What would you consider actual histories? I’m always happy to add more things on my own reading list.

What would you consider “actual histories”?

I can tell you, as a complete matter of fact from first hand witnesses within my own family, that the Chinese people were definitely starving during the Mao era.

Of course, they don’t understand that Mao was the reason for it, they have portraits of him on their walls and treat him like a hero. But they were definitely starving.

I’m reading through Frank Dikotter’s People’s Trilogy - that’ll give you an idea of what happened after the revolution. Before that, there’s a very good early biography of Mao written by an American journalist Edgar Snow called Red Star Over China.

Red Star will answer questions on why the Chinese would choose the Communists over the Nationalists.

Read Red Star first, so that you can be in the mindset of a hopeful optimist excited to see the old Fascist guard of the Nationalists be overthrown… it makes perfect sense why the nationalists would lose. However: what came after that was an enormous human tragedy.

Imagine people starving in California - you have a cornucopia of perfect land and the country still manages to accidentally or deliberately murder 100 million of its own people through insistence on ideological purity. Dikotter explains really well how that came to be.

The next thing I want to read is probably the papers Zhao Ziyang wrote - it would be fascinating to understand why the leaders of the Communist Party decided to ignore the student movement at Tiananmen in 1989 and decided to bring in the army to restore order by killing many of the demonstrators.

Oh - there’s also a really good documentary named The Gate of Heavenly Peace. That’s a must watch.

Did they do it out of fear of a repeat of students being used to purge and kill leaders? Was it that they felt democracy still had too many problems? These are in Stanford at the moment, I’m not sure if someone’s made a book with them yet. But Zhao Ziyang wanted a democracy, so it’ll be interesting to understand why he failed at convincing the other leaders in the CCP to have one.