People’s War and Active Defense are two inter-related concepts based upon Mao Zedong’s writings during the wars against the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Japanese in the 1930s.2 Mao described numerous strategic, operational, and tactical lessons learned through the Red Army’s early battlefield experience in several essays that formed the basis for his military thought. Much of the content of these essays discuss-es situations particular to the campaigns against the KMT and Japanese that are of mostly historical
inter-est for the modern PLA today. Other lessons endure and form the foundation for China’s military strategy and operational concepts into the 21st century.
Perhaps the three grand principles of Mao’s mili-tary thought embedded in People’s War and Active Defense that have endured are 1) the strategically defensive posture forced upon a weak China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); 2) the need to involve the entire country through mobilization to achieve military objectives defined by the Party; and 3) the requirement for the loyalty of all the Chinese armed forces to the Party.3
Mao saw the existence of the CCP threatened first by the KMT and later by the Japanese occupation of China. The young Party and Red Army were politi-cally, economipoliti-cally, and militarily weaker than their enemies and forced into rural soviets to survive. The Party and Army sought to build upon the strength of China’s large landmass and population as it assumed a strategically defensive posture before going on the offense to achieve its political objectives. After the CCP took control of the country, China was weaker economically and militarily than the United States and the Soviet Union. Beijing’s perception of relative weakness justifies the most fundamental element of current Chinese doctrine: its strategically defensive posture. This assessment of military weakness, es-pecially relative to the United States, has begun to change as China’s economy has grown and its military has modernized, but it still remains as a fundamental reality in China’s perception of its “comprehensive national power.”
Despite the strategically defensive nature of PLA doctrine, Chinese military leaders understand fully the need for offensive actions at the tactical and
opera-tional levels of war and, when conditions demand, at the strategic level. In 1936, Mao used the term “Active Defense” to illustrate this concept:
Active defense is also known as offensive defense, or defense through decisive engagements. . . . the only real defense is active defense, defense for the purpose of counter-attacking and taking the offensive. . . . Mili-tarily speaking, our warfare consists of the alternate use of the defensive and the offensive.4 (emphasis added)
As the weaker power, the key was to shape the battlefield so that China’s strengths would allow them to take the offensive even if only in limited, specific areas. Mao expected initiative, flexibility, and good judgment from his commanders (“We do not permit any of our Red Army commanders to become a blun-dering hothead”5) and for them to employ deception and stratagem to achieve victory. Commanders ana-lyzed mistakes and adapted their methods of opera-tion and were encouraged to maintain awareness of themselves, their troops, the enemy, and the “objec-tive material foundations, i.e., the military, political, economic and natural conditions.”6 This multidimen-sional outlook presaged the concept of “comprehen-sive national power” that Beijing uses to measure China’s standing in relation to other nations.7
The need for mobilization was illustrated in one of the earliest references to People’s War in 1937:
Throughout the War of Resistance Chiang Kai-shek opposed all-out people’s war in which the entire peo-ple are mobilized . . . thus his actions compeo-pletely vio-lated his own Lushan statement that ‘once war breaks out, every person, young or old, in the north or in the south, must take up the responsibility of resisting Ja-pan and defending our homeland.’
This idea continues in modern PLA doctrine in the mobilization of the people, economy, science and technology, and the emphasis on military-civil inte-gration (
军民融合
) in military operations and combin-ing military with civilian requirements in the defense industries (军民结合
).Loyalty of all the Chinese armed forces to the Party can be traced back to Mao’s words: “Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Our principle is that the party com-mands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.”9 Party control of the military was reinforced in the first element of Hu Jintao’s “His-toric Missions,” which requires the armed forces to
“provide an important source of strength for consoli-dating the ruling position of the Communist Party of China.”10 In the years since Hu issued this guidance, this principle has been underscored by the repeated campaigns to oppose “removing the party from the military” (“
军队非党化
”), the “de-politicization of the military” (“军队非政治化
”), and the “nationalization of the military” (“军队国家化
”).11Mobilization and political loyalty are often linked together by the slogans that the PLA is both the “Peo-ple’s Army” and the “Party’s Army.” In order for it to be successful, the PLA needs the support of people just as it must always be a servant of the CCP. But the PLA must also respect the people, and after the rup-ture caused by the PLA’s actions in 1989, the military has worked hard to reestablish its image as a “Peo-ple’s Army” through its support to national economic construction and particularly in its contributions to disaster relief operations throughout the country.
Another way to look at the relationship of the mili-tary to the people and CCP is through the “unity be-tween the PLA and the government and bebe-tween the PLA and the people” (“
军政军民团结
”). As Mao wrote in 1945 in the essay, “On Coalition Government”:The sole purpose of this army is to stand firmly with the Chinese people and to serve them whole-hearted-ly. . . . Internally, there is unity between officers and men, between the higher and lower ranks, and be-tween military work, political work and rear service work, and externally, there is unity between the army and the people, between the army and government organizations, and between our army and the friendly armies. It is imperative to overcome anything that im-pairs this unity.12
These exact themes were repeated in a staff com-mentator article, “Always Care About the Safety and Well-being of the Masses,” PLA Daily, in September 2012, which also mentioned the problems of a certain
“small number of party members”:
The roots, the bloodline, and the strength of our party lie among the people. . . . under a condition of hold-ing the governhold-ing status for a long time, in the envi-ronment of reform, opening up, and developing the socialist market economy, a small number of party members did not adhere to the party’s fundamental principle, did not keep in mind the party’s mass-relat-ed viewpoint and mass line, became indifferent to the difficulties and sufferings of the people. The danger of being divorced from the masses is more salient than any time before. . . . Practice shows that only when we truly care about the masses will the masses care about us; only when we treat the masses as our family mem-bers will the masses also treat us as their kinfolk.13
“On Coalition Government” also acknowledged that the Army had created “a system of strategy and tactics which is essential for the people’s war” and had become skilled in both guerrilla and mobile warfare, depending on battlefield conditions. Additionally, Mao noted the Army was divided into two parts: main forces and regional forces, “the latter concentrating on defending their own localities and attacking the en-emy there in co-operation with the local militia and the self-defense corps.”14
Many of the concepts in Mao’s early writings on People’s War are found within the texts of White Pa-pers on National Defense issued over the past decade and in the most recent edition of The Science of Military Strategy.15 Moreover, the same basic organizational structure still exists for the PLA and militia as Mao described in 1945.