Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)

Sarah Paine opens with a disclaimer that her views are her own, then argues that Mao was one of the most consequential political and military figures of the twentieth century and of Chinese history more broadly. She emphasizes his enduring influence as a military-political theorist, while explicitly distinguishing that assessment from an endorsement. Her account also notes the scale of China’s population and trade, and says Maoist theories were later used by adversaries of the United States to take over fragile states from within.

Paine explains that her presentation reconstructs Mao’s ideas from Stuart Schram’s collected works by comparing the published versions with earlier texts and restoring deleted passages in italics. She asks the audience to watch for those restored passages because Mao’s ideas are scattered across many writings. The organizing device is a four-part framework: Mao as propagandist, social analyst, operational military leader and grand strategist.

Paine situates Mao among major military theorists. Clausewitz analyzed conventional interstate land warfare; Sun Tzu wrote about maintaining power in a continental empire through coercion and deception; Mahan and Corbett developed theories of maritime power. Mao’s distinctive problem, she argues, was building a political and military structure from the ground up. Drawing on Clausewitz’s people–military–government framework, she describes Mao’s strategy as “triangle building”: creating a shadow government inside a fragmented state until it can seize power.

This model appealed to some postwar decolonizing countries that were agricultural and underdeveloped, and that viewed Western colonial rule with hostility. Paine describes Mao’s rise against the backdrop of China’s fragmentation after the Qing dynasty fell in 1911. The Nationalists and Communists first formed a united front to defeat regional warlords; Chiang Kai-shek then turned against the Communists in the White Terror. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and later expansion into China created a new threat, leading the Nationalists and Communists to form another united front.