Protracted People’s War

Reflecting on Mao’s strategic innovation and legacy.

Essay

The laws of war are a problem which anyone directing a war must study and solve.
The laws of revolutionary war are a problem which anyone directing a revolutionary war must study and solve.
The laws of China’s revolutionary war are a problem which anyone directing China’s revolutionary war must study and solve.
We are now engaged in a war; our war is a revolutionary war; and our revolutionary war is being waged in this semi-colonial and semi-feudal country of China. Therefore, we must study not only the laws of war in general, but the specific laws of revolutionary war, and the even more specific laws of revolutionary war in China.¹

On paper, China’s communists had little going in their favour in order to achieve their goals of revolution. In the early twentieth century, China was still transitioning from a quasi-feudal system into a republican form of government. With a primarily agrarian economy featuring little in the way of industrial production, the young republic suffered from political instability, military cliques vying for regional and national dominance, and external pressures in the form of Japanese imperialism. Though the republican revolution spearheaded by the Kuomintang (KMT) featured an alliance with the communists, conflict between the two soon flared up, and in this decades-long conflict the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Red Army was at a clear disadvantage. However, Mao’s ascendance to the top of the CCP and his command of the Red Army saw a new doctrine of strategic retreat in the face of overwhelming KMT forces developed. His use of the Red Army not only as a military instrument but also as a political organiser and propaganda force in its areas of operations saw ultimate success, bringing the communists to power in 1949 after decades of attritional defensive warfare with Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists slowly shifted into an unwavering offensive.

We call this strategy protracted people’s war. This strategic framework is characterised by three distinct stages, which reflected the development of the Chinese civil war and pragmatically recognised each side’s strengths and weaknesses. The initial stage involved the adoption of a strategically defensive posture, in which guerrilla tactics were used to gradually wear down the enemy’s strength and to develop the greater popular support necessary for expanding operations. During this stage, retreats from untenable positions may be necessary to conserve forces, though this does not entail an admission of defeat being instead a recognition that the rebelling forces’ strengths are better saved for decisive efforts in the future. The second stage of this strategy is that of a strategic stalemate, achieved when a greater parity of forces arises from the attrition of government forces and sees the escalation of engagements, allowing a transition from defensive to offensive actions. Finally, the third stage is marked by a strategic offensive, where the strengthened popular army aims to decisively engage and defeat the weakened government forces. The guerrilla warfare characteristic of this strategy relies on mobility, adaptability, and especially a great deal of reliance on popular support, and Mao’s own formulation greatly emphasised the unique conditions which characterised China’s civil war.

Mao had accounted for a protracted timeline for the conflict. Whereas the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) — the KMT’s nationalist forces — was a well-armed conventional force with an immense manpower pool to draw from, the Red Army numbered at times in the few tens of thousands and had few resources from which to rely on. This disparity was not lost on the communist leadership, which had to tackle the herculean task of defeating the government forces that far outnumbered it. Time, however, was a weapon which the Red Army used to great effect against the NRA.

Even in the face of a greater foe, the fact is that guerrillas are inherently the active party — the party with strategic initiative — of an internal conflict which involves them. Robert Taber, a journalist and author who accompanied Fidel Castro’s forces in the 1950s, wrote that “the guerrilla has the initiative; it is he who begins the war, and he who decides when and where to strike. His military opponent must wait, and while waiting, he must be on guard everywhere. Both before and after the war has begun, the government army is in a defensive position”.² This is concurrent with the writings of Mao, more so if we consider that “he [the guerrilla] can afford to run when he cannot stand and fight with good assurance of winning, and to disperse and hide when it is not safe to move. In the extremity, he can always sink back into the peaceful population — that sea, to use Mao Tse-tung’s well worn metaphor, in which the guerrilla swims like a fish.”³ The informal, “underdog”-like nature of the guerrilla, allows them to trade precious government time, energy, and resources at an exchange rate which defence economists and strategists alike would rather play dice over.

