345. Chairman Mao: The Cultural Revolution (Ep 6)

17:33Rana Mitter:You know, Leninist tactics are very much tied around the idea of terror. And before that, that goes back to the French Revolution as well. The idea that by instilling fear, you also instill political discipline. This is something that has a long history in that kind of revolutionary moment. And again, it has, I think it's fair to say, a very different vibe from the kind of Confucian idea that, you know, sort of harmony, working out what will be the kind of best balance of things is the best way to run a society. This is very much the opposite. Writing poetry in a tea house in the hill. Writing poetry in a tea house and all these sorts of things.

18:07Rana Mitter:Exactly. But more broadly speaking, the idea of the golden mean balance and so forth. Red Terror is about lots of things, but it's definitely not about kind of a nice balance. People will use phrases like it is sometimes necessary to go too far to do the right thing. And that's something that you will find plenty of examples of.

18:21Anita:And it's all these sort of cherubic faced young people who are doing these dreadful things. Just like I think you mentioned it a little earlier, the death of Stalin, that fantastic Yannucci retelling of the death of Stalin and all the jockeying that went on afterwards to get into prime position. That's hilarious. But there are actual real life hilarious things that happen. Can I please draw your attention or beg you to tell us the story of the mangoes, Mao and the mangoes and the cult of the mango? Because this is such a delicious story. I can't tell you.

18:52William:I feel I live in a city that has a cult of the mango.

18:55Anita:This is so different. This is bonkers. Go on, Rana, hit us with it because it's such a great story.

19:00Rana Mitter:Yeah, but the story comes with the fact that actually Mao didn't like mangoes.

19:04Anita:No, because he's a wronger and you can tell right from that that there is something very wrong with him. No decent person dislikes mangoes, I think that's fair.

19:10Rana Mitter:Not that we're allowed tangents but I would point out that the well-known physicist and communist JBS Haldane in his classic kids book, my friend Mr Leakey wrote about the mango in the 1930s as a kind of exotic fruit that most people in Britain would never have seen and suggested you should really eat it in the bath to stop being stained. Mao wasn't going to eat it in the bath or even in the swimming pool with Chris Chalks. He didn't like mangoes.

19:30Anita:Or anywhere. Never.

19:32Rana Mitter:He had been presented with a basket or casket, whatever it was, of mangoes, which reminds me of one of the best lines ever in the film, The Italian Job, where Michael Caine's girlfriend says to him, I only got out of there because the ambassador of Pakistan was a very nice man. If you want the context of that, go and see the film. Anyway, not the ambassador of Pakistan, but the foreign minister of Pakistan, I think, visited China and presented a case of mangoes to Mao. Mao didn't want to eat them because he didn't like them, Not least because by that stage he had filthy rotten teeth covered in kind of old tea leaves and eating slightly tasty but acidic mangoes might not have gone down so well.

20:06Rana Mitter:So he sort of passed them on and said, we'll give them away. And they were given away to, you know, one mango at a time, I guess, to different factories and work units in China. And because, of course, the cult of personality was operating in the highest possible gear at that point, They weren't regarded just as sort of nice bits of fruit that someone might scoff after work, but as holy sacred relics because they were Mao's mangoes.

20:31Anita:Behold, Mao has touched my mango. I mean, to the point, Rana, where it's so bonkers. You have like one worker who boils it so that he could drink a spoonful of sacred juice and get it going for longer. One who puts it in a glass case and bows to it every morning. I mean, it is so mad, but it's because he has touched it. The great man has given unto us. The man goes, well, she hates because he wants to get rid of them. But, you know, it's this extraordinary gift that has been given. It's a holy reliquary thing that's going on.

21:06Rana Mitter:That's exactly the point. It's a religious thing. It's not really a fruit-oriented thing in that sense. No. And, you know, it's like a fragment or a relic, you know, almost like a saint having touched it in this particular case that becomes part of this, you know, almost religious sweep that goes with the cult of personality.

