Chinese Communist Revolution

And it got overturned by Castro and his brothers and Che Guevara and those guys.

You got the Chinese Communist Revolution, okay, led by Mao.

At that time, you had these wealthy landlords that owned everything in China and they exploited the peasants and the tenants that worked on their land.

In addition to that, there was tremendous corruption in the government of Chiang Kai-shek that ran China at the time.

So I understand that the Japanese have done a lot of evil, especially towards people of Southeast Asia.

I also understand that the Chinese Revolution has been tremendous for the ordinary people of China.

Before 1949, one quarter of all Chinese were opium addicts.

and only one quarter of Chinese could read and write.

Last week, we were joined by Rebecca Karl to talk through the history from the first opium war right through to the beginning of the Mao era.

This episode is the second of a two-parter with Rebecca Karl all about the Mao period from 1949 and the Chinese Communist Revolution until his death in 1976.

We'll take in the Communist Revolution, the first five-year plan, the great leap forward and the famine that followed it, the third front, and the period of the Cultural Revolution, before finally considering that question.

Who was Mao? What should we think of Maoism? How should we understand it today? Does it have any relevance to our current world? And as ever, I'll be adding to my map of all the things, people's places, technologies, ideas, and events that have ever mattered.

And, you know, when authorities who are more interested in law and order say, no, you must go back to your classrooms, sit quietly, obey, and the students say, to rebel is justified.

In fact, the rebel is justified slogan became newly available or re-available for the pro-Palestinian encampments so that you can see a lot in this country, you could see a lot of those encampments had these big slogans to rebel as justified banners over their encampments.

And so there was a real sense that in 1966 that young people were being unnaturally contained, were being unnaturally constrained, and that by setting their imaginations free from these constraints, one could achieve a revolution in culture and a cultural revolution that was adequate to the transformative potential of what Mao had in mind when he launched the Chinese Communist Revolution.

There is a very intense enthusiasm for Maoism in the 1670s, particularly in France, for reasons that never quite I understood.

So although the Long March and the victory in the War of Resistance against the Japanese aggression were totally different historic events, but it always reminded us that a nation's destiny is shaped not only by its material strengths, which is of course very important, but also by its capacity to mobilize society, mobilize young people in particular, and maintain a sense of shared purpose.

We know that the Long March took place when the Chinese Revolution faced the crisis And also the subsequent nationwide war against the Japanese aggression demanded an even broader mobilization of the young people.

So in both events, the outcome was far more than predetermined.

So for young Chinese today, I believe that the most important common message is that individual lives need additional meaning when connected to the fate of a larger community, larger society.

So becoming, you know, always use realism into their day-to-day operation of their daily lives and education, I think it is very important.

The Long March certainly demonstrated that devastating consequences of rigid thinking and strategic decisions detached from actual conditions, actual context of the battle, of the war.

And the Zunyi Conference, the turning point of the Long March and also the turning point of, to some extent, the CPC has helped redirect military strategy and also reshape the leadership of cpc and also enlarge a broader and possible development of chinese revolution also re-informs the importance of adapting mechanisms to china's real circumstances so for young people today seeking truth from facts become to be honest first and to adopt and to infuse intellectual capacity into this honesty and to help and to equip yourselves to become able to distinguish evidence from assumptions.

especially when we face the world with, for example, when we face the international affairs, international challenges, we face this disinformation or misinformation.

Improved transport links are also bringing more visitors to the region.

Rijin, known as the cradle of the Chinese Revolution, preserves a wealth of revolutionary sites.

In 2025, the city recorded over 26 million tourist visits, with both visitor numbers and tourism revenue reaching record highs.

Since Ruijin was connected to China's high-speed rail network in 2019, we've seen more visitors from farther afield.

I know that the podcast has really suffered for my attention, having been diverted to the textbook, and I hope that in the end it will have been worthwhile.

Also, uh, for all of you who read Turkish or like to read things online that your web browser translates from Turkish for you, at the end of July, the online journal Textum Dergi published a special issue on China and includes a translation of my article, The Road is Tortuous: The Chinese Revolution and the End of the Global Sixties, which I'm pretty stoked about.

Uh, but perhaps more relevant for you, uh, there are a bunch of other articles there worth reading.

I particularly enjoyed the long interview with Fred Engst, which they titled Maoism's Goal is to Win the Revolution, and they also translated the very important old article from the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars by Per Møller Christensen and Jørgen Dellemann, A Theory of Transitional Society: Mao Zedong and the Shanghai School into Turkish.