I've always been impressed by professor Paine lucidity when talking about history.She's the right kind of historian, the bookworm who's gonna read and investigate all of the possible documentation she can find before forming an opinion.
One of the criticism I have towards her, though, is her apparent lack of empathy towards history and its protagonists. She may very well read in history how Mao's genius of involving and empowering women in the communist struggle against the Japanese and Nationalists gave him a crucial advantage. This and other small acts that compound in significant events, that she can find, recognize, trace and expose.
She can clearly recognize how Chinese century of humiliation shapes modern Chinese foreign policy.
Yet, somehow sometimes she cannot see other obvious things.
E.g. Russians and Ukrainians "hate" each other, because they see the other as the bad guy in their biggest trauma. For Ukrainians, whose biggest collective trauma is the Soviet famine of the 20s/30s the Russian is the aggressor. For Russians whose biggest collective trauma is ww2, Ukrainians are those who sided with the Nazi invader.
Both of the previous sentences are equally true and equally...a bit more nuanced and complicated. But they still shape Ukrainians and Russians born 4/5/6 generations after those events.
Yet, professor Paine sometimes cannot see or expose this obviousness.