"Mao, I call a populist tyrant because of what we associate today, and especially after Donald Trump with the term populism. And in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the globe, we've just been through a period, hopefully past tense of populist authoritarianism. But populism or another term that scholars use for voluntourism, it is an appeal to the mass public, the downtrodden and the dispossessed and the disaffected elements of a society in particular. That's who Mao appealed to in China, the rural peasantry of course most notably, but other elements of society in the urban proletariat as well. Mao was a deeply anti-elitist politician who repeatedly appealed straight to the masses and would try and mobilize them, I should say, through his campaigns, the yundong. One yundong after another characterized Mao's era. He would mobilize the masses against the state. He didn't use the state against the masses so much, certainly not after 1956, but he used the masses against the state repeatedly. He had an innate faith in them in their voluntourist agency, you might say. He distrusted institutions, he distrusted elites, and this led to his views about revisionism. He wanted to transform Chinese society, normatively, culturally, behaviorally, and the institutions would get corrupted in that process, he believed. So he leapfrogged the institutions, the bureaucracies and appeals repeatedly straight to the masses. So that's why I call him a populist. He was also very much a revolutionary in, I would argue the Trotskyite variety. He saw perpetual revolution and the export of it. You James are in fact writing your own PhD dissertation about the export of Maoist revolutions abroad during the sixties and the seventies. So that was also populous. To be a revolutionary, you have to be a populist. And then I would note, why do I call him a tyrant? So I call him a populous tyrant. Well, he was a tyrant of global historical proportions. He's up there in the league of Hitler and Stalin, if not more so. Many more Chinese died under his rule than did under Hitler's rule or Stalin's rule or Pol Pot in Cambodia, tens of millions, somewhere between 40 and 50 million Chinese died as a result of his policies directly or indirectly. I don't know about tens of millions, but countless millions, others were persecuted by him and took their own lives and were stigmatized. He was a despot and a tyrant extraordinary."