Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…an being a really good one, and that worked. Then when the Manchurian campaign initially wasn't going well for Mao, he retreated up to Siping, which is a little bit north, and that worked well enough. But when Chiang Kai-shek tried to pick these Manchurian cities as a place to retreat in Manchuria, bad news. There's only one railway system that gets you south out of Manchuria. You suppose the Communists don't know about it? They encircled the Nationalists in these cities and destroyed them there. So when you're thinking about insurgents and things, think about, well, if you knock them out of one area, where might they go next? Another concept from Mao is disintegrating enemy forces, which is what happens to the Nationalists. Think about it: Chiang Kai-shek had been fighting since the 1920s, forever and ever, and he fought the Japanese, they're brutal. The United States had trouble fighting the Japanese, and Chiang Kai-shek fought them alone for a long time before we joined the war. And yet, he loses a battle in '48 in Manchuria, and that's it. The rest of the country wraps up. So what was going on there? Or the South Vietnamese: they'd been fighting forever. 00:55:55 And then the whole place just wraps up. And the same thing happened with Japan in World War II. They'd been fighting all over the place forever, fighting us brutally. And then in 1945, we don't even have to invade the home islands. Think how unusual that is. The Germans fought every street on the way to Berlin; the Japanese quit. This is about disintegrating the enemy and why it happens. But what you can say in all those three cases is the warfare had been going on for an incredibly long time, and it was ruinous. The places in question were ruined, so don't expect that to happen too fast. Of course, Mao's big contribution was his three stages of people's war. Mao presents them as sequential: you go from one to two to three, and tada, you win. And they're cumulative, right? You do certain things, and then you get to phase two, and you've had this cumulative effect of destroying enemy forces. You get even more accumulating casualties on the other side, and finally, you win. A student of mine said that's actually not a great way to look at it, or there's an even better way to use it. It's like a metric of how an insurgency goes up and down, so that ISIS may be on the cusp of going into stage three. I don't know that they ever really—well, possibly, with all the equipment they got initially—or whether then they get knocked back to stage one, where you wonder whether they still exist anymore, and come back and forth. Anyway, that was that person's take. I thought I'd pass it along to you. 00:57:25 All right. I have one last thing to talk about. Mao, when you read these 7,000 pages—and I don't recommend it—one is struck by all these dualities. I think it goes back to Yin and Yang analysis, which is very prominent in traditional Chinese thinking. I got a little abbreviated Yin and Yang list of opposites here of these coexisting opposites constantly changing. ack to Yin and Yang analysis, which is very prominent in traditional Chinese thinking. I got a little abbreviated Yin and Yang list of opposites here of these coexisting opposites constantly changing. So, if you look at Mao discussing triangle building, it's in terms of the presence or absence of factors, presence and absence being opposites. So you're going from the absence of political power to the seizure of political power, from the absence of the Red Army to the creation of the Red Army. It goes on and on. Studying the differences and connections between dualities is a task of studying strategy, and it's really everything. To defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance. It goes on and on, and it's all about correctly orienting yourself between these opposites. 00:58:32 So, “oppose protracted campaigns and the strategy of a short war. Uphold the strategy of a protracted war in a short campaign” and I'm starting to lose it. You've got to put everything in the context of each other: losses, replacements, fighting, resting, concentration, and dispersion and I'm thinking, "I don't get this. Mao's bipolar disorder." So I turned, and then you look at the diagram. Okay, they're opposites, and it's either one or the other, but even- they're not even true to themselves. Each opposite is a dab of the other. I was having trouble figuring it out, so I went to this gentleman, Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith. He is the only translator into English of Sun Tzu who has a distinguished military career, and also, he went on to get a DPhil—it's like a PhD—from Oxford in military history. 00:59:32 If you look at his career, he's in China during the Japanese escalation of the Sino-Japanese War. He's back in China, does another tour at the end of the Chinese Civil War. He gets top marks in the military's Chinese language exam. Oh, look at these details: Navy Cross, Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Cross. He's a distinguished man, and for retirement, he decides he's going to go get the Oxford degree, and he writes the translation of Sun Tzu. He is the only translator of Sun Tzu who translates "死地" as "death ground. " Other people, it's like, oh, I don't know, I can't remember the words, like, I don't know, "contested ground," something else. But I'm guessing that when he chose those words, "death ground," it's because when he was thinking about it, it might well have conjured up his memories of what exactly it was like to be on Guadalcanal or New Georgia. He has provided insights- oh also the other thing to mention about him is he's really modest. 01:00:35 I had to dig around to find these biographical details. They're not on the cover of his book which is where they should be. And his service to his country continues to this day. Because it's his translation that continues to educate officers over 40 years after his death. But here's his take: "In every apparent disadvantage, some advantage is to be found. The yin is not wholly yin, and the yang is not wholly yang. It is only the wise general," said Sun Tzu, "who is able to recognize this fact and turn it to good account." And of course, Mao could, and he did. is not wholly yin, and the yang is not wholly yang. It is only the wise general," said Sun Tzu, "who is able to recognize this fact and turn it to good account." And of course, Mao could, and he did. But in peacetime, choices are not binary, they're graduated, and evolution is much more conducive to economic development than revolution. So that's what I have to say about Mao's bipolar disorder and other things about him, and thank you very much for bearing with me.…

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