part0013

Before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the party’s top military commanders had accumulated more than twenty years of experience on the battlefield. The armed forces under the party’s control grew from just a few thousand in 1927 to more than five million at the conclusion of the civil war on the mainland. This battlefield experience would influence how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) approached the development and formulation of military strategy after 1949. During this period, the CCP adopted a variety of military strategies. Some were defensive, others offensive. Most emphasized employing regular units to engage in conventional operations, especially mobile warfare, while other strategies gave greater prominence to the use of irregular forces engaging in guerrilla warfare.

This chapter reviews these strategies, along with the key terms that form China’s strategic lexicon. After 1949, these battlefield experiences defined the boundaries for strategic thinking and influenced how senior military officers conceptualized and discussed strategic issues when formulating new military strategies for the PRC. The legacy was also a complex one, involving many different strategies that were contested during the civil war and over which contention would emerge again after 1949 in debates over strategy, in both the mid-1960s and late 1970s. The chapter concludes by outlining the challenges the PLA faced when the PRC was established and senior military officers began to discuss what national military strategy the new country should adopt .

The CCP’s approach to military strategy before 1949 is best understood by an examination of the different phases of the Chinese civil war. In the first phase, during the late 1920s, the CCP attempted to execute urban uprisings and insurrections to seize local power centers in several provinces, starting with the Nanchang Uprising in August 1927. The second followed the failure of these insurrections when the CCP shifted to establishing base areas in the countryside to serve as sanctuaries for developing armed forces known as the Red Army. The third began after the CCP again sought to seize cities in the summer of 1930. In response, the Nationalists launched a series of offensives against these base areas, called “encirclement and suppression” campaigns, to destroy the Red Army. This resulted in the first large-scale conventional engagements of the civil war. Lasting until 1934, this phase ended with the Red Army’s defeat in the fifth encirclement campaign and the start of the Long March, when the CCP engaged in a circuitous exodus from Jiangxi province and other base areas that ended in Shaanxi province a year later. The fourth phase covers the period of the Sino-Japanese war. With the exception of the “battle of one hundred regiments” in 1940, the CCP generally avoided direct conventional engagements with Japanese forces so as to conserve its own strength and to establish and expand base areas from which it would seek to gain control over the country following Japan’s defeat. The resumption of the contest to control China after Japan’s surrender in 1945 marked the fifth and final phase of the civil war, which erupted when the Nationalists launched a general offensive against the CCP in June 1946.

Until Japan’s surrender in 1945, the CCP’s armed forces were composed primarily of light infantry units. These units were armed with rifles, grenades, and some light machine guns, but possessed few heavy weapons such as heavy machine guns, mortars, or field artillery. Typically, the CCP organized its armed forces into three types. The first was conventional or regular forces, which were structured much like many other armies and emphasized the conventional military training of the period. The CCP’s conventional forces were first called the Red Army and then changed their name in 1946 to the People’s Liberation Army. They are also referred to as main force units (zhuli budui ) or, in certain configurations, field armies (yezhan jun ). When the CCP planned to conduct a major military operation against the Nationalists (whose military was called the National Revolutionary Army), it would employ its conventional forces. The second type was local forces (difang budui ), which were also organized like conventional units, but less well armed and less well trained, focusing only on the conventional defense of a specific area. The third type included militia (minbing ) and self-defense corps (ziwei dui ). These were composed of citizen soldiers and would be organized both in areas under CCP control and in areas under Nationalist or Japanese control. They would engage in guerrilla operations and in support activities, especially intelligence, logistics, and supply.

With only light infantry, three forms of warfare ( zhanzheng xingshi ), or ways of fighting, were most prominent before 1949. Mobile warfare ( yundong zhan ) was the use of conventional units to fight on fluid fronts, maneuvering and then attacking enemy units when a local superiority of forces or tactical surprise could be achieved. This was the main form of warfare used by the CCP’s armed forces from the early 1930s until the end of the civil war, in both offensive and defensive operations and at the tactical and campaign levels. Positional warfare ( zhendi zhan ) referred to the use of conventional units to defend or attack fixed positions with fighting on a fixed front and not a fluid one. Positional warfare was perhaps the least common form of combat during the civil war, but became somewhat more common after the resumption of hostilities between the Nationalists and Communists in 1946. Guerrilla warfare ( youji zhan ) refers to small-scale harassment and sabotage operations behind enemy lines. 1 To slightly confuse the analysis during this period, the CCP would use both main force units and militia or self-defense corps units to conduct guerrilla operations, depending on the circumstances. The CCP’s military strategies adopted before 1949 combined these three forms of warfare, but the most common form was mobile warfare.

During most of the period before 1949, the CCP’s armed forces were numerically weaker and technologically inferior to their Nationalist or Japanese opponents. Until the late 1940s, the CCP thus confronted a similar strategic problem: how to defend itself against a superior force to ensure its survival and ultimately to reverse the balance of forces and be able to defeat the Nationalists. Such conditions dictated an emphasis on strategic defense. Only in late 1948 did the CCP for the first time enjoy numerical superiority over the Nationalists. Even then, however, they still lacked superiority in equipment, especially artillery, armor, air power, and transportation. Nevertheless, within this broad orientation of strategic defense, the CCP adopted different strategies to conserve its forces and gradually expand the territory, people, and resources under its control. These approaches are described in the following sections.

The Red Army’s inferiority, and the imperative of survival, had several important implications for how it fought during this period. First, CCP forces would sometimes seek to avoid engagements altogether, retreating to remote areas and biding their time to build up their forces. Second, when employing its regular units, the CCP would seek engagements or battles of “quick decision” ( suzhan sujue ). Troops would maneuver to gain local superiority, attack, and then withdraw. The purpose was to destroy or “annihilate” ( jianmie ) enemy units, thus slowly changing the balance of forces while acquiring weaponry, supplies, and soldiers from the destroyed unit. Third, reducing an enemy’s effective strength through annihilation operations was often more important than seizing and holding territory. The Red Army would retreat from territory it had conquered if it concluded that it could not defend the area or as part of a ruse to defeat Nationalist units. Finally, the disparity in forces indicated that any conflict would be protracted in nature, as it would take a long time for parity to be reached that would allow the CCP to transition from the strategic defensive to the strategic offensive.

In sum, these varied types of military operations suggest it would be a mistake to view this period simply as dominated by guerrilla warfare, as the concept of “people’s war” suggests. Main force units from the Red Army or the PLA would carry out major military engagements. Militia and self-defense forces provided support. Popular support and mass mobilization were essential, producing not only manpower for the Red Army but also supplies, logistics, and intelligence. Areas where the CCP had gained control or influence were often harder for the Nationalists to take back. As the weaker combatant, the support of the people was critical. Nevertheless, the decisive military operations, backed by this popular support, were carried out by conventional units of the Red Army.

