338.Chairman Mao: Birth of A Dictator (Ep 1)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durympool. And today we are launching a brand new six-part series exploring the life of one of the most influential but also one of the most controversial figures in human history. Mao Zedong. He's a figure of titanic proportion.

Some hail him as a revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage and lifted millions out of poverty, but he's also condemned as someone who killed more civilians than Hitler or Stalin, a brutal despot who built a revolutionary one party state. To take us through this extraordinary story of an extraordinary man, we are very lucky to have Rana Mither with us, S.T. Lee professor of US-Asia relations at Harvard University. He is the leading expert on China and has written numerous books on this, including Forgotten Ally, China's World War II and Modern China, a very short introduction, which let me tell you, is now in its count them, third edition.

Thank you so much for for being with us. Lovely to be here with you, Anita, and you, Willie. So Mao is one of those faces that was so iconic and so everywhere. You know, Warhol got his hands on it. He was on t-shirts, he was on magnets, he was on badges, he was, he was all over the place.

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