union, would control, you know, all of your life. The ideal scenario would be that you would be born in, you know, kind of the Danwe birthing home or hospital. You know, you'd be schooled in a school that was attached to the unit. you would then you know find work there have a kind of lifetime employment and maybe you know the funeral parlor that you know dealt with your dispatch from this earth would also be attacked to the the Dan way it was essentially the answer to the question of how can a country which was you know devastated economically where people's lives were so precarious day to day deal with that question and the answer they came up with was a sort of authoritarian welfarist socialist wraparound in which your entire working life would be subsumed to a unit controlled by the Communist Party.

16:38Rana Mitter:But on the flip side, that party would provide all of the life provisions that you would need from cradle to grave.

16:45William:Was this envisaged as a sort of elysium? I mean, it sounds incredibly grim. Could it be framed in such a way that this was, at the period, in the context, progress, the modern world, the future, heaven?

16:59Rana Mitter:It depends who you are and where you are, I think. You know, everyone's experience is going to be different. I think for an awful lot of people, particularly those who are used to, you know, freedom of labour and entrepreneurship, basically being shoehorned to a job they might not have wanted and not be very good at, would have been a pretty depressing experience, I think it's fair to say. Also, these are not just workplaces, they become communities. And communities, particularly inward-looking ones, can become, you know, extremely fraught sorts of places where relationships, bribery, these sorts of things matter a great deal.

17:30Anita:But I suppose if you're a landless peasant and you've been living the most precarious life, suddenly having something that you're anchored with, with somebody saying, you know, we'll look after you, we'll make sure that you have food in your belly is quite appealing. I want to just look at women. Surprise, surprise. I want to look at women for a moment. In the first episode, you know, you were talking about sort of young Mao railing against the arranged marriage, railing against, you know, sort of women, I think, as he put it, you know, almost being sort of forced into, you know, being raped in their relationships and how he was against it.

18:00Anita:Now he's got power. Now he's got the chops to do something about it. Does he do anything for women or was it all talk?

18:07Rana Mitter:It wasn't all talk, but the results are highly compromised. The Chinese Communist Revolution since its earliest days has always talked about the importance of women's rights and feminism. But it's always in practice made class-based arguments placed above feminist arguments. In other words, that feminist arguments can only be an aspect of class politics as opposed to being important in their own right. Nonetheless, if you want to turn to things that really do change women's lives during this period, there are plenty of them. One is a new divorce law in 1950, which makes it much easier for women to separate from their husbands.

18:44Rana Mitter:And that provides not only actually for women and for men, of course, a newer and perhaps more accessible means to deal with, you know, the unhappy marriages and other things, which, of course, were very much part of China, like any other society at that time. But also, actually, as the scholar Jennifer Alterhanger has pointed out, based at Oxford University, that it gives people an idea also about what legal rights they have in their lives. because if you're going to get involved in divorce under the new settlement, you also have to learn how the law operates. And this puts into people's eyes or ears the idea that actually legal remedies are available to them, which they can use as ordinary people.

19:23Rana Mitter:Highly flawed and problematic and subjected to a whole variety of terms and conditions. But it's about a mindset as well. So that becomes important at that time.

19:32Anita:As convoluted as it might have been, though, over a million women filed for divorce in the first year. I mean, some kind of floodgate has opened.

19:40Rana Mitter:On the other hand, you can see, so, you know, something that is ambivalent, at least, is on those work units I've mentioned. Women were given work points, basically. I mean, men and women were both given work points to check that they'd fulfilled their quotas, very Soviet. But women had to do more work to get the same number of points in many cases, partly because, you know, allegedly they would be working more slowly or they wouldn't have as much bodily capacity. And therefore, to make up their numbers, they'd have to do more. And obviously, as is so often the case, the type of work which got counted was usually manual factory work, say, whereas looking after children generally didn't get counted quite so much.