Over time, Mao’s strategy imposed tremendous costs on the nationalists. Though the KMT led the young Republic of China dictatorially through the will of its Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, its legislative bodies still held sway over decision-making in the gigantic country. Mao noted that the toll he imposed on the day-to-day functioning of civil-society, the government, and the legislature, made such a structure suicidal to maintain, as outcry and burdens mount up and society too falls to attrition.⁴

Importantly, on an individual level which helps to explain the process through which Mao developed his theory for victory, Mao, though leading a dogmatic and mostly intellectually closed movement, was himself a very pragmatic individual — and an especially avid reader. Besides the Chinese military literary tradition he borrowed a lot from in his own writings, he understood war and its meaning in a Clausewitzian way — that “politics is war without bloodshed” and vice-versa, much like the Prussian Clausewitz wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”.⁵ In fact, unlike other communist leaders, Mao was not solely a political leader with few insights on military affairs: both through theoretical study and practical exercise, he dedicated a lot of his attention and consideration towards understanding and fighting the war he led, and his military doctrine was not a mere reflection of a dogmatic party line but rather the result of the aforementioned study and practise of warfare.⁶

Additionally, from the point of view of the field of conflict resolution, we are able to ascertain some valuable conclusions when analysing the Chinese civil war and the impact the strategy of protracted people’s war had on its many stages, which saw moments of escalation, de-escalation, and even collaboration at some points. The rise of a common enemy — the Japanese Empire — would bring back together the CCP and the KMT in a second United Front, after Chiang Kai-shek (who had conducted extensive campaigns of extermination of the communists — encirclement campaigns) was kidnapped by his own lieutenants in the hopes of convincing the Generalissimo of the greater threat posed by Japan.

Though neither of the opposing sides trusted the other and competition (and the occasional skirmish action between the two) continued, some temporary respite to the internal conflict was found for a few years. However, this period of formal alliance ended before the war with Japan. The peace that had been built was fragile, and neither side had an incentive to follow through with it.

FARC, a Colombian marxist-leninist insurgent group, fought a war against the government not unlike the Chinese civil war. This protracted conflict lasted in part due to commitment problems on the government side: the government accepted the surrender and cessation of hostilities of many FARC groups, but there are still holdouts to this day. This is due to the fact that, after surrender, the former guerrillas were still prosecuted and “disappeared”. The government offered no tangible incentive for hostilities to cease, and thus the insurgents continued their fight.⁷ The Chinese communists faced a similar problem. Why should they surrender the command of their troops to the NRA during the war with Japan? That may have helped them fight the Imperial Japanese Army, but it gave them no assurance that after that fight was done their leaders would not be swept aside from positions of power or even executed by the KMT, being now in a weaker, subservient position.

This leads us to discuss a key feature of Mao’s protracted people’s war approach to warfare — the incentives which led to the war in the first place and the means with which this war was to be conducted with were largely intangible in nature, and Mao recognised this nature of theirs. This means that: continuing with the conflict resolution analysis, there was no room for compromise over the reasons for which the communists (driven by ideology and unwilling to concede or share power with their ideologically sworn enemies) were fighting⁸; and that militarily Mao counted on leveraging those intangible sentiments and resources (which E.L. Katzenbach Jr. outlined as space, time, and will) — which were for a long time the only ones he could resort to — to achieve a victory.⁹

Though the strategy employed by Mao, which eventually led to his victory, has been replicated in several conflicts (there are currently maoist and other communist insurgencies following the general principles laid out in Mao’s writings in India,¹⁰ for instance) but the canonical second example of a protracted people’s war strategy being employed is that of the Indochina wars, with a particular focus on the Vietnam War.

Whereas Mao had found trouble in applying his findings on strategy in the Korean War,¹¹ which took tones more akin to western industrialised warfare with positional fighting, being a much more internationalised conflict with a lesser emphasis on its internal components, and having been fought in a much more constrained and limited geographical space, Vietnam’s prolonged conflict allowed the communists a great expanse from which to operate. Much like in China, Vietnam’s war was conducted from various bases of operation where the North Vietnamese Army (which controlled the entire northern half of the country and functioned with the backing of an established North Vietnamese communist state) and Viet Cong (the guerrilla component which operated across the south and neighbouring states with high mobility and politically engaging the residents of its area of operations).

Like in China, the government’s forces controlled a large territory but (as it appears to be the case in many a guerrilla war) “the more the enemy holds, the more he has to defend and the broader the insurgent area. Yet, on the other hand, the more the insurgent fights and wins, the more he has with which to fight and to win — in arms, in manpower, in material resources. Thus the objectives of the government and of the insurgent must be diametrically opposed. The army seeks to end the war as quickly as possible, in order to minimise its losses; the insurgent seeks to prolong it, since he has everything to gain by it.”¹² And such was the case in Vietnam, as the war lasted for 20 years and ended with a communist victory.