The armed conflict between the Nationalists and Communists began with the Nanchang Uprising on August 1, 1927. Involving many individuals who would rise to prominence at the highest levels of the PLA after 1949, the uprising represented the CCP’s first effort to use armed force to achieve its political objectives. 2 The CCP was founded in 1921, and in 1924 it established a united front with the Nationalists with the ambition of unifying China by defeating the warlords who then controlled different parts of the country. In April 1927, however, Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Communists, killing or imprisoning thousands of CCP members in Shanghai. In response, the CCP decided to take up arms and its first military action occurred with its bid to seize Nanchang, a city in Jiangxi province. 3

The Nanchang Uprising only lasted a few days. Nevertheless, the CCP attempted more armed uprisings in different parts of southeastern China. In September 1927, for example, Mao Zedong led a series of insurrections in Hunan and Jiangxi known as the Autumn Harvest Uprisings. Uprisings occurred in other parts of China, including the city of Guangzhou. All told, official histories indicate that more than one hundred uprisings occurred from July 1927 until the end of 1929. 4 The implied strategy was that the CCP needed to seize control of areas, usually urban ones, from which it would be able to spread its revolution among the working class and peasants, then gradually expand its power throughout the country.

All these early attempts to seize power failed. Some members of the party remained committed to taking control of urban areas deemed most appropriate for a communist revolution based on mobilizing the working class. Others, including Mao Zedong, decided to create bases in rural areas and “encircle the cities from the countryside,” while at the same time realizing the more immediate and practical necessity of avoiding major conflicts in order to increase the size and strength of the CCP’s armed forces. Although the CCP’s ideas about mobilizing the peasantry to support the revolution were not yet fully developed during this period, rural base areas provided a degree of sanctuary for the party, enabling it to develop and organize its armed forces and gradually expand the territory and population under its control.

Between 1927 and 1930, the CCP established more than ten base areas. They were located in the remote border areas of provinces in south-central China, such as Jiangxi, Fujian, Hunan, Henan, Hubei, Anhui, and Sichuan. 5 The base area in the Jinggang Mountains in Jiangxi province, established by Mao Zedong in late 1927, is perhaps the most well known of those created during this period. However, as shown in map 2.1 , Mao along with Zhu De would later move south to establish another base area on the Jiangxi-Fujian border. 6 Other significant bases were established along the Hunan-Hubei border and the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border. Official histories attribute the establishment and expansion of these rural base areas to the use of guerrilla warfare, which was well suited to the weaknesses of the Red Army while contributing to its goal of eliminating local power holders in these areas. 7 Still, guerrilla warfare was only a temporary expedient until the party gained sufficient manpower, weapons, and supplies to develop and train regular forces to conduct conventional operations. Because many of the commanders at the time, such as Zhu De, had received modern military training through service in warlord armies, they sought to build similar conventional forces to defeat the Nationalists. 8 Moreover, the majority of the Red Army’s leadership subscribed to a conventional military ethic that emphasized regular forces. This was shaped by exposure to either Russian or warlord armies. By contrast, only a minority of the leadership, including Mao Zedong, embraced a guerrilla ethic. 9

By the summer of 1930, the strategy of establishing rural base areas and avoiding engagements with Nationalist units had appeared to pay off. The CCP forces numbered around one hundred thousand soldiers, with seventy thousand in the Red Army and thirty thousand local forces. 10 The largest base area was located in Jiangxi along the border with Fujian, also known as the “Central Soviet,” with a strength of about forty thousand soldiers. Based on this strength, the CCP leadership decided again to attempt to seize several cities in Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, including Nanchang and Changsha, in the summer of 1930. Like the 1927 uprisings, however, these attempts also failed. Yet they revealed the growing strength of the Communist forces, which represented a renewed challenge to the Nationalists even after Chiang had nominally unified China during the Northern Expedition. In November 1930, Chiang decided to go on the offensive and attack CCP forces in the base areas with “encirclement and suppression” (weijiao ) or pacification campaigns .

Between October 1930 and October 1934, the Nationalists would launch five offensives against the CCP. The most well-known of those targeted the Central Soviet, which was the Communists’ largest base area. The Nationalists also attacked other base areas, including those on the Hunan-Hubei border and the Hubei-Henan-Anhui border. a These campaigns, which the CCP calls counter–encirclement campaigns, offer important examples of the CCP’s evolving military strategy. In each campaign, the Red Army was vastly outnumbered, on the defensive, and seeking to ensure its survival. Nevertheless, different strategies were used to defend against the Nationalists’ attacks, including a mix of defensive and offensive operations. Mao Zedong, then head of the government in the Central Soviet, was closely involved in the development of the Red Army’s military strategy in the first three encirclement campaigns, which would later contribute to the development of Mao’s “military thought” ( junshi sixiang ).

Official histories describe Red Army operations during these campaigns as emphasizing mobile warfare. The campaigns involved the Red Army’s main force units, drawing directly or indirectly on the populations in base areas for support, supplies, and intelligence. 11 While waiting for the opportune moment to attack and destroy select Nationalist units, Red Army units would maneuver to create ambushes or wear down Nationalist forces who were operating in unfamiliar terrain. When surprise or a local superiority of forces could be achieved, the Red Army would attack.

The first encirclement campaign, from December 1930 to January 1931, highlighted the use of “luring the enemy in deep” ( youdi shenru ). The Nationalists dispatched one hundred thousand soldiers to attack the Red Army’s forces, which numbered roughly forty thousand. Under Mao’s direction, the basic concept of operations was to draw the Nationalists into the mountains of the base area and then ambush them. The Red Army achieved tactical surprise, destroying one Nationalist division and inflicting significant losses on another, which then withdrew, ending the campaign. 12

The CCP’s strategy in the second encirclement campaign, from April to May 1931, was similar to the first but without the active deception of luring Nationalist forces into the base area. This time, the Nationalists deployed two hundred thousand troops against roughly thirty thousand in the Red Army. 13 CCP forces targeted one of the weaker Nationalist units, the Fifth Division, and laid an ambush as it entered the base area. CCP forces then chased retreating Nationalist units, tripling the area under their control. 14 Poor coordination among the four columns of Nationalist troops contributed to the Red Army’s success. 15

The third encirclement campaign lasted from July to September 1931. Official histories claim that the Nationalists mobilized 300,000 soldiers, but the actual number may have been closer to 130,000, as many Nationalist units were understrength. The CCP fielded between 30,000 and 55,000 soldiers. 16 The CCP strategy was to maneuver within the base area for a month without engaging the Nationalists, thereby wearing down units that were operating in unfamiliar territory that had been deliberately evacuated to deny them supplies. The Red Army avoided the strongest Nationalist armies, attacking and destroying several weaker divisions in the second week of August. Emboldened, the Red Army then attacked one of the strongest Nationalist armies that it had previously sought to avoid, the Nineteenth Route Army. However, CCP forces were defeated and lost about 20 percent of their manpower.