20:17Rana Mitter:So many of the distortions of life that came from the pre-1949 period, even though they were rethought in a feminist mode, were still arranged in many cases according to what was really best for a highly masculine society that was choosing to industrialise and associated that kind of progress and development with the values of factories and the manufacturing of heavy products.

20:43William:And as if that isn't dark enough, tell us about the campaign to suppress.

20:47Rana Mitter:Counter-revolution race. I mean, essentially, one of the things that emerges very early, and perhaps unsurprisingly, in the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party's rule on the mainland, is paranoia, essentially. The fear that there are traitors from within who are seeking to subvert the regime. And like many paranoids, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Yes. Bear in mind the situation in the early 1950s, which is completely different from what you might think of now. The PRC, the People's Republic of China under Mao, is still an unrecognized state. It's not recognized by the United Nations.

21:28Rana Mitter:It's not recognized by the United States of America. A few countries, including Britain, actually have given it diplomatic recognition. but overall Taiwan is still maintaining that actually it's the Republic of China, it's the true government of China. So first of all, it's not like Mao can send off his representative to jet to New York or Geneva to speak at the UN and say, here we are in the world. And therefore they become very dependent, of course, on the Soviet Union as a result with the alliance between the Soviets and the PRC lasts for about a decade. But the second thing is that the fear that Chiang Kai-shek may be coming to take back the mainland is real and not wholly implausible.

22:03Rana Mitter:We know it didn't happen in the end. We know actually that almost certainly Harry Truman and indeed, you know, Eisenhower would not have actually supported Chiang Kai-shek to retake the mainland. It would have been a hopeless task. But Mao didn't know that. And I think Chiang didn't know that either, you know, at least for a few years. He nursed some hope that he could help to engineer World War III and get the mainland back. So the fear that there would actually be Guomindang nationalist, nationalist party spies in the cities or villages isn't wholly without foundation. Even though, of course, the party turned it into an excuse for a sort of paranoid purge of people who had nothing to do with the party whatsoever.

22:37Anita:It was like a horror show. It was like, you know, sort of the traitors, but not on telly. I mean, you sort of have these sessions where, you know, you have somebody just being ritually humiliated with this tall dunce cap on their heads or, you know, placards around their neck saying, you know, I am a counter-revolutionary. I am anti all of the efforts of Chairman Mao. And it was all about humiliation, degradation and sometimes physical abuse as well. Right, Rana? Yes.

23:02Rana Mitter:And this tactic comes from the rectification movement of the 1942 to 44, where essentially exactly these tactics, psychological pressure, ideological conformity, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes physical coercion and violence came together to force people into a new sort of mindset. said. So all of this was by way of essentially running an endless series of campaigns to turn China into a highly politicized society. The term politics in command was often used at that time, and everything, culture, economics, everyday life, ideas of family life, were turned into an aspect of that social change.

23:43Rana Mitter:The argument being, from the point of view of Mao and others at the top levels of the party, particularly the radicals who supported him, that the need for transformation in China was so complete and so total that anything less than complete 24 hour a day, you know, reconversion of people simply wouldn't get the job done because people would slip back into the old ways of Chiang Kai-shek.

24:04Anita:It feels like 1984 by George Orwell that what you need to do is you need to shatter all the traditional bonds, family, friendship. And all you must have is, I mean, in Orwell, it's the party. But here it is Mao, the state. We're going to take a break here. If you don't like breaks, if you don't like to take your pods with breaks, you know, just join our club empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com. For the rest of you, here's an ad break.

24:35William:When you want your spring break to feel like and your kid's pool day to feel like and your hotel bed to feel like Ooh, and room service to feel like... Because at Hilton, hospitality feels like...

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24:56William:It matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton, for this day. We're leaving today and entering a world of Mickey Mouse waving, princess meeting and greeting, lightsaber clashing, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror dropping, Banshee flying Space Mountain launching Galaxy rewinding Galaxy rewinding Fireworks igniting World of Other Worlds For whatever you love Infinite worlds await at the most magical place on Earth Walt Disney World Resort Welcome back Rana, how secure is Mao in 1953? Is he feeling paranoid and still feels that there are class enemies behind every steelworks or is he now sort of just enjoying being in supreme power and feeling confident?