21:25Anita:I mean, that's funny, but in the background, really not funny things are happening at all. And in the targeting of, you know, the bourgeois, the intelligentsia, and anyone who might remind him of this Confucianist era that he wants to wipe out of history, he is also targeting party officials, isn't he? Can you tell us a bit about that?

21:42Rana Mitter:As I've said, there are two things going on. One is an ideological revolution, a renewal of the revolutionary fire of the original revolution, as Mao sees it. And the second thing is an attempt to basically knock out all of his enemies, which also, from his point of view, goes extremely well. So amongst those who find themselves on the wrong end of Mao's wrath are some of the most senior officials in the PRC. Now, first of all, worth saying, pretty much every single one of all of those fellow leaders, including Zhou Enlai, heartily endorsed the Cultural Revolution. So if you get the impression any of them were kind of, you know, against it, at least in terms of speaking up, that was not the case.

22:16Rana Mitter:They all basically said, yeah, this is a great idea. Probably the most prominent person to end up, you know, at a sticky end was Liu Xiaqi, who was the president of China as opposed to the chairman of the party. So this is still a state position, not a party position, but an important one. And Liu Xiaoxi was basically, I mean, kidnapped is the only word for it, really, and held in a basement in the city of Kaifeng, where essentially he died from lack of medical treatment. You know, this is one of the senior officials and the old comrade in arms of Mao's didn't matter. He was just, you know, wiped out.

22:45Rana Mitter:His wife, Wang Gongme, was paraded in front of red guards. They made her wear a necklace made of table tennis balls. Ping pong, as you know, kind of ends up becoming a diplomatic tool between the US and China about 10 years later. But at this point, this was nothing to do with diplomacy. This was humiliation. They put this necklace of ping pong balls around her neck. Why? Because it was meant to be a sort of ironic reference to her wearing pearls at diplomatic gatherings. And the idea was that, you know, if you are supposedly a communist revolutionary's wife or communist revolutionary in your own right, but you're wearing pearls, you still have that petty bourgeois mentality and we're going to humiliate you for it.

23:23Rana Mitter:Other leaders, Deng Xiaoping, who goes on, of course, to become the paramount leader of China after the death of Mao. So you might say from paranoid leader to paramount leader is the way that it goes. Mao is very, very paranoid about Deng Xiaoping. He thinks he's far too sharp and far too smart. So he doesn't kill him, but he gets him. He basically, one of, I think, I think it's the second or the third rise and fall. Deng Xiaoping keeps rising, falling, rising, falling. He gets sent out, I think, down south to Sichuan. Anyway, but he's sent out of the capital, certainly. Meanwhile, the Cultural Revolution is going absolutely bonkers.

23:56Rana Mitter:I mean, revolutionary youth like teenagers are hijacking tanks in the streets of Chongqing, as it is letting teenagers out on the streets with any kind of weapons is a pretty dangerous thing to do. Adolescent boys with no education taking over tanks. I mean, there's an awful lot of sort of random shooting going on at this stage, even worse or better. and I think it's teenage, I think at this time it was actually genuine revolutionary interest up in Heilongjiang, someone decides that a really good thing to do, going one better than the Great Leap Forward in the Cultural Revolution, would be to not invent backyard steel, steel turds, we put it in the last episode, but invent your own nuclear power plant.

24:34Rana Mitter:Now, what could possibly go wrong?

24:36Anita:Oh, no.

24:38William:Teenagers in charge of...

24:39Anita:Oh, God, I have a teenager in the house. This is just a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible vision.

24:44Rana Mitter:Yeah, well, basically, create your own missiles in the backyard. Why not? So basically, lots of things. At one point, Mao was given an account of quite a lot of this stuff going on. And he said, everything is chaos. The situation is excellent, which gave you an idea of how he felt about all this.

25:00Anita:With all this chaos on the streets and the teenagers on the rampage, surprise, surprise, let us take a break. Join us after the break where we talk about the removal of one particular person who could possibly have been Mao's successor had some unfortunate incident not taken place.