Following the third campaign, the Nationalists paused their attacks against the Central Soviet. Chiang had to divert troops first to deal with the establishment of a rival Nationalist government in Guangzhou allied with several warlords in the summer of 1931, followed by Japan’s invasion of Manchuria after the Mukden Incident in September 1931. 17 Given that the Red Army had not destroyed two powerful Nationalist armies involved in the third campaign, this diversion of Nationalist forces likely saved the CCP from even further losses. 18 Nevertheless, with the attention of the Nationalists focused elsewhere, the Central Soviet was able to expand, growing to 50,000 square kilometers with a population of 2.5 million. 19

After the third encirclement campaign, the CCP’s top leadership reconsidered its military strategy. Although militarily successful, the operations in the first three campaigns had been controversial. Some objected that the base areas in which the CCP was trying to mobilize the masses and build a new state around socialist policies such as land reform were ravaged by the fighting. Mao’s strategy of luring the enemy in deep was viewed as weakening the image and status of the party in the minds of the people whose support it was trying to mobilize. Following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, along with the apparent success in the third encirclement campaign, the CCP decided to go on the offensive. In January 1932, the party leadership in Shanghai issued instructions “to seize one or two important key cities so as to win an initial victory of the revolution in one or more provinces.” 20 The goal was to enlarge the territory under CCP control and integrate isolated base areas, focusing on the provinces of Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi. The initial action under this new policy, the siege of the city of Ganzhou in Jiangxi, lasted from late February to late March 1932. Although the attack failed, the party continued with this new approach. By the summer of 1932, party documents described the new strategy as “active offense” ( jiji jingong ) . 21

Mao Zedong opposed these changes to the party’s military strategy. Following the instruction to seize one or two key cities in January 1932, he took sick leave. After the failed siege of Ganzhou, he was called back to work. Over Mao’s objections, the party leaders in the Central Soviet decided to attack Nationalist areas in northern Jiangxi. In open defiance, Mao led the forces under his command in this two-pronged attack to western Fujian instead. Although Mao’s raid of the city of Zhangzhou succeeded, the leadership of the Central Soviet, which now included national party leaders from Shanghai such as Zhou Enlai, decided at the Ningdu Conference in October 1932 to strip him of responsibility for military affairs. 22 Mao was charged with disobeying the party’s instructions, advocating a “pure defensive line” ( danchun fangyu luxian ) based on avoiding engagements with the Nationalists outside the Central Soviet, and committing the “rightist risk” of waiting for the enemy to attack (a direct critique of luring the enemy in deep). 23 Thus, the party leadership rejected Mao’s strategies used in the first three encirclement campaigns.

The fourth encirclement campaign lasted from January to April 1933. Consistent with the principle of “active offense,” the Ningdu Conference also determined that the Red Army would launch preemptive strikes against Nationalist forces that were preparing for another assault on the Central Soviet, targeting Nationalist weak points along the perimeter but not luring them into the base area. Mao later described this approach as “resisting the enemy beyond the gates” ( yudi yu guomen zhiwai ). 24 The campaign also featured what was becoming a familiar CCP tactic of targeting reinforcements dispatched to relieve a besieged unit. When the campaign started, the Nationalists had assembled 154,000 soldiers, with another 240,000 occupying blocking positions around the base area, against 65,000 Red Army troops. 25 In the first phase, Red Army units attacked along the northern and western edge of the base area, driving away Nationalist forces. In the second phase, they besieged the Nationalists at Nanfeng and then attacked two divisions dispatched as reinforcements, destroying one and weakening the other. The campaign ended indecisively, as the bulk of Nationalist forces remained intact. 2 6

The fifth and decisive encirclement campaign occurred from October 1933 to October 1934. This time, the Nationalists changed their strategy. Before, their units would seek to drive deep into the Central Soviet. Now, they decided to create a ring of interconnected blockhouses and then gradually tighten a net around the base area to trap and destroy the Red Army inside. 27 The approach was “strategically offensive but tactically defensive.” 28 By gradually reducing the territory under CCP control, the Nationalists intended to limit the Red Army’s resources and, even more important, its ability to maneuver, which had played a key role in defeating previous Nationalist encirclement campaigns, to gain advantage. Reflecting the importance that Chiang Kai-shek attached to this campaign, the Nationalists deployed about one million soldiers, including 500,000 to invade the base area, against 120,000 Communist forces, creating the largest disparity in forces and thus the harshest conditions to date for the Red Army. 29

The results of Chiang’s new strategy were devastating. Red Army attacks could not break through an east-west line that the Nationalists had created in the northern part of the Central Soviet, which had forced it into a passive position. What became known as “short, swift thrusts” against these fixed positions failed to create any breakthroughs and resulted only in costly engagements. An effort to build “red” blockhouses failed to halt the Nationalist advance in the face of its superior firepower. As Edward Dryer concludes, “It is difficult to imagine any communist strategy that would have prevailed against this combination of factors.” 30 The campaign had demonstrated that the Red Army could not wage positional defensive warfare from a position of significant inferiority. 31

As the net was closing in the summer of 1934, the CCP leadership began to discuss leaving the base area, a move that they called a “strategic transfer” ( zhanlue zhuanyi ). In October 1934, after several months of planning, they embarked on what would later become known as the Long March (as shown in map 2.1 ). In March 1935, Zhang Guotao’s forces, now in Sichuan, began to march to the west, followed by He Long’s forces, now in Hunan. Some Red Army units remained behind in Jiangxi to screen the retreating columns and conduct guerrilla operations against the Nationalists. 32

The strategic goal of the march was to establish a new base area in which the CCP forces could regroup and rebuild. Strategy in the march itself, along with the final destination, changed frequently. The results of the march, however, were devastating. Of the roughly one hundred thousand soldiers that departed from the Central Soviet in October 1934, only ten thousand arrived in northern Shaanxi in October 1935 after traveling more than three thousand miles. The remnants of Zhang Guotao and He Long’s forces that began their own long marches from other base areas would only arrive in Shaanxi about a year later .

In late 1934 and early 1935, the CCP leadership held a series of meetings during the Long March to discuss strategy and to examine the reasons for the Red Army’s defeat in the fifth encirclement campaign. The most well-known meeting was held in the city of Zunyi in Guizhou province. These meetings provided a fortuitous political opening for Mao. Since he had been completely removed from responsibility for military affairs in October 1932, he could not be blamed for the Red Army’s defeat in the fifth encirclement campaign. Moreover, he could use the party’s defeat to blame others for pursuing a flawed strategy and thereby to elevate his position within the party. Over time, the critique of the military strategy that Mao advocated at Zunyi would eventually form part of the orthodoxy of Mao’s military thought.