25:55Anita:Is he having fun, Rana? Is he tyrannising with a smile? Rana, is he happy? Is he really, really happy?

26:03Rana Mitter:I think he's never happier than when he's basically getting other people to do what they want. So I think, yes, at that stage he probably is extremely happy. When you said, is Mao secure in 1953, I don't know whether you meant is he secure in his position or is he psychologically secure in himself because the two things obviously go to each other. So I think in practice, it's fair to say that he certainly was safe at that point. I think he really was from the attempt of any of his rivals to launch a coup against him. There was a sort of brief attempt. We don't know again if it was a purge or it was real or whatever with a couple of rival leaders very early on, Gao Gang and others at the beginning of the period of rule.

26:40Rana Mitter:but essentially they were purged again. And I think it's fair to say that in 1953, the likelihood that any of the actual top leaders really would have pushed Mao out of the way was pretty minimal, not least since by that stage, he'd basically manipulated the internal party systems to make it clear that he was by now the absolute supreme ruler. But what there was still in 1953, and this is perhaps going to being secure in the other sense, as far as we can tell, was a certain amount of space, limited space, for a genuine debate in the leadership about what should come next. The period of complete my way or the highway would not come until a few years later, particularly after the Great Leap Forward, which we'll get to.

27:23Rana Mitter:But at this stage, I think it's fair to say that internally, there were figures, Liu Shaoqi and others, who could, you know, push back in various limited but real ways about where policy should go in terms of economics and society in particular. So the chances of Mao being knocked off his perch in 1953 are pretty low, I think, at that stage. The greatest danger, I think he would have thought, was external intervention that might lead to the collapse of the regime. And having, of course, in 1953, been privy to a final ceasefire, an armistice, still with us to this day, between the Western side and the North Korean side in the Korean War.

28:05Rana Mitter:I think he probably felt when I was 53, actually, that it was time for a breather, in a sense, that, you know, the external pressure that had been there for three years during the Korean War was no longer quite as urgent. And that probably led him to the path that he's on at that stage.

28:19William:And Stalin has died, hasn't he?

28:21Rana Mitter:53 is the year Stalin pops his clogs. Stalin also dies at I was 53. So that's an important moment, too. And actually, because he takes over and it's not clear, there's a sort of triumvirate which eventually ends with the rise of Khrushchev, but it takes a little while. Mao certainly regarded himself, so you talk about things that made him happy, he certainly regarded himself as now being the senior leader of the world communist movement.

28:40Anita:Stalin's dead and gone, but Mao keeps the flame burning because, you know, five-year plans are something we associate with the Soviets. And then Mao comes in in 1953 with his first, but not last, five-year plan. Now, in effect, what does he want and what does he put his people through to get there?

29:00Rana Mitter:Absolutely. Of course, China still has five-year plans even today, in fact, but now they're all about AI and quantum, but they still very much exist. So he has taken that along with other things from Stalin's short economic history of the Soviet Union, which is a kind of handy guidebook for how to run a command economy with ruthless authoritarianism, which he was very keen on. And that five-year plan is basically Mao's idea of how to get at high speed to an industrialized economy. Amongst phrases he'd use, he'd use it later on the decade when they get to the Great Leap Forward, he would be talking about surpassing Great Britain.

29:36Rana Mitter:This might or might not seem like an impressive milestone now, but at the time, the idea that Britain, which is still one of the biggest economies in the world with a huge empire even at that stage, could be something that poor China could overtake was really a pretty fantastical kind of ambition. So that's where he was going. And he was fairly explicit about that's what he wanted to do. It did involve various quite complex bits of thought in the leadership about how you got there, because we mentioned before the land reform movement, the violent redistribution of land to poorer farmers by taking it away from rich farmers.