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26:53William:Welcome back. So we're now in 1971. The Cultural Revolution is at its peak. Teenagers are going crazy with some driving tanks around military bases. But Mao is not yet secure. He is worried that the military has too much power. Tell us what he does, Rana.

27:09Rana Mitter:The Red Guard phase that we were talking about actually is quite a short part of the whole Cultural Revolution decade. It only lasted about 1969. And even Mao, who, as we were saying, was sort of cackling with glee at various points about basically China's unrestrained youth going around and smashing up all of their elders, began after about three years to think that maybe this was a bit much. So he basically sends in the army to shut that down. And by 1969, essentially, the Red Guard phase is over. But that doesn't mean the end of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it turns much more towards the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, being in charge.

27:42Rana Mitter:And actually, although it's far less sort of violently exuberant than the period of the Red Guards, actually even more people die during the period when the PLA is much more dominant in the next seven years or so. Oh, wow, really? Really? Yeah, just in terms of deaths. Again, fantastic information on this in probably the most comprehensive English language book on certainly the elite part of the Cultural Revolution, which is Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. And well worth reading, although it's not an easy read, I would say. Anyway, so at that point, the army has a much bigger role.

28:14Rana Mitter:And that's not surprising because Lin Biao, the foreign minister, is at this stage, you know, pretty much regarded as being Mao's likely successor. After, you know, as Mao put it, he would go to have a conversation with Marx, i.e. to, you know, pop off. And then something seems to go wrong. And even now, this remains one of the biggest mysteries in Chinese political history. We don't know exactly what went on. Maybe it was heated conversations in different directions in the top leadership about the event that would happen in 1972 that would change the world, which was Nixon's visit to China. That didn't come out of nowhere, obviously.

28:49Rana Mitter:And on the Chinese side, there were people, not least the so-called Gang of Four, Mao's wife and three other big ideological figures who were very much against the Americans being invited to China. And it seems that Lin Biao may have been in that grouping too, whereas people like Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, are very much in favor. So maybe, you know, the question about ideological correctness of inviting the Americans might have been part of it. Or just the kind of vicious infighting and purges that we know had been part of the Chinese Communist Party's rise to power over 50 years and more.

29:19Rana Mitter:Or both of them, you know, these things are not incompatible with each other. Two things can be true. What we do know is the end result, which was just extraordinary, which was that, this is 1971, a report was put out that Lin Biao, the defence minister, the supposed successor to Mao, had fled Beijing with his family in a plane. If I remember correctly, this may or not cause hearts to flutter with pride. A British Trident jet, I think, in fact, is the days when Britain still used to make jets.

29:48William:Oh, wave our Union Jacks at this point.

29:51Rana Mitter:Which had run out of fuel and crashed over outer Mongolia while trying to presumably flee for the Soviet Union. Now, the question of how that happened, was there a coup against Mao that Lin and his family had been planning and had gone wrong? They tried to flee and they hadn't refueled the plane enough. Or was this a setup of some sort? Very, very unclear. But one thing that certainly happened, even in the highly controlled atmosphere of China, the Cultural Revolution, was that once they started propaganda saying that, in fact, Lin Biao had been a traitor and had been trying to assassinate Mao and all that stuff, that even ordinary people began to think, well, hang on, you were just telling us five minutes ago that he was the great successor and, you know, the second and only to Mao.

30:31Rana Mitter:And now you're saying, in fact, he was a traitor from within the system. We're not sure we can believe anything that you say again. And much of the disillusionment with the system, and there are many, many reasons, but I would say that that particular moment, the Lin Biao incident, if you want to call it that, is probably one of the

30:44Anita:reasons but did did anyone actually point a finger and say we think mal might have killed him or nobody dared to say anything like that because you know what happens a bunch of you know

30:52Rana Mitter:rampaging teenagers going to turn up at your door you're very worried about the rampaging teenagers well yes if you met any teenagers you'll know about that just need to know their place let me

31:00Anita:tell you it's a hard enough thing you know yeah i haven't heard certainly convincing explanations

31:07Rana Mitter:that mal himself would have done that because if you think about it for a second if you want to knock off Lin Biao, knock him off, but how would you be in a position to sort of make sure he got to an airport, got on a plane with his family, but didn't have enough fuel to make it all the way? And, you know, how do you know that the pilot wouldn't have tried to land in the atom? There's a lot of contingencies there that make it a bit less likely, I think. It seems like a very complex way to try and engineer an assassination.