In his speech and the final Politburo resolution, Mao challenged the view that the Red Army’s failure could be attributed to “objective” factors, such as the enemy’s overwhelming strength and the CCP’s weakness. In a clear jab at those who had critiqued his military strategy at the Ningdu Conference in October 1932, Mao charged that the party had adopted a “pure defensive line” or “purely protective defense” ( zhuanshou fangyu ) of positional warfare and blockhouse warfare. The party should have pursued a “decisive defense” ( juezhan fangyu ), which Mao also termed an “offensive defense” ( gongshi fangyu ), in which superior forces were concentrated to attack an enemy’s weak points through mobile operations. 33 In other words, the party should have adopted Mao’s strategies from the first three encirclement campaigns.

In December 1936, Mao elaborated on these ideas when he delivered a lecture that would form one of his most influential essays on military affairs. Entitled “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” it examined the reasons for the successes and failures during the five encirclement campaigns for the purpose of identifying the “correct” military strategy for the CCP in its revolution. 34 The essay expanded on many of his earlier arguments, but also served the political objective of consolidating Mao’s authority on military affairs as part of his struggle for leadership of the party. Eventually, this lecture would become canonized as part of Mao’s military thought, endorsed in the 1945 resolution on party history, and would serve as an important point of reference for the formulation of military strategy after 1949.

Mao’s starting point was a discussion of the balance of forces. The Nationalists, he argued, were “a big and powerful enemy,” while the Red Army was “small and weak.” 35 How to prevail under these conditions of extreme inferiority posed the central strategic challenge. Mao identified the “primary problem” while on the strategic defensive as “how to conserve our strength and await an opportunity to defeat the enemy.” 36 In the most general terms, Mao advocated for a protracted war at the strategic level and campaigns of “quick decision” at the operational level. Mobile warfare should be the main form of warfare, or “ ‘fight when you can win, leave when you cannot fight and win.’ ” 37 Operations should combine offense and defense in a flexible way consistent with mobile warfare, which he summarized as follows: “To defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance, to move against the flanks in order to move against the front, and to take a circuitous route in order to go the direct route.” 38

Mao highlighted the role of what he termed strategic retreat ( zhanlue tuique ), though it was described in tactical or operational-level terms. The main purpose of strategic retreat was to avoid engagements in which large forces could be defeated. Retreats could create favorable conditions by identifying weak enemy units, creating a local superiority of forces, or inducing an overstretched enemy to make a mistake. Mao then critiqued the strategy adopted by the party in 1932, such as “resisting the enemy beyond the gates” and not luring the enemy in deep; “attacking along the entire front” ( quanxian chuji ) and not focusing one’s effort in a particular direction; “seizing key cities” and not enlarging rural base areas; “striking first” ( xianfa zhiren ) and not striking second; and, finally, “setting up defenses everywhere” ( chuchu shefang ) and not maneuvering. 39 Although Mao was quick to blame the failure in the fifth counter–encirclement campaign on others, his own ideas in this essay, such as luring the Nationalists deep into the Central Soviet or using mobile warfare to penetrate the enemy’s rear, would also have failed catastrophically. Nevertheless, Mao’s assessment of the failure of the fifth encirclement campaign would become part of the party’s orthodoxy on military affairs and would be used after 1949 as a rhetorical tool to critique different military strategies.

In late 1935, Red Army units under Mao’s leadership reached Shaanxi and gained a relative degree of sanctuary. At the same time, the Japanese threat to China, especially in northern China, had become more acute. In December 1935, the Politburo met in the town of Wayaobu and developed a new military strategy for the coming period that was endorsed by the Central Committee and foreshadowed the approach that the CCP would take over the coming years. 40

The first and most important element of the strategy was to use the slogan of national resistance against Japan to strengthen the CCP’s position in the civil war with the Nationalists. The resolution passed at the meeting described this as “combining the civil war with the national war.” 41 The idea was to portray all CCP actions as part of resisting Japan, with slogans such as “the Red Army is the vanguard of the Chinese people in resisting Japan,” while also seeking to recruit sympathetic units from the Nationalists and warlord forces. 42 The immediate goal of this strategy was to attack Chinese forces aligned with Japan while preparing to attack Japanese forces directly. A second goal was to greatly expand the size of the Red Army. 43 The third goal was to create a land bridge with the Soviet Union so that the CCP could receive supplies and support directly from Moscow, while a fourth goal was to use guerrilla warfare to expand areas under CCP control in the main provinces of China.

The next occasion for the CCP to consider its military strategy followed Japan’s effort to conquer all of China after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937. By this point, other Red Army forces under Zhang Guotao and He Long had arrived in Shaanxi and the CCP moved its headquarters to the city of Yan’an, where it would remain until after Japan’s surrender in 1945. At this time, the CCP was negotiating a second united front with the Nationalists to cooperate against the Japanese.

In August 1937, the Politburo convened an enlarged meeting at Luochuan in Shaanxi to address the changed situation. The first issue decided was the organization and strategy of the CCP’s armed forces during this new phase. As part of the projected united front with the Nationalists, the Red Army’s main force units were reorganized into two armies that would nominally be part of the Nationalist-led National Revolutionary Army. The Eighth Route Army would be composed of the units that fled the Central Soviet and other base areas and would operate in northern China, behind Japanese lines or in areas beyond Japan’s control. The New Fourth Army would be composed of CCP guerrilla units that had remained in the south after the Long March and was expected to operate in southern China.

A second issue was the CCP’s overall military strategy and the military strategy for the Eighth Route Army operating in north China. At the meeting, Mao took up these issues in a report on military affairs, which the Politburo approved. The Red Army would engage in a strategic transformation ( zhanlue zhuanbian ) to a protracted conflict with Japan. The concern was that Chiang would use the opportunity of Japan’s invasion to eliminate the CCP, which, along with Japan’s invasion, required such a transformation. Regular armies ( zhenggui jun ) engaged in mobile warfare would become guerrilla armies ( youji jun ) engaging in guerrilla warfare, which meant that they would operate in a dispersed fashion, not that they would be composed of irregular forces. 44 The Red Army’s goals were to establish base areas in northern China, tie down and destroy Japanese forces, coordinate with “friendly” warlord forces in the area, conserve and enlarge the Red Army’s effective strength, and strive for leadership in the resistance against Japan. 45 The slogan for the new military strategy was “independent and self-reliant guerrilla warfare in the mountains.” 46 The Red Army units in the north were expected to take the initiative and create base areas in mountainous regions where they could most easily find sanctuary, dispersing their forces to mobilize the population in these areas and only concentrating to attack the Japanese when opportunities arose. This strategy reflected the spirit of Mao’s experience building the Jinggangshan base area in the late 1920s, a template he believed was suitable for the current situation.