30:10Rana Mitter:But actually, of course, giving a poor farmer a small patch of land is not the way towards mechanized agricultural success. When we think about Stalin back in the 30s, one of the many reasons, including sort of violent, paranoid thinking, that Stalin destroyed the kulaks is that he wanted to industrialize agriculture, make it a sort of mass pursuit, or rather kind of, you know, something that was done on a kind of large scale, rather. And removing landlords was one way to do that. Mao, I think, in as much as he thought about this, and he was not a kind of agricultural economist by any means, wanted to move in a direction that in some ways went against what they'd said in the first few years, which is everyone gets their own small patch of land.

30:50Rana Mitter:Now it's almost, but we need to actually then kind of throw the switch in the other direction to get to the next stage of economic development.

30:56William:You mentioned him looking over his shoulder at Stalin and the fact that Stalin's gone now and he's the senior communist on the bloc. But is he, I mean, the fact that he's using this language of five-year plans, which is a Stalinist thing. Is he looking at the Soviet Union and thinking, they've done this well, they've done this badly? Is he copying them? Or is he very much forging his own way as he did with the rural revolution?

31:19Rana Mitter:I think, not to give you the historian's answer, but I will give you the historian's answer, I think it's both. Yes, but yet. Mao always has huge admiration for Stalin and for the Soviet Union. You know, it is up to that point the only kind of successful, you know, depends on your definition of success, but certainly, you know, kind of persistently existing socialist state of that size and significance in the world. And obviously, you know, particularly post-nuclear weapons, the Soviets become a really important player in global politics. So all of that are things that Mao admires. And he understands that the economy and the Soviet ability to mobilize the economy, bearing in mind that they didn't either in the West or East, nobody at that point knew what we now know, which there were huge flaws within the Soviet economy that made it ultimately very inefficient.

32:06Rana Mitter:This is the 1950s. This is the era when people are drawing in the West and East on wartime planning. And the Soviets having the five-year plan was the sort of biggest, baddest, most effective one of those plans that lots of people in the Western world thought, well, actually what we need is more state planning to actually succeed. So Mao wasn't out of place in doing that. And yet he knew, and all of his comrades knew as well from the 1920s onwards, that the Soviets, and Stalin specifically, were capable of giving spectacularly bad advice because they'd never been to China. They read about it in a book or, you know, they read about the theory, but never when they're in practice.

32:39Rana Mitter:So things like, yeah, let's have an urban proletarian uprising in Shanghai. Well, thanks, guys. A, there isn't an urban proletariat. B, when we tried next best thing, Chiang Kai-shek comes around and guns us all down. So not doing that again. And both of those vibes, you know, admiration, along with a certain frustration that the Soviets really couldn't seem to learn, didn't seem to know what they didn't know. Both exist at the same time.

33:00Anita:But I want to know, just on a very basic level, if you're going to redo your playbook and you're going to learn from the Soviet mistakes and you're going to ignore what they don't understand and you now realise that they aren't the god of everything when it comes to revolution, does he manage to put food in the belly of most of his people? Do you have, with these, you know, sort of five-year plans, do you have people being fed? Are they eating? Are they housed? Are they, you know, what level are the people living at?

33:25Rana Mitter:Broadly speaking, in many cases, yes. The period from 1949 up to the mid-1950s, I'd say, does have a lot of stabilisation as well as upheaval and revolution. So yeah, schools, education systems are opened again after the war, money is put into them. Partly they're interested in education because they need to propagandise, but also they need to realise that literacy, numeracy, all these things are part of the system. There's a fabulous book by my colleague here at Harvard, Arunav Ghosh, called Making It Count, which is about the way in which Chinese statisticians go to India to actually learn from another country that isn't the West, but which is also newly independent or newly kind of autonomous, and using math, science, and statistics to try and create an exciting new sort of socialist society.

