Everything is scripted in great detail. Yet the most interesting thing is that behind that facade

from 1942 to roughly 43-44, extraordinarily violent perjures took place in that very same place.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, here today with Professor

Frank DeCutter, who is the Millius Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute out of Stanford University

and also Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.

The danger really is that so often within communist systems,

the people within these dictatorships and observers outside

occasionally tend to believe that the next leader,

the next leader will be more humane. It's the next one

will be great. They never are. Today we are discussing his new book, Red Dawn Over China,

which describes the early years of the Chinese communist movement and how it eventually

exercised a stranglehold on the history and society of China.

I don't want to start with the book itself or any specifics of your narrative just yet.

I want to begin by observing something I've noted in reviews of the book.

And these are admittedly coming from more journalistic leaning outlets

rather than academic ones.

But there seems to be a good amount of surprise

at the level of violence your book describes.

And it's interesting to me as somebody who used to work in government

that people didn't expect this, given the era you're covering, given the global region,

and given the personages involved. And I think that this unpreparedness for the malevolence and violence which occurred in the early years, the Chinese Communist Party's consolidation of power, can largely be traced to a historiographical problem.

And I think that's reflected either implicitly or explicitly in the title of your

...