By December 1937, however, the Politburo had modified the CCP’s military strategy. Many of the Red Army’s military commanders, such as Zhu De and Peng Dehuai, wanted not only to build new base areas but also to engage in mobile warfare and attack the Japanese. 47 Otherwise, they believed the prestige of the CCP would suffer. Thus, they called for changing the strategy to “mobile guerrilla warfare” ( jundong youji zhan ) or “guerrilla mobile warfare” ( youji yundong zhan ): rhetorical efforts to legitimate such operations within the existing strategy. After the Luochuan meeting, Mao had sent multiple telegrams in September to explain the new strategy to Peng Dehuai (the political commissar of the Eighth Route Army), which was likely a response to Peng’s dissatisfaction with the new strategy and emphasis on guerrilla warfare. 48 In December 1937, the Politburo adjusted the military strategy to permit mobile warfare “under favorable conditions.” 49 By May 1938, Mao described the CCP’s military strategy as “basically … guerrilla warfare but not giving up opportunities to conduct mobile warfare under favorable conditions.” 50

In 1938, Mao delivered a series of lectures on strategy in China’s war with Japan that again echoed many themes from his assessment of the encirclement campaigns. Mao underscored that, due to the disparity of forces, the war with Japan would be a protracted one that would move through three stages: strategic defense when Japan was on the attack, strategic stalemate when Japan sought to consolidate its gains, and counterattacks that would lead to a strategic offensive to defeat the Japanese. Mao viewed conventional operations, and especially mobile warfare, as the key to ultimately defeating Japan. At the same time, during the period of strategic stalemate, after the enemy had expanded and was seeking to consolidate its gains, guerrilla warfare would take priority. The shift to mobile warfare would only occur after the enemy was weakened by guerrilla operations and the size of Red Army forces had increased to the point that they were able to engage in conventional operations against Japan. 51

For the next few years, the Red Army focused largely on expanding areas under its control, mostly in northern China. This occurred in areas under Japanese control, as well as those beyond it, in provinces like Shanxi and Shaanxi. The CCP increased the size of its regular and militia forces while avoiding large-scale engagements with Japanese forces that might place those forces at risk. As a de facto or default strategy, this was fairly successful, as the Nationalists were preoccupied defending major cities such as Nanjing and Wuhan. By the end of 1938, the Eighth Route Army in the north had grown to approximately 156,000, while the New Fourth Army in the south numbered more than 25,000. 52 These main force units were augmented by as many as 500,000 local self-defense troops and 160,000 guerrillas. 53 By 1940, the population within the CCP’s base areas had grown to 44 million. 54 The Eighth Route Army grew to 400,000 soldiers and the New Fourth Army to 100,000. 55 These forces established and expanded base areas, using primarily mobile and not guerrilla warfare. 56

The only deviation in the Red Army’s approach occurred with the “battle of one hundred regiments” in August 1940. Drawing on these new capabilities, as well as a desire to burnish the CCP’s anti-Japanese credentials and weaken Japanese pacification efforts in north China, Peng Dehuai ordered the Eighth Route Army in July 1940 to launch an offensive against the Japanese in parts of Hebei and Shanxi, focusing on the ZhengTai railway from Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan. 57 The goal was to cut the line and disrupt Japanese communications in the area. The offensive was launched on August 20, 1940, and the Red Army scored some impressive victories into early September. 58 Nevertheless, as Japanese reinforcements arrived, the effort fizzled by early October. Official Chinese histories report that the Eighth Route Army suffered 17,000 casualties while destroying 474 kilometers of rail lines and 1,500 kilometers of roads. 59 These same sources indicate that Japan suffered 20,645 casualties, but Japanese sources indicate the number was much lower, with around 4,000 killed in action and an unknown number of wounded and missing. 60 Although the party leadership, including Mao, had approved of the offensive, it did not signal a change in strategy as much as opportunism.

The offensive, however, produced a dramatic change in Japanese strategy. General Yasuji Okamura, the Japanese commander in north China, unleashed the punishing “three alls” campaign (kill all, burn all, loot all) to crush the CCP. The base areas established over the past few years contracted and the population under CCP control fell by almost half, to 25 million. 61 The CCP’s main force units were dispersed and focused on small-scale guerrilla operations and generally avoided any engagements with Japanese forces. The size of the Eighth Route Army fell by twenty-five percent, to around 300,000. 62

Until Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Red Army remained focused on rebuilding base areas and carrying out limited guerrilla operations. Aiding them in these efforts was the diversion of Japanese forces for the Ichigo offensive, which sought to create a corridor under Japanese control that would connect Korea with Indochina, and then for operations in other parts of the Pacific Theater. As a result, Japan left a largely garrison force in north China to protect existing Japanese positions, allowing the CCP and the Red Army to rebuild and grow. By April 1945, the CCP’s Eighth Route Army in north China had grown to more than 600,000 soldiers and the New Fourth Army to 296,000, although some of this increase occurred as local units were redesignated as main force units. 63

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the balance of forces between Nationalists and Communists had changed dramatically. Although the Nationalists had several million soldiers, the Red Army had grown from the remnants of the Long March to approximately 910,000 soldiers, along with two million militia. 64 The party controlled nineteen base areas with a population of 125 million people, or roughly twenty percent of the country’s population. 65 Nevertheless, despite the impressive growth of the CCP and the Red Army, it remained in an inferior and tenuous position. The military strategies chosen during this period reflect similar concerns about survival to those that had marked strategic decision-making in earlier periods of the civil war. In the end, the CCP’s military victory in the civil war occurred much faster than even the party’s leadership had anticipated.

Although hostilities between the Nationalists and Communists did not begin immediately following Japan’s surrender, both sides jostled early on for advantage on the ground. The CCP’s first strategy for this phase of the civil war was formulated in September 1945, while Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were conducting peace talks with the Nationalists in Chongqing. The Central Committee under the leadership of Liu Shaoqi formulated a strategy of “development of the north, defense of the south” ( xiangbei fazhan, xiangnan fangyu ). 66 The goal was to seize control of the northeast or Manchuria. Described by Steven Levine as the “anvil of victory,” China’s northeast was the most industrialized part of the country and one that had witnessed the least destruction during the period of Japanese occupation. 67 Whoever controlled Manchuria would not only be able to acquire these resources, but would also be well positioned to threaten all of northern China, including Beijing.

Liu’s strategy envisioned developing a large base area in the northeast similar to those from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Communist forces would be deployed elsewhere in the north to defend the main approaches to the northeast. By contrast, in the south, Communist forces were instructed to contract their positions to defend against anticipated Nationalist attacks, with some units ordered to shift north and others moved into Shandong to defend access to the north. 68 Some clashes and battles occurred as the Nationalists and Communists raced to control Manchuria in the fall of 1945, but on the whole both sides continued to jockey for position in the peace talks and avoided major military engagements. Although the Communists arrived first in Manchuria, the Nationalists followed in even greater numbers. In late 1945 and into 1946, the Red Army would abandon most of the cities that it had seized a few months earlier and retreated north across the Sungari river into rural areas of Manchuria.

