Mao Zedong is named in these excerpts only once, and only in passing. In the episode “Socialism Reincarnated,” the guest Joshua Muravchik, discussing how communist systems came to power, lists the places where communism was imposed: “It was done in China and Cuba and Vietnam and around the world.” Mao is not named in that sentence, and no excerpt in the source set otherwise identifies him, dates him, titles him, or describes any action of his. What the excerpts support is not a biography of Mao but a general claim about communist rule into which China, and by implication Mao, is folded.
The argument in which China appears
Muravchik’s framing is that socialism divided into two camps over the course of the nineteenth century. One camp consisted of genuine humanitarians and idealists who wanted a kinder and gentler world through sharing and common ownership, but who could never convince enough people to adopt it. The other camp, which he associates with Lenin and everyone who followed him, concluded that people would never be convinced and that the system would have to be imposed at the point of a gun. Muravchik states that this was done in Russia and the surrounding areas that became the Soviet Union, and also in China, Cuba and Vietnam. He adds that the system called communism was never voted in in any country, and that by the time it reached its heights — which he places in the 1970s and 1980s — it ruled about one-third of the people of the world. Nowhere, he says, did the people choose it; everywhere an armed revolutionary minority was able to take over a country and impose the system. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Within that account, China is one item in a list, not a case study. Muravchik does not in these excerpts discuss Mao’s role in the Chinese revolution, the founding of the People’s Republic, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or any other episode of Mao’s career. The excerpts contain no dates for Mao, no offices he held, and no assessment of him by name.
What Muravchik says about how communist systems actually functioned
The excerpts do contain Muravchik’s general characterization of how communist rule operated once established. He says that nowhere did the system work the way it was supposed to; that people had to plead for what they wanted; that the members of communist parties and ruling elites turned out to have many needs and gave themselves many benefits; and that the only way an ordinary person could convince an official of his needs was to give that official a bribe. Socialism Reincarnated (2019) This is offered as a universal description of communist regimes, not as a claim about China or Mao specifically, and the excerpts do not attach it to any particular country.
The failure of early communes
The bulk of the substantive material in the excerpts concerns not China but the nineteenth-century experiments that preceded communist states. Bob Zadek puts the framing question: that socialist systems, wherever tried on a small or large scale, always failed, and he asks Muravchik for one or two examples of a purely socialist system that was test-driven. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Muravchik begins with early history. He says the people who invented the word socialism were talking in the 1820s, and that the group started in England around one man named Robert Owen. Owen was a successful industrialist who had made significant innovations in the mills he owned in England and had attracted a lot of attention; he then came up with the idea of common property. He came to the United States and announced he would build a commune there to demonstrate to the world what a better system socialism and sharing everything would be. He bought a community in Indiana that had already been developed by a religious sect and named it New Harmony. He gathered around him something up to a thousand people — Muravchik says maybe it was not quite a thousand — who thought the idea exciting. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
They settled into New Harmony, and, in Muravchik’s telling, there was no harmony and not much work. Within a year it started breaking down: there was a lot of quarreling and very little produced; they often did not even get to planting crops, and people largely hung around and shot the breeze most of the day. Within two years it was all over. Muravchik adds that this was not rare. In the 1800s a great many communes were founded in the United States, because land was free or cheap and the country had a big frontier, so that no one would bother you if you wanted to do things differently from everyone else. That, he says, is why these communes were almost all in the United States rather than in Europe, where land was harder to get, where there were more established social expectations and mores, and where the people around you might not like a commune being set up in their neighborhood. The excerpt breaks off at that point, mid-sentence, with Muravchik saying that in the United States it was — and the passage ends there. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)
Across episodes
Only one episode in the source set, “Socialism Reincarnated,” touches on Mao or on China, and it does so only in a single passing reference; the excerpts therefore show no development in treatment across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Mao’s dates, his offices, his writings, or any event of his career, and they do not name him at all. They do not describe the Chinese Revolution, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, or any policy associated with Mao. They do not give a Chinese death toll, a date for the Chinese communist takeover, or any assessment of Mao by the guest. Everything the excerpts say about communism in China is contained in the single sentence listing China alongside Cuba and Vietnam as places where the system was imposed rather than chosen.