34:10Rana Mitter:Obviously, Nehru socialism and Mao socialism are not the same type of socialism. Back in the 50s, China and India were very close. Hindqin Bai Bai, you know, India and China will be brothers.

34:20Anita:Oh, God. Hindu-Chini-Bye-Bye, which, you know, the Congress Party still punished for that, you know, sort of legacy from Nehru. And to explain it to other people who don't know what this is. So Nehru is saying, he's sort of envisaging this brave new world post-British colonialism, where, you know, these powerhouses of India and China will join hands together and they will cooperate and it's going to be marvellous. And of course, then there's a Chinese invasion of Indian territory. So this phrase of Neres, Hindu, Chini, Bye Bye, Hindus and Chinese are brothers, is still a stick to beat them with.

34:53Rana Mitter:And underpinning everything is that during this period, it does stabilise in some important ways because there's a very important economic relationship with the Soviet Union. The Soviets basically helped to insert China into the kind of alternative eastern bloc of economic cooperation. So as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, these countries are taken over by communist governments and become part of a new economic bloc. For the 1950s, China is part of that, too. So China exports pork bellies to Hungary or the Soviet Union or wherever, and it gets back machine parts in return. And being integrated into that economic situation, something which changes in the 60s when the Soviets and Chinese split, is an important part also of improving people's day-to-day lives and also creating a more stable society in a country which started the decade extremely dislocated.

35:42Anita:So, I mean, a more stable society. And what I'm getting the impression of is that, you know, this is quite a successful endeavour. A lot of people do suffer. But, you know, as you were saying, people largely do have food in their bellies and they have somewhere to go to school and they have somewhere to live. Is he then, I mean, is it from that sense of security that we have in 1956, the Hundred Flowers campaign, which is, I mean, it looks like the Hundred Flowers is inviting intellectuals to have a hundred different ideas in the garden, to criticise the Communist Party. The flowers that are blooming are different political doctrines.

36:18Anita:I mean, surely that doesn't feel very mal, but he does it. I mean, is that what happens? A sort of a widening of the debate at this time? Basically, yes.

36:27Rana Mitter:I mean, again, there are arguments about this, and, you know, in some ways it'll remain debated forever. But broadly, yes. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. You know, this is the slogan that's used at the time to say, we're doing so well you're seven years in 1956 and you know we're stabilizing the economy's improving we've got this thing going with the soviet union so let's take a moment to actually open up and take constructive criticism got to be constructive but constructive criticism as to what we can do better you know we're doing well tell us what more we can do that's the idea i think and you can see actually that there is plenty of this in different ways in the chinese tradition Again, the ideological version of democracy that the Chinese communists put forward was not a liberal multi-party democracy, but the idea that you would have different opinions taken to create what was called the mass line.

37:16Rana Mitter:And then once you got the mass line, you know, that was it. You know, you stuck to the party line and you're not allowed to dispute it. But the process that gets voices in there, at least initially, is supposed to be quite open in the way the party thinks about it. So that's in a sense what they're thinking about, opening up beyond the party to wider society to get constructive ideas. because it would appear that Mao genuinely thought that things were going so well that people would say, yeah, you know, there's some problems, but basically, you know, we think things are on the up and up and here's what I'd suggest you could do a bit of that or the other.

37:44Rana Mitter:And he'd probably been OK with that.

37:45Anita:The thing is, most suggestion boxes in big corporations have anonymous boxes for anonymous tips for a reason. Because even, you know, sort of your most mid-level manager does not like criticism. So I'm just trying to think how somebody like Mao, with the paranoia that Mao has had before with all of the denunciations and everything else, it's going to take any kind of criticism.

38:06Rana Mitter:This is the problem, as it turned out, because first of all, when...

38:10William:He doesn't like criticism. He just doesn't like criticism.

