Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…You're creating a nucleus of a Communist Party to erode them from within, and eventually, it'll have a shattering effect. He said, also, part of this disintegrating the enemy has to do with leniency. Sun Tzu advocates: never put your enemy on death ground. Death ground means that you just have no hope, that you're a dead person if you don't fight. So, your only hope is to fight. If you put someone on death ground, they tend to fight with incredible willpower. And Mao is: don't do that. So, what he did when you capture people, propagandize a little, recruit the willing, but release the unwilling, so that the comparison of communist leniency and nationalist brutality becomes absolutely stark in this otherwise pitiless war. 00:42:29 Okay, that's the civil war. Now, we're going to go to the second problem, which was Japan, the regional war. Mao made a really thoughtful assessment of what were the key characteristics of China that would determine what kind of military strategy would use. And this is his assessment. He said, "Okay, China is a large, semi-colonial country. It's an undeveloped country." Point one. "Second, its enemy is really strong." Point two. "Thirdly, the Red Army is weak. And fourthly, there's an agrarian revolution going on." And from this, he concluded that revolution was definitely possible, but it's going to take a long time. So he didn't kid himself about quick wins. He's going to come up with a strategy for protracted warfare. And he thought that Japan had certain weaknesses that the communists could leverage. For instance, the Japanese had inadequate manpower to garrison a country the size of China. This meant that guerrillas could roam far and wide behind Japanese lines. Also, the Japanese were brutal, just gratuitously brutal, and they're outsiders. This means that the peasantry are naturally going to gravitate towards the communists, just simply regardless of what the communists do, but based on what the Japanese are doing, they're going to gravitate towards the communists. 00:43:47 Also, the Japanese had grossly underestimated the Chinese. And as a result of underestimating the Chinese, they made errors. When they made errors, they started quarreling among themselves and making more errors and the communists could leverage these things. All right, Mao's most famous paradigm theory is his three stages of people's war. The first stage is the strategic defensive. It's the "prevent defeat" phase. The last phase, phase three, is the strategic offensive, the "delivery victory" phase. In the first phase, you're focusing on the peasantry. In the last phase, you're annihilating the enemy army. And if you look at activities that go on in each phase, the activities of phase one and two never cease. Rather, you add additional activities as competence increases. So, in phase one, you're doing popular mobilization, base area building, triangle building, guerrilla warfare. And then, as you get more of these things, then you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try your hand at a little conventional warfare, reach out with diplomacy. riangle building, guerrilla warfare. And then, as you get more of these things, then you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try your hand at a little conventional warfare, reach out with diplomacy. And then if you go further in stage three, then you're talking positional warfare, and you're going to have the war-winning battle. And how do you get from the phases? 00:46:41 Well, the transition from phase one to two is basically you have a critical mass of base areas, cadres, armed forces that you can move into phase two. But the problem of being in phase two is what had looked like isolated acts of banditry in phase one to the incumbent government, now the incumbent government gets it, that they're facing an insurgency bent on regime change, and the regime changes strategy. So the communists are no longer under the radar, but they're in the crosshairs. And it's dangerous because they're weak and the enemy is strong. So when you transition to phase two, initially it is quite dangerous. And here's Mao writing about these problems and saying, "Look, in these stages one and two, the enemy is trying to have us concentrate our main forces for a decisive engagement," i.e. decisive in their favor, they'll win the war because they'll annihilate us. And of course, this is what General Westmoreland was trying to do in the Vietnam War, getting the North Vietnamese to concentrate so he could blow them off the map. And of course, they'd read their Mao and didn’t do that nonsense. 00:47:50 Mao was saying you only fight when you're sure of victory. Also, in order to get to phase three, you need a big friend. Why? Because phase three is conventional warfare, which requires infinite supplies of conventional armaments that requires an industrial base to produce it, and somewhere like China lacks this industrial base. So, good old Soviet Union played this role the world over. And so this is the secret sauce of people's war: if you want to get to phase three, you need a big buddy. That's where the Soviet Union came in. And so this is why Mao determines that Yan’an is going to be his terminal point of retreat. He's fighting his way through to the Soviet Union. No kidding, you've got to have the conventional arms. To fight this stuff. What's interesting about Mao's description of people's war is it actually applied not so much to the war with Japan, which he claimed it applied to, but rather to the civil war with the Nationalists. And here is the key. Mao didn't actually fight the regional war against Japan. The Nationalists did. The Nationalists did every bit of the conventional fighting, except one, and that's the Hundred Regiments campaign that Mao fought in North China in 1940, and he was smeared. The Japanese responded with a "three alls" campaign, which is "kill all, burn all, loot all," which is what they did. And it wiped out loads of communist base areas in North China. So, Mao never tried that ever again, and he certainly didn't write about it in his collected works. Don't talk about failures there. So, it's interesting. What he's talking about really applies to the civil war. 00:45:01 And Mao understands these different layers. te about it in his collected works. Don't talk about failures there. So, it's interesting. What he's talking about really applies to the civil war. 00:45:01 And Mao understands these different layers. So, as the Nationalists are busy fighting the Japanese and actually being destroyed by them, the communists are pretending that they're fighting the Japanese. They're later going to take credit for it and say, "We won against the Japanese," which is nonsense. There was also the United States in that as well. Because he's using that to strengthen the communists during all of this rural mobilization. So, when Japan's defeated and the communists, when the civil war resumes full bore, he's in a good situation. 00:48:47 Okay, that's it on Mao, the operational military leader at the operational level. Now let's put it all together as Mao the grand strategist, of linking all elements of national power into a coherent strategy. These are Mao's instruments of national power: the peasantry, propaganda, land reform, base areas, institution building, warfare, and diplomacy. The US military, when they're thinking about elements of national power, love this little framework: DIME. D is for diplomacy, I is intelligence, M for military, E for economics, as being critical elements of national power. It's better than only looking at the military elements, at least you got three more things. But if you look at Mao, this is not a cookie-cutter event. This is a different society, different national elements of national power are available. You've got to get to the other side of the tennis court net to see what the other team is doing. Mao is famous for all these reasons, but also for his sinification of Marxism, where he makes all the things that I’ve told you about, makes his version of Marxism much more applicable to these countries, the newly independent countries after World War II, of how they put things together. He positions himself to replace Stalin, who dies in 1953, as the leader of communism. 00:50:15 Mao was prescient on numerous levels. He was certainly prescient about the centrality of the peasantry. He was way ahead of his times on the importance of women. He was calculating and cunning on how he was going to use minorities and POWs. He had proven his kudoi and determination with his military strategy. He also anticipated when the Japanese war in China would stalemate, and he also anticipated, more or less, when the United States was going to get into the war in Asia. He's the great sinifier of Marxism. Mao produced all kinds of concepts and paradigms that are useful for insurgents who are trying to take over the host from within. I've listed a variety of them here, and I'm going to go through them in turn. These are the things that the counterinsurgent then has to counter. All right, rural mobilization. This is obviously a big deal in Mao. If you compare—and I'm going to be doing a lot of comparisons with the Vietnam War and the Korean War because they're communists and all these things—you can see Mao's rural mobilization was very successful in China. The North Vietnamese rural mobilization was also really good. South Korea, not so much.…

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