I'm John Batsworth, Professor Sean McMeekin. To overthrow the world is the book.

In 1965, 1966, there's a rally in Tiananmen called by Mao to inspire students to destroy their teachers, their books, they're learning, anyone with special knowledge, any professor.

And I point out to this, Sean, I've done some lengthy reporting about the red guards.

They're still alive.

They remember themselves.

They remember what they did, and they're ashamed of it.

They talk about other people stealing from homes they broke into.

They stole.

And it went on for years.

It was chiefly over in 66, but it went on for years brutality towards professors.

And again, I'm looking for ideas.

Mao meant this to happen, ostensibly because he was competing with younger members of the Politburo.

I don't know.

He tortured and beat up his own people, the Chinese communists, as well as people he didn't know.

He turned them loose on the high school where he sent his children.

Where are the ideas here? This looks like it's beyond intellectualism. It's complete

anarchy. Well, there is a kind of madness to it, but there's also this, I think, sense of

escalation. Now, if you look at any of the communist regimes, there's always been something of

a cult of the youth, that is, that it's only among the young that you can really instill the

full ideas, that they will

believe in the ideology. So the early years of communism in Russia, you couldn't trust people

who've been around in the old regime. You couldn't trust people over a certain age because

...