Hey, tonight we're going somewhere most history classes skipped entirely, Mao Zedong.

A name that appears on T-shirts, coffee mugs and dorm room posters, right next to Che Guevara,

worn by people who would not last a single afternoon in the world he actually built.

We're talking about a man responsible for more civilian death than Hitler and Stalin combined,

and yet somehow his face

is still hanging over Tiananmen Square like nothing happened.

Seventy million people, let that number breathe for a second.

But before we get to the terror, the famines, the children informing on their own parents,

we need to understand the world that made Mao possible, because monsters don't appear

out of nowhere. They get summoned. And China in the late 1800s was doing everything it could to

summon something enormous. Turn the lights down, get comfortable, and before we dive in, drop a comment,

where are you watching from? What time is it there? I'm genuinely curious who's up at

this hour ready to go there with me. This is chapter 1. To understand what Mao Zedong was able to do to

China, you first have to understand what had already been done to China before he arrived.

And the picture is not pretty. Actually, not pretty is the kind of understatement

that historians use when they don't want to cause a panic in the first paragraph. The truth is

that by the mid-1800s China was one of the most systematically humiliated civilizations on the planet,

and the people living through it knew it, which somehow made everything worse.

For most of recorded history, China had been exactly the kind of empire that other empires

looked at nervously, from across a very large body of water.

At its peak, the Middle Kingdom, and yes, Chinese rulers genuinely called it that,

because when you've been the dominant civilization in your region for 3,000 years,

...