On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation)/Introduction Chapter 2
II
PROFILE OF A REVOLUTIONIST
Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Tse-tung, 1938
MAO TSE-TUNG, the man who was to don the mantle of Lenin, was born in Hunan Province, in central China, in 1893. His father, an industrious farmer, had managed to acquire several acres, and with this land, the status of a "middle" peasant. He was a strict disciplinarian, and Mao’s youth was not a happy one. The boy was in constant conflict with his father hut found an ally in his mother, whose "indirect tactics" (as he once described her methods of coping with her husband) appealed to him. But the father gave his rebellious son educational opportunities that only a tiny minority of Chinese were then able to enjoy. Mao's primary and secondary schooling was thorough. His literary taste was catholic; while a pupil at the provincial normal school he read omnivorously. His indiscriminate diet included Chinese philosophy, poetry, history, and romances as well as translations of many Western historians, novelists, and biographers. However, history and political sciences particularly appealed to him; in them, he sought, but without success, the key to the future of China.
His studies had led him to reject both democratic liberalism and parliamentary socialism as unsuited to his country. Time, he realized, was running out for China. History would not accord her the privilege of gradual political, social, and economic change, of a relatively painless and orderly evolution. To survive in the power jungle, China had to change, to change radically, to change fast. But how?
Shortly after graduating from normal school, in 1917, Mao accepted a position as assistant in the Peking University library. Here he associated himself with the Marxist study groups set up by Li Ta-chao and Ch'en Tu-hsiu; here he discovered Lenin, read his essays, pored over Trotsky's explosive speeches, and began to study Marx and Engels. By 1920, Mao was a convinced Communist and a man who had discovered his mission: to create a new China according to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. When the CCP was organized in Shanghai, in 1921, Mao joined.
The China Mao decided to change was not a nation in the accepted sense of the word. Culturally, China was, of course, homogeneous; politically and economically, China was chaos. The peasants, 400 million of them, lived from day to day at subsistence level. Tens of millions of peasant families owned no land at all. Other millions cultivated tiny holdings from which they scraped out just enough food to sustain life.
The peasant was fair game for everyone. He was pillaged by tax collectors, robbed by landlords and usurers, at the mercy of rapacious soldiery and bandits, afflicted by blights, droughts, floods, and epidemics. His single stark problem was simply to survive. The tough ones did. The others slowly starved, died of disease, and in the fierce winters of North China and Manchuria, froze to death.
It is difficult for an American today to conceive tens of thousands of small communities in which no public services existed, in which there were no doctors, no schools, no running water, no electricity, no paved streets, and no sewage disposal. The inhabitants of these communities were with few exceptions illiterate; they lived in constant fear of army press gangs and of provincial officials who called them out summer and winter alike to work on military roads and dikes. The Chinese peasant, in his own expressive idiom, "ate bitterness" from the time he could walk until he was laid to rest in the burial plot beneath the cypress trees. This was feudal China. Dormant within this society were the ingredients that were soon to blow it to pieces.
An external factor had for almost a century contributed to the chaos of China: the unrelenting pressure and greed of foreign powers. French, British, Germans, and Russians vied with one another in exacting from a succession of corrupt and feeble governments commercial, juridical, and financial concessions that had, in fact, turned China into an international colony. (The American record in these respects was a reasonably good one.) Mao once described the China he knew in his youth as "semicolonial and feudal." He was right. Shortly after Chiang Kai-shek took command of the National Revolutionary Army, in 1926, Mao went to Hunan to stir up the peasants. The campaign he waged for land reform in his native province can be described as almost a one-man show. The fundamental requisite in China was then, as it had long been, to solve the land question. Reduced to elementary terms, the problem was how to get rid of the gentry landowners who fastened themselves to the peasants like leeches and whose exactions kept the people constantly impoverished. In the circumstances, there was only one way to accomplish this necessary reform: expropriation and redistribution of the land. Naturally, the Nationalists, eager to retain the support of the gentry (historically the stabilizing element in Chinese society), considered such a radical solution social dynamite. But in Mao's view, there could be no meaningful revolution unless and until the power of this class had been completely eliminated.