31:39Anita:No, fair enough, and he's quite a direct man, generally speaking, isn't he? Yeah, he just sort of arrests you and has you taken away.

31:44William:we're heading now to 1972 and an event takes place which I saw first on the stage at the Edinburgh Festival as an opera Nixon in China the only opera I've ever seen with a jetliner wheeled onto the stage of the festival theatre tell us what led to this improbable moment when Nixon turns up in the middle of all this madness

32:07Anita:I mean this is a ping pong ping pong diplomacy chapter isn't it

32:11Rana Mitter:amongst other things too indeed Now, I play clips from John Adams and Alice Goodman's wonderful opera Nixon in China to my class. So I try to get them in the mood before we talk about the Nixon visit as a historical event. Essentially, and put it as concisely as possible, the United States and Richard Nixon, who gets elected president in 1968 and takes office in 1969, are under pressure because the Vietnam War is tearing America apart and peace in Asia is desperately needed to try and bring a bit of calm to the world and certainly to the United States. And Mao, for the reasons that we've been talking about, is a very difficult situation.

32:42Rana Mitter:The Cultural Revolution is ongoing, but there's lots of awful after effects. You know, the economy doesn't do so well. You know, the country's in chaos. So both sides have a motivation to try and do something different. But there's one other fact that we have to bring in, and this is crucial, the Soviet Union. Both the United States and China are worried about what may happen if the Soviet Union becomes too powerful. And China is particularly worried, more perhaps than the Americans, because the Soviets and the Chinese fell out. You know, the Khrushchev-Mao bromance soured very quickly. and by 1960, essentially, they never break off diplomatic relations.

33:14Rana Mitter:The armbands in the swimming pool. Yeah, the swimming pool thing didn't go down well. So basically, by 1960, all Soviet technical assistance is very suddenly withdrawn from China, and China is left on its own. And for much of the 60s, the only socialist country or country at all that sits as a kind of eternal comrade is the Great Socialist Republic of Albania, led by the unspeakable Enver Hoxha. And Albania and China becoming eternal friends for all time is very much the vibe of the 60s. By the early 70s, they realized that, you know, the man in Tirana is probably not going to be quiet enough to keep China's international position going.

33:46Rana Mitter:So there are sort of signals on both sides, including sort of secret talks in Warsaw. And then Henry Kissinger, who's by then the national security advisor, goes to a dinner in Pakistan, a diplomatic dinner, no matter where the mangoes are served or not. And then pretends that he's sort of suddenly got food poisoning and has to be rushed to his hotel. But in fact, he's not being rushed to a hotel. He hasn't got food poisoning. is being taken on a secret flight to China to do secret negotiations about an American visit by President Nixon. And eventually, the diplomacy works out. And in February 1972, in what Nixon, never knowingly undersold, called the week that changed the world, Mao and Nixon met.

34:27Rana Mitter:Nixon arrived at the airport in Beijing, shook the hand of Zhou Enlai. In other words, although it wasn't the beginning of the diplomatic relations opening again, that would take seven years, didn't happen to 1979, the beginning of the opening between America and China was essentially at that moment. And as you say, there were sort of cultural ambassadors to, you know, ping pong games being played between American and Chinese table tennis players. In later periods, they would also be, you know, kind of opera singers, you know, other cultural figures who are trying to provide a sort of alternative diplomatic track at the times when the top diplomats and politicians were not progressing as fast as possible.

35:05Rana Mitter:We know in practice now that the 70s was a period of slow but sure realignment between the two. But it would be after Mao's death, which happened in 1976, before the US and China finally reopened full diplomatic relations. But the process at that stage began with that meeting in February 1972.

