Mao Zedong and the Strategy of the People’s War: History Lessons

The goal is to identify and review the main features of the people’s war strategy developed by Mao Zedong using the legacy of traditional Chinese philosophical and political culture to defeat the Japanese regular troops and take power in the country by the Communist Party of China.

Research methods include components of military-historical, historical-logical, political science and sociological analysis.

Results. The main strategic principles of Mao, which helped the Chinese Communists not only to win the civil war, but also to expel the troops of the Japanese regular army, are revealed. Mao developed a hybrid strategy that included elements of guerrilla warfare. The basic principle of guerrilla operations was the suddenness with which it is possible to increase a slight power advantage over the guerrillas by the Japanese. Mao considered the driving force of the Chinese revolution to be the multi-million-strong peasantry, whose mentality he knew and used well. Only respect for and concern for the peasantry could, in Mao’s opinion, benefit the future revolution. Mao wrote in detail and convincingly about the essence, components and merits of his strategy, which was based on the works of military leaders and masters of war of the past years, including the provisions of Confucianism and the treatise “Thirty-six stratagems”, and had a clear political goal. The main principle of the strategy Mao believed the maximum possible preservation of their forces and the destruction of enemy forces.

Conclusions. The history of the Chinese revolution confirmed the correctness of the main strategic principles developed by Mao. Mao not only developed a brilliant hybrid strategy that combines the three strategies of Subversion, enemy depletion, and destruction into a single strategy of protracted people’s war, but also demonstrated how these strategies can be used in conjunction with the actions of the regular army. The combined efforts of the Communists to indoctrinate the masses far from politics led to civil-military cooperation. The people not only supported the liberation war under the leadership of the CCP, but were also prepared to further accept the ideas of the Communist ideology and the rules of the political game. The history of the revolutionary movement in the twentieth century showed the correctness of many of Mao Zedong’s strategic ideas, which were used in the theory and practice of the national liberation war in various parts of the world.

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