All in all, it must be considered whether this strategy has stood the test of time or not. To do that, we must look towards other movements besides the successful communists in China and Vietnam (and by extension a large portion of Southeast Asia). Malaysia’s communists, for instance, failed in their insurgency, which followed a three-staged strategy similar to Mao’s strategic defence, stalemate, and strategic offensive.¹³ But for all the failed communist movements which applied these principles, what is the most striking is how the specific ideology matters little in the sound design of this approach to strategy when fighting to subvert a superior foe. Afghanistan fought two such wars successfully (one of them precisely against communists!), both being lengthy, against a materially superior government, and ideologically motivated. Though it would be difficult to qualify the Taliban’s war against the government and international presence in Afghanistan as a protracted popular war, the strategic phases of the war coincide with one, as do their characteristics, with the insurgent forces playing not only a military role, but also that of a political (in this case particularly religious) propagandist and engager.¹⁴

The same should be noted in Gaza today. The experience of radical Islamists with the Islamic State in the 2010’s — noted for a sudden surge of positional fighting and manoeuvre warfare — though successful on the short term, failed to exhaust its opponents due to an effective counter-action. It too took on similarities with the strategy of Mao, especially with the use of propaganda and base-building¹⁵ but differed in the lack of effectiveness it achieved in converting the population to its cause: it was largely seen (and acted as) a brutal conqueror, as opposed to a liberator. Recruitment and support came in the form of coercion, even to possible partners, and it failed to use its technologically refined propaganda machine to grow steady support. But the Israeli-Palestine conflict, with Hamas as the primary Palestinian combatant further gaining a monopoly over its chief base of operations’ (Gaza) population, might unfortunately demonstrate that a protracted people’s war approach is still worth taking, especially in an era where even the most desperately poor forces can leverage technology and information to both spread their ideas and to fight on the ground. With the Israeli Defence Forces expanding the intangible incentives for Palestinians to revolt by destroying their very tangible livelihoods, it has assured organised resistance to Israel will be found in future generations of Palestinians with nothing to lose — the manpower pool of Hamas will expand faster than an end to the conflict can be found, and as was the case with Mao, time favours the guerrilla. As Taber puts it: “The rebel casts himself in the role of David, and makes it his business to force the enemy into the role of Goliath in the public mind.”¹⁶

The key takeaway from Mao’s legacy thus appears to be that his strategy may be readily available to any force or group whose intangible incentive to fight is great enough. It perpetuates a conflict, and initiates a cycle of violence that either ends with the elimination of the revolting party in its near-entirety, or with the absolute exhaustion of a society’s resources and well-being leading to a surrender by tiredness. Today, the clear heirs of this strategy are those radical Islamic groups such as the Islamic State and Hamas, yet as its principles were not exclusive to communists, so too does this strategy present an opportunity to many other ideologies. With the democratisation of access to technology and information, the role of that which is intangible and fuels a guerrilla is now greater than ever, posing a danger to an ever-polarising world.

Bibliography

• Blattman, Christopher. Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. New York: Viking, 2022.
• CIA. ‘Communist Concepts for Revolutionary War’. CREST, 24 July 1998. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp85-00671r000300050001-5.
• Deutsche Welle. ‘Why Has Maoist Violence Subsided in India? – DW – 01/05/2023’. Accessed 4 January 2024. https://www.dw.com/en/why-has-maoist-violence-subsided-in-india/a-64292819.
• Katzenbach Jr., E.L. ‘TIME, SPACE and WILL: The Politico-Military Views of Mao Tse-Tung’. Marine Corps Gazette 40, no. 10 (October 1956). https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Oct1956-TIME_SPACE_and_WILL_the_polit.pdf.
• Khatib, Lina. ‘The Islamic State’s Strategy: Lasting and Expanding’. Carnegie Middle East Center, 29 June 2015. https://carnegie-mec.org/2015/06/29/islamic-state-s-strategy-lasting-and-expanding-pub-60511.
• Mao Zedong. Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Marxists Internet Archive, 1936. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_12.htm.
• Taber, Robert. War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare. Washington, D.C: Brassey’s, 2002. https://archive.org/details/war-of-the-flea-the-classic-study-of-guerrilla-warfare-robert-taber/page/n5/mode/2up.
• Zucchino, David. ‘Collapse and Conquest: The Taliban Strategy That Seized Afghanistan’. The New York Times, 18 August 2021, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/asia/taliban-victory-strategy-afghanistan.html.

Notes