S8 Ep256: MAO'S XENOPHOBIC REVOLUTION AND THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. Moving to China, McMeekin explains that Mao Zedong's ideology was a "bizarre melange" of Marxism, class envy, and intense xenophobia. Unlike European communists, Chi

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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MAO'S XENOPHOBIC REVOLUTION AND THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. Moving to China, McMeekin explains that Mao Zedong's ideology was a "bizarre melange" of Marxism, class envy, and intense xenophobia. Unlike European communists, Chinese communism was driven by a deep resentment of foreign imperialism. The conversation analyzes the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, where Maoattempted to surpass British economic output by collectivizing agriculture and creating "industrial armies"—an idea taken directly from the Communist Manifesto and Stalin's Five-Year Plans. This experiment resulted in the death of 40 to 45 million people. McMeekin notes that Mao ignored warnings from Soviet advisors to avoid their past mistakes, driven instead by a competitive desire to outdo the Soviets and a "fantasmagorical" hatred of foreign influence. NUMBER 5

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0:30.3	Continuing my conversation with Professor Sean McMeakin,
0:34.2	his new book, To Overthrow the World,
0:36.2	The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.
0:39.3	Karl Marx is a Prussian, a European.
0:43.3	Vladimir Lenin is a Russian, a European.
0:46.3	Mautzy Dung is neither.
0:49.3	He is a man who comes from the peasant, pigtail-wearing Chinese born in 1893, so much younger than the
0:58.8	older revolutionary communists that we've been watching in Europe. However, he is radicalized
1:06.6	as a student, especially something called the May 4th of 1990, I believe, in reaction to what was considered to be a sellout of China at the Versailles Treaty.
1:21.4	That is not his Marxism, however.
1:24.2	He comes to Marxist-Leninism later on, reading the Communist Manifesto, reading what he can of Marx.
1:32.3	However, Professor, again, congratulations for this.
1:36.3	In reading the Europeans in their struggle with Marx when he was obtuse and when he was rhetorical. Marx is a great writer. He would have been
1:47.0	successful in Hollywood for making up titles and easy ways to explain motion pictures. However,
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