2025-09-03
8 分钟The Economist. Welcome to Editor's Picks.
I'm Charlotte Howard.
I'm the co-host of our American podcast, Checks and Balance.
You are about to hear an article we have chosen from the most recent edition of The Economist.
We hope you enjoy it.
In the opening months of the Korean War,
one of the bloodiest conflicts fought between communist forces and the Democratic West,
China's leader Mao Zedong cabled his fellow tyrant, Joseph Stalin,
with thoughts about the deaths that each side needed to suffer.
My overall strategy, Mao wrote in March 1951,
involves consuming several hundred thousand American lives in a war lasting years.
Only then would the imperialists realise that,
in the newly founded People's Republic of China, they had met their match.
Mao had already sent armies of volunteers to the Korean Peninsula where combat had raged
since the previous summer,
after a Soviet-sponsored regime in northern Korea invaded South Korea, ruled by an American ally.
Coolly, Mao told Stalin that China expected to lose 300,000 more men to death or maiming.
Mao's disregard for casualties was no rhetorical flourish.
By July 1953, when an armistice brought 37 months of war to an end,
internal Chinese estimates put his country's death toll at 400,000.