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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnondon.

And me, William Durhampool.

And today we are launching a brand new six-part series, exploring the life of one of the most influential,

but also one of the most controversial figures in human history, Mautzy Dong.

He's a figure of titanic proportion.

Sam Haley him is a revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage and lifted millions out of poverty, but he's also

condemned as someone who killed more civilians than Hitler or Stalin, a brutal despot who built

a revolutionary one-party state. To take us through this extraordinary story of an extraordinary

man, we are very lucky to have Rana Mitha with us, S.T. Lee Professor of

U.S.-Asia relations at Harvard University. He is the leading expert on China and has written

numerous books on this, including Forgotten Ally, China's World War II, and modern China

a very short introduction, which, let me tell you, is now in its count them,

third edition. Thank you so much for being with us.

Lovely to be here with you, Anita, and you, Willey.

So Mao is one of those faces that was so iconic and so everywhere.

You know, Warhol got his hands on it. He was on t-shirts. He was on magnets. He was on badges. He was all over the place.

And I just wondered, sort of in China, the iconography was very much of this sort of red sun, that he was almost divine.

The people of China were the sunflowers all looking up to this great broad face of Chairman Mao.

Tell us a little bit about actually the true story

...