38:13Rana Mitter:When he opened up the floodgates... And by the way, from what we know about the Politburo meeting, which has decided, his comrades, who I think knew him pretty well, said, Chairman, not sure this is a good idea. Why don't we just sort of keep going? And just sort of, you know, open up suggestions. But again, it's the two parts of Mao. This is one of the reasons that he's such a devastating, terrifying, fascinating character. He's both the paranoid authoritarian advocate of coercive violence who brooks no argument. And he's still that library assistant at Peking University who loves sitting around drinking tea in the back room debating Marxist theory or, you know, what's going to happen to world politics.

38:55Rana Mitter:And, you know, you can't do that unless you have people to kind of argue back and forth with. and they're both Mao, you know, pretty much till the day he dies. Even that ballad with Richard Nixon in 1972 when he comes along has got that sort of playfulness along with the ruthlessness and that's why he was so difficult to figure out. But just sticking with the 1956 and the Hundred Flowers, whatever Mao thought he was doing, that's not what happened. Huge numbers of people around the country, you know, peasants who are complaining about being herded into collective farms, which was beginning to happen, they didn't like that.

39:25Rana Mitter:Professors saying they couldn't get any of the Western books, they needed to kind of keep up with the fields of physics or chemistry or whatever. You know, from the highest to the lowest, everyone writes in saying, I've got complaints and this is really terrible. And one of the best examples of this is a young man who got to become very famous, actually, called Liu Binyan, who in the 80s would be one of China's best known dissidents and finally was condemned in the 80s during the crackdown. There are a couple of writers, Liu Binyan and Wang Meng, who would go on to become very famous as sort of internal dissidents almost in the 1980s.

39:53Rana Mitter:But they write short stories, a lot of inside news about a newspaper, kind of under communist rule. Another one called The Newcomer in the Organization Department, which is about kind of bureaucrat working in the communist system. And they're both stories of slow disillusion as these young idealistic men come in in these short stories. It's fiction, but obviously likely disguised fiction and discover the system is sort of, you know, it's furred up. The old bureaucracy still maintains itself. People aren't really kind of being sincere and wanting to change and so forth. And these short stories got their authors into very big trouble just a few months later when Mao reversed the switch.

40:26Rana Mitter:He saw all this complaint coming in. He almost did himself discredit by actually saying, actually, it was all a trick. I knew there were all these kind of evil spies around and I made them declare what they thought so that I could find out. This was basically kind of, you know, covering retconning, I think is the technical term.

40:43Anita:But you don't believe him because, I mean, he does say, you know, I was luring the snakes out of their layers is how he put it. But you don't believe he was doing that at all.

40:51Rana Mitter:Yeah, he got the fancy language out like nobody's business. But I think he's retconning. I think he had no idea quite how much everyone was really, really, you know, very, very disillusioned in many aspects already of the first years of the regime. Was profoundly shocked and decided to come up, not least for credibility with his fellow Politburo members. You know, when they were like, well, we told you not to do this. And he said, well, you know, it'll all be fine. You go back and say, ah, but actually what you didn't know was that I meant it all along. So basically Mao could never be proved wrong on anything.

41:25Rana Mitter:So, you know, that was why we were doing it.

41:27William:It's not just a couple of people that get sort of shunted out at this point. 550 ,000 people are officially labelled as rightists and punished. This is a big nationwide crackdown.

41:38Rana Mitter:Yes, 1957 is the big anti-rightist crackdown. Not that they're really right wing in any meaningful sense. One of them, for instance, is Ding Ling, the feminist author we've mentioned a few times across the Padka podcast, who's sent off the Heilongjiang province.

41:50William:I love Ding Ling. We're very keen on Ding Ling.

41:53Rana Mitter:OK, well, she gets sent off into internal exile in the frozen far northeast of China and so to various other people at this stage, many of whom don't reappear to the 1970s.

42:02Anita:So you've got sort of these two faces of Mao. One is, you know, it kind of reminds me of Stalin who wanted to be the poet, but couldn't have a purge or two. Got to have a purge or two. To be a priest. Yeah.

