Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…t work. You need numerous organized workers and peasants. You've got to have some local support there. And then you need a good party organization. This is Mao's idea of what you need for a base area. He believed that you needed to match your military unit, the type of military unit, to the territory. He said there are three kinds of territory: there's base areas, there is enemy-controlled areas, and then there is the interface in between, which is where guerilla forces are going to be roaming. So he was all about deploying the Red Army to the comparatively safe base area, they'll protect that. You might send guerilla detachments to some of the guerilla areas, but really only really small things would you ever send into enemy territory. Moreover, he has prerequisites to fight. There are six possible prerequisites; you've got to have at least two before you fight. The most important one is that people have to actively support you. You probably need a base area to pull this off. 00:36:00 He said that the last three things about enemy weak points, enemy exhaustion, enemy mistakes, those things could appear quite rapidly. But you better choose your terrain very carefully; terrain is immutable. He also said that if you're weak the way the Communists were, you had to follow a strategy of annihilation. What you do is you annihilate one small enemy unit at a time, and the cumulative effects will eventually change the balance of power. Only someone who is really strong can tough out an attrition strategy. He's also about triangle building in these areas. So, little guerilla detachments go out into the interface. If it works out well and it looks like they can start either a new base area or expand an existing one, that's what they're going to be up to. So, these guerilla forces are either a disposal force, which you could send them out to do risky things, and if they get wiped out, it doesn't endanger base area defense, or they can become a nucleus of a new base area. So in small guerilla groups, party members are toughened, cadres trained, the party government, mass organizations are consolidated. If they're successful, then you bring in the Red Army to do higher-level institution building and either greatly expand an existing base area, or you're forming a new one, is what’s going on. 00:37:30 Mao had two military services, we always think of army, navy, air force—that's not what it was for him. It was guerilla forces versus conventional forces. And guerilla forces are operating in the rear of the enemy so that there's no stability or security. In fact, there isn't even a front line; it's just so amorphous. And so what guerilla forces are supposed to be doing is exterminating small enemy forces, weaken larger ones, attack enemy lines of communications, establish bases, and force the enemy to disperse, but they're doing all this in combination with conventional forces. Because here's the thing: you think about Mao and his guerillas, well, actually, here's what Mao really says: "Regular forces are of primary importance because it is they who alone are capable of producing the decision," like winning the war. Mao and his guerillas, well, actually, here's what Mao really says: "Regular forces are of primary importance because it is they who alone are capable of producing the decision," like winning the war. 00:38:25 “There is in guerilla warfare no such thing as a war-winning battle”. The relationship of the two is really important. Mao also thought that you needed to establish a fire escape if you had a base area, like, if it all goes south, where do you go? And his terminal point of retreat for the Long March was up in Yenan. He thought it was important to figure those things out in advance. Mao also cultivated an unprecedented group of allies, never before assembled in Chinese history: not only peasants, but women, minorities, youth, intellectuals, and the enemy army, most creatively. For cultivating the allegiance of peasants, it wasn't just education and land reform, it was also army discipline. This is where the three rules, six points for attention, and a couple of additional points were enforced through 1949, when the Communists win the civil war. Why? You don't want to alienate the peasantry. These are the people that are forming your cadres, your guerrillas, everything. So, maintain army discipline. Don't mess with it. 00:39:30 Mao also took an incredibly forward-looking view about women. Here he is with his fourth wife, the actress. The other three had suffered, respectively, abandonment, execution by the nationalists, and commitment to a Soviet psychiatric ward. Not fates for the faint-hearted. But Mao calculated that women are about half the population. They're miserably treated, so they're naturals for wanting a revolution. They're a force that will decide the success or failure of the revolution. He calculated correctly, and he was way ahead of his times. He also understood that in a guerrilla war, you're sending all the guys off to be fighting, and you've got to be building base areas and things. This is where women came in to do those activities. As a result, he offered women the unthinkable, which is “men and women are absolutely equal. Women have the right to vote, be elected, and participate in the work of the government”. He's just way ahead of his times. 00:40:37 Mao also offered minorities the previously unofferable, which was self-determination. What the minority people didn't get is that a promise made in a really desperate civil war, with a regional war overlaid, once you win those things and you can turn your guns on those trying to secede, that promise may be unenforceable. You can ask the Tibetans and Uyghurs how it all worked out. All right, so Mao's strategy: he had a strategy of disintegrating the enemy army and let me tell you how that one worked. In every county, you select a large number of workers and peasant comrades, people below the radar, and then you insinuate them into the enemy army to become soldiers, porters, and cooks. You can use women to do this as well. Talk about people who are below the radar. 00:41:34 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. 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.…

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