The situation changed when the Nationalists launched a nationwide offensive against the CCP in June 1946. The Nationalist forces were 4.3 million strong against 1.2 million CCP forces, who held approximately 25 percent of the country. 69 At around this time, the Red Army was renamed as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The offensive marked Chiang Kai-shek’s bid to seize control of the country and defeat the Communists once and for all. Perhaps somewhat ironically, Chiang’s strategy mirrored Japan’s own effort to conquer China by seizing the major cities and communications links between them north of the Yangtze river. This would enable the Nationalists to create strongpoints and transportation corridors from which to launch and sustain attacks against CCP-held areas.

In response, the CCP countered with a strategy of mobile warfare, but on a much larger scale than in the encirclement campaigns of the early 1930s. If expedient, the CCP abandoned cities and other territories it held, which Mao described in July 1946 as “not only unavoidable but also necessary.” 70 In this way, CCP strategy reflected a return to both the period of the base areas and the anti-Japanese war in which it avoided large-scale, decisive engagements and withdrew its forces to fight on interior lines. The strategy was later described as “destroying the effective strength of the Nationalists, not holding [ baoshou ] territory.” 71 When engagements occurred, the idea was to concentrate superior forces to achieve tactical victories and gradually reduce the effective strength of the Nationalists. 72 At the strategic and operational level, the PLA returned to modes of warfare that would have been quite familiar to commanders from the late 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on the defense of interior lines.

In the offensive, the Nationalists gained much of the territory they sought. Symbolically, they even captured the CCP capital of Yan’an in March 1947 (after the CCP decided to withdraw and mount only a token defense). Nevertheless, the Nationalists were unable to destroy any large CCP units or to pacify and control any region completely. Nationalist offensives in Shandong and Shaanxi in the first half of 1947, in particular, had failed to destroy any large contingents of CCP forces. 73 The campaign also drew Nationalist forces away from Manchuria, allowing that base area to further develop. By July 1947, the size of the Nationalist forces had shrunk to 3.7 million, while the PLA grew to 1.95 million. 74 Moreover, although the Nationalist forces had gained ground, it became overextended. The need to defend the cities and the communications links between them placed many forces on garrison duty, leaving fewer field forces available for launching attacks against CCP-held areas. 75

In the summer of 1947, the CCP decided to change its military strategy. In early July, Mao concluded that the Nationalist offensive had been stopped everywhere except in Shandong and the CCP could now counterattack and transition to the offensive. Mao assessed that the Nationalists were losing the support of a war-weary public and becoming increasingly isolated. Reflecting excessive optimism about the changing circumstances, he suggested that the PLA could destroy one hundred brigades in the next twelve months. 76 On September 1, 1947, the CCP outlined its military strategy for the upcoming year. 77 The document indicated what Mao had concluded over the summer: that the CCP would switch to the offensive by using its main force units to fight on exterior lines or attack areas held by the Nationalists. Some forces would still be assigned to defend CCP-held areas, but others would now take the fight to the Nationalists.

The first major offensive action, however, occurred before the new strategy was formally issued. The target was the central plains of China, in particular the Dabie Mountains in the Hunan-Hebei-Anhui border region that had been abandoned in 1946. The goal was to establish a new base area in the central plains, which could threaten the Nationalists in the south and divert forces from Manchuria. Led by Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping, the offensive involved three army corps and an audacious crossing of the Yellow River. 78 Other battles occurred in the north, including the capture in November 1947 of Shijiazhuang in Hebei, a key communications node, and a series of attacks in the northeast against Nationalist forces connecting Liaodong and Shenyang in Manchuria (known as the LiaoShen corridor). Nevertheless, CCP strategy during this period remained somewhat opportunistic and keyed to regaining what had been lost to the Nationalists since 1946, not significantly weakening the Nationalist forces.

In September 1948, CCP leaders met at Xibaipo in Hebei province to consider plans for military operations for the coming year. They expected that the war would last another three years, until 1951, and that the PLA should be expanded to five million and be able to destroy one hundred Nationalist brigades a year. 79 Operations were mapped out only in areas north of the Yangtze river, including north China and Manchuria. The CMC developed a plan to destroy 128 Nationalist brigades and allocated a rough quota to the regions where the PLA was operating. The highest quota was given to the northeast, where forces under Lin Biao were preparing to attack the LiaoShen corridor in Manchuria again. These plans reflected a view that the war would be protracted and, even though the CCP had shifted to the offensive, victory would be achieved not through decisive battles in the short term but by degrading the effective strength of the Nationalists over several years.

Yet the war ended much more quickly than even the CCP leaders had anticipated. As shown in map 2.2 , three major field battles in the fall of 1948 each produced unexpected victories, which generated momentum and turned the tide of the war. From September to November, Lin Biao’s forces in Manchuria launched the LiaoShen campaign. It started with a focus on seizing Jinzhou, a smaller city, but succeeded in capturing Nationalist-held territory from Changchun to Shenyang and thus taking control of all Manchuria. It was the largest battle to date in the civil war, pitting 550,000 Nationalist troops against 700,000 Communist ones. The majority of Nationalist forces either defected or were captured, thereby shifting the balance of forces significantly. 8 0

In November and December 1948, a second major campaign—known as the HuaiHai Campaign—that would accelerate the CCP’s victory in the civil war occurred in central China. The target was the city of Xuzhou, a central communications node north of the Yangtze. Although the campaign started with a fairly limited objective of defeating the Nationalist Seventh Army (around 70,000 soldiers), it soon expanded into a battle for the central plains of China, involving around 600,000 soldiers on each side. 81 When the campaign was over, the Nationalists lost more than 550,000 troops, including 320,335 who were captured and 63,593 who defected. 82

Finally, in the PingJin Campaign from late November 1948 to late January 1949, Lin Biao’s forces captured the cities of Beijing and Tianjin. Half a million Nationalist forces were defeated, most of whom were captured or defected. Along with the LiaoShen campaign, the CCP now controlled most of northern China. Thus, at the start of 1949 and in just six months, the Nationalists had lost 1.5 million soldiers and most of their territory north of the Yangtze river. The civil war was effectively over. 83

The three campaigns were large-scale field battles, larger than any other operations conducted by the PLA to date. They succeeded because of the flexible nature of operations and mobile warfare in all phases of the civil war, along with the popular support that the CCP could mobilize in certain areas, as well as poor command decisions by the Nationalists, especially in the HuaiHai Campaign. What began as a series of large-scale autumn offensives evolved into a series of decisive engagements that marked the beginning of the end of the war. Although major combat operations would last until May 1950, with the seizure of Hainan Island from the Nationalist garrison (and through 1951, with the occupation of Tibet), the Nationalists were unable to mount any meaningful resistance after these three campaigns.