While Mao was making himself extremely unpopular with the landed gentry in Hunan, the revolutionary armies of the Kuomintang were marching north from Canton to Wuhan, on the Yangtze, where a Nationalist Government was established in December, 1926. These armies incorporated a number of Communist elements. But by the time the vanguard divisions of Chiang's army reached the outskirts of Shanghai, in March, 1927, the honeymoon was almost over. In April, Chiang's secret police captured and executed the radical labor leaders in Shanghai and began to purge the army of its Communist elements. In the meantime the left-wing government in Wuhan had broken up. The Communists walked out; the Soviet advisers packed their bags and started for home.
During this period, the Communists were having their own troubles, and these were serious. The movement was literally on the verge of extinction. Those who managed to escape Chiang's secret police had fled to the south and assembled at Ching Kang Shan, a rugged area in the Fukien-Kiangsi borderlands. One of the first to reach this haven was the agrarian agitator from Hunan. As various groups drifted in to the mountain stronghold, Mao and Chu Teh (who had arrived in April, 1928) began to mold an army. Several local bandit chieftains were induced to join the Communists, whose operations gradually became more extensive. Principally these activities were of a propaganda nature. District soviets were established; landlords were dispossessed; wealthy merchants were "asked" to make patriotic contributions. Gradually, the territory under Red control expanded, and from a temporarily secure base area, operations commenced against provincial troops who were supposed to suppress the Reds.
In the early summer of 1930, an ominous directive was received at Ching Kang Shan from the Central Committee of the Party, then dominated by Li Li-san. This directive required the Communist armies to take the offensive against cities held by the Nationalists. The campaigns that followed were not entirely successful and culminated in a serious Communist defeat at Changsha in September. On the thirteenth of that month, the single most vital decision in the history of the Chinese Communist Party was taken; the ultimate responsibility for it rested equally on the shoulders of Mao and Chu Teh. These two agreed that the only hope for the movement was to abandon immediately the line laid down by Moscow in favor of one of Mao's own devising. Basically the conflict that split the Chinese Communist Party wide open and alienated the traditionalists in Moscow revolved about this question: Was the Chinese revolution to be based on the industrial proletariat—as Marxist dogma prescribed—or was it to be based on the peasant? Mao, who knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential, was convinced that the Chinese urban proletariat were too few in number and too apathetic to make a revolution. This decision, which drastically reoriented the policy of the Chinese Communist Party, was thereafter to be carried out with vigorous consistency. History has proved that Mao was right, Moscow wrong. And it is for this reason that the doctrine of Kremlin infallibility is so frequently challenged by Peking.
In October, 1930, the Generalissimo, in the misguided belief that he could crush the Communists with no difficulty, announced with great fanfare a "Bandit Suppression Campaign." This was launched in December. How weak the Nationalists really were was now to become apparent. The campaign was a complete flop. Government troops ran away or surrendered to the Communists by platoons, by companies, by battalions. Three more Suppression Campaigns, all failures, followed this fiasco. Finally, in 1933, the Generalissimo reluctantly decided to adopt the plans of his German advisers and to commit well-equipped, well-trained, and loyal "Central" divisions to a coordinated and methodical compression of the Communist-controlled area. As the Nationalists inched southward, supported by artillery and aviation, they evacuated peasants from every village and town and constructed hundreds of mutually supporting wired-in blockhouses. The Communists, isolated from the support of the peasants they had laboriously converted, found themselves for the first time almost completely deprived of food and information. Chiang’s troops were slowly strangling the Communists. For the first time, Communist morale sagged. It was in this context that the bold decision to shift the base to Shensi Province was taken, and the now celebrated march of almost 6,000 miles was begun.
This was indeed one of the fateful migrations of history: its purpose, to preserve the military power of the Communist Party. How many pitched battles and skirmishes the Reds fought during this epic trek cannot now be established. It is known, however, that for days on end their columns were under air attack. They crossed innumerable mountains and rivers and endured both tropical and subarctic climates. As they marched toward the borders of Tibet and swung north, they sprinkled the route with cadres and caches of arms and ammunition.
The Reds faced many critical situations, but they were tough and determined. Every natural obstacle, and there were many, was overcome. Chiang’s provincial troops, ineffective as usual, were unable to bar the way, and the exhausted remnants of the Reds eventually found shelter in the loess caves of Pao An.
Later, after the base was shifted to Yenan, Mao had time to reflect on his experiences and to derive from them the theory and doctrine of revolutionary guerrilla war which he embodied in Yu Chi Chan.