35:23Anita:You've opened the door to Mao's death. And so we might as well talk about it because we are on the slope to the end for Mao. His health is declining very seriously. He's suffering. He's got a stutter. He can't speak properly. He can't swallow properly. His muscles are wasting. Some people have suggested it might be ALS or some kind of neuron degenerating disease. He's in a bad way. Is he not seen in public? Is he completely sequestered while he's sort of wasting away?

35:47Rana Mitter:He's not seen that much in public, but I think that's probably par for the course after the Red Guard period. You know, he's still in 1969, 68, 69, doing these kind of big speeches in Chalamet Square where the Red Guards are coming to meet him. By the early 70s, he's pretty much retreating, I think it's fair to say. It appears to have been some sort of motor neurone disease. We don't know exactly where that seems pretty likely. And certainly even with the Nixon visit, Nixon only actually saw Mao once. He saw Joe and Lai and others much more. And that was partly because it would appear that Mao really could say very little.

36:17Rana Mitter:He managed to croak out a few aphorisms. Famously, he told Nixon, I voted for you in the last election, which was a nice little lie. He said, I tend to prefer right-wingers. They're easier to deal with or something along those lines. But essentially, by the last few years before Mao's death, so let's say the early 70s, there's a clear factional division within the leadership. The relatively moderate faction who are opening to America and the world, Zhou Enlai being probably the most notable member of that group. And then on the other side, the radical group known as the Gang of Four. This was a name that would only be used, of course, after they had fallen from power after Mao's death.

36:54Rana Mitter:They weren't called the Gang of Four at the time but uh jang chen chiao yao wenyuan mao's uh wife uh jang qing and uh wang hong wen these are four figures who are highly radical um and basically want to take the cultural revolution and ramp it up even further now we haven't had nearly enough teachers lynched or no absolutely

37:14William:teenagers running off with tanks we need more of that and basically these two factions you know

37:19Rana Mitter:continue to contest for power in the last years of mao's death joan lai actually dies just a few months before Mao in spring of 1976. And the Gang of Four are furious because huge numbers of people come out into the streets in Beijing to lay wreaths for him, what became known as the Tiananmen Incident, a long time before 1989, when of course the Tiananmen Square killings of that year become much more associated with it. But in 1976, the Tiananmen Incident were people basically mourning the memory of Zhou Enlai, who they regarded as a more moderate, more humane figure than the Gang of Four.

37:51William:And then Mao finally pops his clogs in 1976. A long life. He does. I mean, the incredible transformation of China that's taken place in that time.

38:02Rana Mitter:That's right. You know, when he finally dies, it is absolutely the end of an era. He'd been in power, you know, uninterrupted since 1949. That's more than a quarter of a century. And he had seen, and in some ways been instrumental to the conversion of China, if that's the right word, from, you know, an empire in decline to becoming one of the most powerful and important Cold War actors in the world.

38:28William:And is it actually a powerful, I mean, we've slightly given the impression in this pod, particularly this episode, with the sort of craziness of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution, that the whole place is just sort of an anarchy. But quietly, the Chinese economy is sort of moving forward and it is genuinely becoming a powerful force again in the world.

38:47Rana Mitter:It is. And we can see that actually there are various things that particularly when Deng Xiaoping comes in a couple of years later, the Mao's immediate successor is a man named Hua Guofeng, who, amongst other things, eventually arrests the Gang of Four and puts them on trial. But when we talk about his legacy and his importance, I don't think, I mean, the economic element is significant in that there are certain actions taken that set the stage for what would then be economic growth. But I wouldn't put most of those down to Mao directly. I think it's always despite him rather than because of him.

39:13Rana Mitter:No, I'd say it somewhere else. It's the legacy of Maoism. Maoism, I think, is probably the only ideological strain that comes from the non-Western world that has had a really global impact during that period and afterwards. Students rioting in the streets in Berlin, Paris in the 1960s. Naxalites in India and Kathmandu. Yeah, they talk about Mao. Naxalites in India are inspired by Mao. 20 years later, the Shining Path, the horrific murderous group in Peru, the Sendero Luminoso, they call themselves Maoists. There's a line, I hope you don't get into copyright trouble on this, I think from John Lennon, you shouldn't go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, that's not going to help you anyhow.