How senior military officers approached formulating military strategy after 1949 was shaped by the legacy of the PLA’s experiences and strategies in the civil war. In addition to the battlefield experience, an important aspect of this legacy was a set of concepts for discussing strategy, including the strategic guideline, active defense, luring the enemy in deep, and people’s war. This section reviews these concepts, highlighting their link to the civil war, and then discusses other military terms used by the PLA that appear throughout this book.

After 1949, the PLA has used the concept of the strategic guideline (zhanlue fangzhen ) to formulate and describe its military strategies. The concept of the strategic guideline, however, has its origins in how the CCP developed military strategies during the civil war. As the civil war progressed through the phases discussed above, the concept of the strategic guideline became synonymous with the CCP’s overall military strategy.

The first use of the term “strategic guideline” by the CCP is unknown. Available collections of party documents suggest that it was likely first used in the summer of 1933, before the fifth encirclement campaign, and then more widely during the Long March. 84 In December 1934, for example, the Politburo during the march met at Liping in Guizhou to discuss “the strategic guideline for the Red Army.” 85 The main decision taken at the meeting was to abandon previous plans to establish a base area in western Hunan and instead to establish one in the Sichuan-Guizhou border area. 86 In January 1935, the debate at the Zunyi meeting over the party’s strategy in the fifth encirclement campaign was framed around the question of whether the party had adopted the correct strategic guideline. The resolution passed at Zunyi concluded that “only with the correct strategic guideline can campaigns be led correctly.” 87

After Zunyi, the CCP’s use of the term in the context of strategic decision-making became much more common. In June 1935, after two of the Red Army’s main columns on the Long March converged at Lianghekou in Sichuan, the CCP leadership issued a new strategic guideline, to head north and establish a base area in the Sichuan-Gansu-Shaanxi border region. In August 1935, the Politburo revised this guideline to focus on establishing a base area even farther north in the Shaanxi-Gansu border area. In December 1935, after the Red Army forces under Mao had reached Shaanxi, the party leadership issued another strategic guideline, to combine the civil war against the Nationalists with the national war against Japan. In the resolution on military strategy approved by the Politburo at the Wayaobu meeting, the title of the document’s first section was the “strategic guideline.” 88 Subsequently, all other major decisions on questions of military strategy in the civil war were described as strategic guidelines. These include the strategy formulated at the Luochuan meeting in August 1937 for resisting Japan in north China; Liu Shaoqi’s 1945 strategy of “development of the north, defense of the south”; the CCP’s response to the Nationalist’s nationwide offensive in June 1946; the CCP’s decision to go on the offensive in September 1947; and the CCP’s strategy for the third year of the war devised in September 1948. Official histories also use the term “strategic guideline” to describe other consequential decisions that were made during the civil war, including the strategies in the encirclement campaigns in the 1930s, the approach for the New Fourth Army’s guerrilla operations in south-central China in 1939, 89 and the CCP’s overall strategy in the civil war in early 1940. 90

Thus, when the PRC was established, the concept of the strategic guideline provided the basic framework for how to conceive of military strategy. As Marshal Peng Dehuai stated in 1957, “The strategic guideline affects army building, troop training, and war preparations.” 91 As described in the previous chapter, the strategic guideline outlines how China will fight its next war .

After 1949, the components of the strategic guidelines contain most of what Western scholars would describe as high-level military doctrine. Authoritative Chinese sources indicate that the guidelines have four components. 92 The first is the identification of the strategic opponent ( zhanlue duishou ) and the operational target ( zuozhan duixiang ), based on the specific military threat posed by the opponent. The determination of the strategic opponent and operational target would reflect the party’s assessment of the country’s overall security environment and threats that it faced. Thus, it is the one component of the strategic guidelines that would not be determined primarily by senior military officers. Any “struggle” against the strategic opponent would require mobilizing all elements of national power, not just the military, and would therefore be a party decision. The military would dominate assessments of the specific operational target and development of military plans for countering such an adversary.

The second main component of a strategic guideline is the primary strategic direction ( zhuyao zhanlue fangxiang ). This refers to the geographic focal point for a potential conflict and the center of gravity for the use of force that would decisively shape the overall conflict, including the deployment of military forces and efforts to enhance or maintain operational readiness. In the civil war, the Red Army’s weakness often dictated the need to identify the center of gravity or central area of focus for the use of its weaker forces to maximize their effectiveness. The Red Army also sought to guard against dispersing its forces on the battlefield where they might be more easily destroyed.

The third and perhaps core component of a strategic guideline is the basis of preparations for military struggle ( junshi douzheng junbei de jidian ). This refers to the form of warfare ( zhanzheng xingtai ) and form or pattern of operations ( zuozhan xingtai , zuozhan yangshi ), both of which describe how future wars should be waged. During the civil war and into the early 1980s, the main debate over the “form of warfare” was how to combine mobile, positional, and guerrilla warfare and which form of warfare to prioritize or emphasize. Afterward, the focus turned to combined operations ( hetong zuozhan ) of the combat arms such as infantry and armor in the ground forces and then to various conceptualizations of joint operations ( lianhe zuozhan ) involving the combination of ground, air, and naval forces.

The fourth component of a strategic guideline is the basic guiding thought ( jiben zhidao sixiang ) for the use of military force. This refers to general operational principles to be applied in a conflict. Based on the main form of warfare, such principles were intended to describe how to conduct operations and thus should be viewed as providing guidance for the operational level of war. During the civil war, for example, mobile warfare was often paired with an emphasis on battles of quick decision. With the shift from defending against total wars of invasion to peacetime modernization and local wars in the late 1980s, strategic guiding thought ( zhanlue zhidao sixiang ) for the overall use of military force, especially in situations short of war such as a crisis, became a more prominent part of the strategic guidelines in addition to basic guiding thought for operations.

Several differences between the strategic guidelines during the civil war and after 1949 should be noted. The guidelines formulated during the civil war reflected changes in strategy in wartime and not in peacetime. Thus, numerous guidelines were issued or adjusted during the more than twenty years of the civil war from 1927 to 1949. By contrast, since 1949, the PRC has only issued nine strategic guidelines, or roughly one every eight years, less frequently than during the civil war. In addition, the guidelines developed during the civil war were generally determined by the party’s top leaders, especially those on the Politburo or other leading bodies. After 1949, the guidelines were formulated by senior military officers serving on the Central Military Commission, with the approval or consent of the party’s top leader.

China’s nine strategic guidelines after 1949 have all been described as embodying the principle of active defense (jiji fangyu ). As a strategic concept, active defense provides guidance for how to conduct operations when facing a superior enemy, numerically or technologically, and thus when on the strategic defensive. The main challenge under these conditions is how to preserve one’s forces and then how to gradually gain the initiative. Thus, active defense offers a vision for how to overcome weakness, not how to conduct operations when on the strategic offensive or when engaging an opponent from a position of overall superiority.