42:14Rana Mitter:Well, you know, poets are as poets does. Ezra Pound was a fascist and ended up in a cage. Well, true. Okay. So fine.

42:22Anita:But, I mean, we shouldn't make light of the fact that, you know, apart from some people being sent to whatever China's equivalent of the Siberian wastelands are, there are substantial executions.

42:32William:100 ,000 denounced, 10 ,000 arrested, and 1 ,000 executed. I mean, it's a massive purge.

42:39Anita:And just the idea of the terror creates a wave of suicides because people just don't want to go through this at all.

42:45Rana Mitter:Yes. And that becomes even more apparent, you know, a few years later in the Cultural Revolution, where many, many people die technically through taking their own lives, but in fact, essentially psychologically pressured. And again, this is one of the things that you see in the Chinese Revolution more broadly. The Chinese Revolution directly kills, you know, very, very large numbers of people, as we discussed. It also causes events that cause the death of many billions of people as well, which may not initially have been intended that way, but are carried out with such lack of care, attention to what the consequences will be that essentially they also lead to mass deaths.

43:22Rana Mitter:And certainly people who take their own lives, even though you could argue technically it's their own act, in practice would never have done so had it not been for the political circumstances created around them. So the revolution does all these things. It devours a lot of its children.

43:36William:We mentioned a few minutes ago India. Looking back by 1958, how is China doing compared to India? Both of them have inherited wrecked economies. Both of them have had incredible uphill struggles against, you know, difficult circumstances and huge numbers of people in poverty. Who at this point is doing better?

43:59Rana Mitter:If we're in 1958, I would say that in terms of internal poverty and economic circumstances, you're fairly even because India is still so poor at this stage. And, you know, it'll take a very long time to get out of that particular circumstance. And that causes all the upheavals that we know of in the 60s and 70s as well. China is also desperately poor, but is undertaking a variety of changes, including that redistribution of land in the countryside, that may do more to improve people's economic conditions. The problem, of course, we know, is that they then start getting put 50, 57, 58. We go into high gear on putting people into collective farms, which we now know are not generally particularly economically efficient.

44:44Rana Mitter:But let me just add one other element to the question, because I think it's worth remembering. Both countries are doing quite well on the international stage. Nehru's idea of India as a new post-colonial actor that brings ideas of peaceful coexistence to the world is very, very popular, particularly with the large numbers of countries that are now going into that stream of decolonizations in the 50s and 60s. And China, although it's not recognized at the UN or by the US, is a big player in what became known as third world politics, particularly in 1955. That's the showdown in a sense where India and China both turn up at Bandung in Indonesia.

45:23Rana Mitter:At Bandung Conference, yes. and parade their ways to the emerging number of newly freed or soon to be liberated Asian and African states. And it's India and China that are making the running in that conversation at Bandung, not the Soviets, not the Americans.

45:39Anita:We are sort of seeing, I guess, a Mao with his confidence at something of a peak. But he is on the cusp of making what is arguably his biggest mistake. And that's where we're going to pick up in the next episode. Rana, we're not going to let you out. You've got to stay with us for that one too. Thank you so much for being with us again. I mean, it's such an education. Absolutely wonderful stuff, this. And you've got some exciting news, Willie, about some special episodes that are coming in this series as well.

46:07William:Yes. We're going to be homing in on some very personal aspects of living life with Mao with our old friend Yung Chang, who's going to be coming on the pod to talk for bonus episodes about her personal story. This is like a sort of parallel to Rana's big picture. We're going to zoom in on Yung Chang's mother and her youth under Mao and how it looks from the point of view of one single family living through all this.

46:39Anita:It is a really extraordinary story. If any of you have read Yung Chang's work, you know you're in for a treat. And if you want to listen to those bonus episodes, you need to join our club because they offer club members only. TheEmpirePodUK.com. So, yes, you can get access to these special bonus episodes just for our club members.

46:57William:Cheaper than the price of a frothy coffee a month. That's true.

47:02Anita:But for now, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Turimple.

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