39:57Rana Mitter:I think I've got the really slightly wrong, but this is a culture of a Beatles song, in other words. People are not going around singing songs about Xi Jinping or Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. Mao had, you know, despite being a man who never, he left China twice in his life, both times to the Soviet Union. Apart from that, he never left the country. He had a genuinely global impact. And these ideas, you know, the sort of glorification of violence, the idea of revolutionary change, the idea of sort of the peasantry, guerrilla warfare, that's another one that, you know, he didn't invent it, but he certainly had plenty to say about it and his views.

40:34Rana Mitter:Even now, his essay on protracted warfare is read in military academies around the world, in the West, as well as in China. I think these are the things, and you can make your own judgment about whether it's good or ill, but in terms of sheer influence, Mao is still remembered as a figure who changed history. What I don't understand, Rana, though, is that almost everything we've talked about is, you know, it's all kind of crazy, mad stuff.

41:04William:All these different moments of sort of souping up the revolution, purging colleagues, producing crazy amounts of steel for the sake of it. It all sounds nuts. And yet at the end of it, China, which has been in decline for 200 years, turns around at this period.

41:21Rana Mitter:So the wider transformation of China at this point is also because of Mao and the other members of leadership who are with him. I think we should be aware of this idea of saying that Mao himself was this sort of individual leader without whom nothing else could have happened. I think the revolution is certainly shaped very heavily by the fact that Mao is there and stays alive. So, you know, China's press for national sovereignty, the use of the People's Liberation Army to basically create a powerful China whose borders will be secured, bearing in mind that China has 14 different countries bordering it.

41:55Rana Mitter:So border security was always a problem. That's one of the things that becomes a continued theme of, you know, Chinese political strategy and foreign strategy under Mao. The transformation of the economy, on the one hand, you know, has lots, as you say, kind of, you know, mad stuff going on like the Great Leap Forward. On the other hand, things like the moving of large amounts of industrial capacity into the southwest of China, largely because they were worried about a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, has provided in some ways the economic base for what became the kind of expansion of Western China into a much more industrialized powerhouse.

42:28Rana Mitter:So you can see the sort of effects of some of that happened at that time as well.

42:31William:As we speak, China is now, you know, poised possibly to topple America in our lifetime. Possibly. It's certainly the second power in the world. And when Mao is born, it is a, you know, a divided, weak, bullied, Finnish culture. How do we reconcile the fact that, you know, that this crazy old man with the cult of mangoes and children running around in tanks turns this country around rather than destroys it?

43:00Rana Mitter:Well, he destroys large numbers of things in it. But I think it is fair to say that overall, the way in which Mao manages to create a sense of national identity is a large part of what keeps China holding together and expanding and solidifying, even despite the huge destruction of his individual policies. That's the part, you know, it is ideology. I think this is one of the things that sometimes is underestimated, that when Mao put out these messages, you know, early in his rule during the Korean War, saying this is an anti-American war and we must unite to resist America, to make China strong.

43:40Rana Mitter:During the 1950s and 1960s, you know, the use of language to basically exhort people into, you know, serving the national good. For a country which had been, you know, invaded, occupied, where people still have vivid memories of the kind of horrific war against Japan, being told, you know, in this phrase that he used many times, but certainly it's become one of his most famous phrases, that the Chinese people have stood up. this is a phrase that in some ways, despite all the horrors that he unleashed on the Chinese people over and over again, did seem to resonate, does seem to resonate with many, many Chinese.

44:16Rana Mitter:You know, the idea that someone came along and finally took China from being on the back foot to being on the front foot in his own terms. That's what I think a lot of people, even those who can't stand Mao and what he did, would grudgingly admit he was able to articulate in a way that previous leaders perhaps were not.

