This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 13th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Mao Zedong's liberation of China was anything but a liberation. It was, however, calculated and brutal.

Frank Decatur has spent years pouring over documents that until recently were kept hidden away in the Chinese Communist Party Archives.

Decatur's new book, The Tragedy of Liberation, a history of the Chinese Revolution

1945 to 1957. He discussed his findings at the Cato Institute in September.

What better place on the Cato Institute to talk about the very opposite of the values it

cherishes, namely the systematic violence and calculated terror of the first years of the regime in China.

I'm particularly honored because this is the Friedrich Hayek Auditorium.

And that Hayek not written a book in 1947 called The Road to Freedom,

the Road to Serve them, that's very much the title that I would have used for this one.

By 1956-57, title that I would have used for this one.

By 1956, 57, that road to serve them has been pretty much fully travelled in China.

And that's the topic of the book in 2006 I read the newspaper article in which it was

reported that construction workers in Changchuan, a city all the way up north in China in a region

formerly known as Manchuria, had made a ghastly discovery. They were digging, and in that rich black soil of Manchuria,

they stumbled upon thousands of skeletons

very closely packed together.

The residents gathered around the excavated area

and wondered could these be the victims of the Japanese occupation of the city

during the Second World War.

One elderly man realized that they just stumbled upon the remnants of the Civil War.

In 1948, the communist troops had laid siege to the city, unable to defeat it that

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