44:34William:And that is recognised in China today, isn't it? It isn't just that people feel they have to be loyal to the party and speak lip service to Mao. There is a sense in China still, particularly obviously the leadership, but in a wider sense, that Mao is the figure that was responsible for this turnaround.

44:50Rana Mitter:Yes, I mean, I think it's fair to say, you know, again, you'll get different views depending on who you talk to. And there are plenty of people, particularly those who survived the Cultural Revolution, who are very negative towards Mao. Overall, the idea of him as someone who was, you know, founder of the country as it sits today, that is acknowledged. And yeah, I think it's probably fair to say respected in the broader sense. We should remember that these days we live in a globally, perhaps more authoritarian time. I mean, again, for many of us, the level at which Stalin appears to be rehabilitated in Russia is a rather worrying development too.

45:20Rana Mitter:But that is a reminder that it's not necessarily always the most liberal characters who remain most appealing in terms of their popular historical record.

45:29William:Yes, I mean, if you think of Ataturk, Nehru, they are both very unpopular figures now. And well, Mao is still very much there in Tiananmen Square.

45:38Rana Mitter:Well, that speaks to changes in those places too. Although I think Ataturk was always more of a kind of hard line, kind of iron fist guy than Nehru was. But maybe, you know, despite that, both of them now. I think the secularist agenda also, perhaps in both places, has been less popular in recent years than it used to be. But yeah, you know, Mao's legacy in China today, I think there's no doubt about it, is complex and ambivalent. Because on the one hand, the horrors that Mao visited upon the Chinese people cannot be underestimated. And they are not reported fully in China today.

46:12William:Are they known? If you talk to teenagers in Beijing today, do they know all this stuff?

46:16Rana Mitter:Yeah, no, they know quite a lot. Partly because actually, you know, with the use of VPNs and so forth, people in Beijing know a lot more than they're often given credit for. I would say that Cultural Revolution, you know, is better known, actually, and partly because it's an urban phenomenon, so educated people tend to know more about it and is pretty widely condemned. But as I said, there are these sort of nostalgia groups on the Chinese internet that talk about, well, let's remember that Cultural Revolution was a time of...

46:39William:Interrail passes.

46:40Rana Mitter:Yeah, all of that. They greatly afforded much less so. You get occasional sort of glancing references to it in films and reports elsewhere, but it is much less well known. But, you know, plenty of Chinese travel around the world. They're perfectly able to access, you know, Western reading on these things elsewhere. And I think what many of them, not all, but many of them would still say in some cases is that we acknowledge all of this. And, you know, particularly the crimes committed by Mao and those around him. But at the same time, this was a moment at which China, which had been, you know, weak and, you know, forced into kind of humiliation from the foreign powers.

47:17William:A century of humiliation.

47:19Rana Mitter:Yeah, a century of humiliation going up to the Second World War. was in a position to turn that round and actually say, you know, we will have the capacity to decide our own fate, even if under Mao, much of that fate turned out to be horrifically bloody.

47:34William:Professor Anamita, we are now freeing you from your prison after six hours as our hostage. You are welcome to take your freedom, but you have been absolutely wonderful.

47:45Anita:Thank you so much. I can't believe what a stretch of history you've taken us through. It's been an absolute privilege to walk with you through what is a mind-blowing and often really harrowing story. Thank you very, very much.

47:58Rana Mitter:Well, Anita, it's such a pleasure to be with you and with Willie, not only to have a chance to talk seriously about history, well, mostly seriously anyway, but also to tell a story which, you know, whatever else is of absolutely global importance and being able to speak to you and to speak to all the members of the Empire Club and of the podcast on something that's just profoundly important, that is a great privilege.

48:20Anita:Have we just been talking about the Empire Pod Club so much that you'd enjoy it? Well, I might as well tell you. Listen, you don't just get to listen to these miniseries in their entirety if you join the Empire Club, since Rana's brought it up so very sweetly. But you also get a weekly newsletter. You get book discounts. You can listen to our Writers of Empire bonus episodes as well. Just go to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com. Till the next time we meet, It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Droomple.