The term active defense was first used in a party document in December 1935 at the Wayaobu meeting. Mao was the primary author of the resolution that was approved, as it is included in his official documentary collection. 93 The resolution stated that the Red Army should oppose both “pure defense” ( danchun fangyu ) and “preemptive” ( xianfa zhidi ) actions. Given the Red Army’s inferiority, either passive defense or preemptive strikes would risk destroying large numbers of CCP forces, especially when operating on interior lines or within the areas that the CCP controlled. Instead, the Red Army should conduct an “active defense” and “gain control by striking afterwards” 94 ( houfa zhiren ). b In this way, active defense—defined as waiting for the enemy to strike and then counterattacking—formed the “correct principle for fighting on interior lines” when facing a stronger and more powerful opponent. These were the conditions that the Red Army faced for most of the civil war. These were also the conditions that China faced after 1949 when the United States and the Soviet Union were its main adversaries.

The thinking underpinning active defense, however, appeared before the Wayaobu meeting. In many ways, the initial operational principles for guerrilla warfare that Mao Zedong and Zhu De developed in the Jinggangshan base area contain the same idea. The slogan to describe the Red Army’s approach at the time was “the enemy advances and we retreat, the enemy camps and we harass, the enemy tires and we attack, the enemy retreats and we pursue.” 95 Likewise, during the encirclement campaigns in the 1930s (especially during the first three), the Red Army waited for the Nationalists to attack before striking. At the Zunyi meeting in January 1935, Mao argued that “offensive defense,” based on mobile warfare, would have been the best strategy for the Red Army to have used to counter the Nationalists in the fifth encirclement campaign.

Mao provided a more complete definition of active defense in his December 1936 lecture on “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.” As discussed earlier, the lecture examined the strategic defensive and the strategy the Red Army should use when faced with its numerical and technological inferiority. Mao’s answer was “active defense,” which he defined as “offensive defense or defense through decisive engagements.” Revisiting the debate over strategy in the fifth encirclement campaign and arguments at the Zunyi meeting, he contrasted active defense with “passive defense” or “purely defensive defense.” Offensive actions at the campaign and tactical levels could be used to seize the initiative from an otherwise passive position in order to achieve the objective of strategic defense and ultimately the transition to a counteroffensive. Nevertheless, the main operational actions that Mao called for while on the strategic defensive were maneuver and retreat (to wear down an opponent) along with short and quick battles, with the objective of destroying the enemy’s forces, not seizing or holding territory. Mobile warfare was the primary form of warfare, as it facilitated both retreats along with large maneuvers to win engagements by concentrating superior forces at a specific time and place. But the overall idea was how to use offensive actions to achieve defensive goals—in this case, the defense of the CCP’s base areas against Nationalist offensives.

After 1949, China’s nine strategic guidelines have been described as being rooted in active defense. The PLA today defines active defense as “using proactive offensive actions to defend against the attacking enemy.” 96 The PLA definition further notes that active defense usually combines offensive operations on exterior lines as part of the protracted defense of interior lines. As will be seen in the following chapters, the meaning of active defense varies in the different strategic guidelines adopted by the PRC. Nevertheless, the main principle of waiting for the adversary to attack and then counterattacking remains a common thread, one that is also linked with the concept of a just war. Only in the early 2000s did greater discussion emerge over what might constitute a “first strike” that would prompt a counterattack. Strategists from AMS suggest that a “first shot” on the “plane of politics” in addition to an invasion or an attack could prompt a counterattack under the rubric of active defense, highlighting challenges from “national separatists.” 97 Even in this context, however, the emphasis remained on counterattacking against an adversary’s action that harmed China’s core interests, especially Taiwan’s potential pursuit of de jure independence.

The continued emphasis on active defense contains several implications for how to understand China’s approach to military strategy. The first is the belief that the goals for which China prepares to use force are defensive ones, such as the defense of the homeland from invasion or the defense of what China views as long-standing territorial claims in disputes with neighboring states. The implication of references to active defense is that China pursues defensive goals, though that is not explicit. The second is the implicit assumption that China is the weaker party and therefore more vulnerable, which places a premium on using offensive actions to achieve defensive goals. The third is that China will not be the first to attack, but instead will focus on counterattacking once an attack on China occurs. Mao captured this idea in 1939 when he said that “we will not attack unless we are attacked. If we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack.” 98 Although these ideas have characterized most of China’s military strategies since 1949, changes in China’s material power in the past decade raise serious questions about the meaning of active defense in the future because China will no longer be in a position of material or technological inferiority.

Luring the enemy in deep was first introduced as part of the strategy for countering the Nationalists in the first encirclement campaign in October 1930. The concept is attributed to Mao, who said “the primary task for the Front Army is to lure the enemy deep into red areas to tire and annihilate the [Nationalists].” 99 In his subsequent analysis, Mao also credited luring the enemy in deep with the successes in the second and third encirclement campaigns. Nevertheless, as discussed earlier, luring in deep was less prominent in these campaigns, even though the Red Army attacked Nationalist forces within the territory of the Central Soviet. In the second campaign, the Red Army set an ambush for a Nationalist division attacking the soviet, while in the third campaign the Red Army used continuous maneuver without engagement to wear down the Nationalist forces.

When the concept of active defense was first introduced in December 1935, luring in deep played a central role in its description. Using luring the enemy in deep to create favorable conditions for an attack despite overall weakness was the core of active defense in 1935. Nevertheless, despite its role in the encirclement campaigns, luring the enemy in deep was used much less frequently after the Long March. By the late 1930s, the CCP had established base areas it could defend without luring enemy units into their territory. When attacked, the Red Army would simply avoid engagements if possible, even if the result was a reduction in the size of the base area. In addition, as discussed above, the approach was contested even at the time it was adopted in 1930, and opposition to it was partly responsible for the decision to remove Mao from responsibility for military affairs at the Ningdu Conference in 1932.

Perhaps no concept is more closely associated with China’s military strategy during the civil war than people’s war. The term has different meanings, only some of which bear directly on military strategy. 100 Most generally, it refers to the righteousness or justness of the goal being pursued, through armed conflict, on behalf of the “people.” In China, the goal was socialist revolution (against the Nationalists) and national liberation (against the Japanese). In addition, it refers to a general political-military strategy for overcoming weakness in such conflicts by mobilizing and organizing “the masses” to increase the manpower and material support for the armed forces and broader political support for the party’s objectives. In China, the peasantry was the target of such mobilization. Third, it refers to the military aspects of such conflicts, including the kinds of forces that would be developed as well as the way in which they would be used. People’s war is often viewed as synonymous with guerrilla warfare, especially outside China. Although militia forces and guerrilla tactics were certainly a part of the civil war in China, they were only a part. As the CCP’s military strategies in the civil war demonstrate, the primary military forces were regular main force units, not militia, and the dominant way of fighting was mobile warfare, not guerrilla warfare.

A further complication is the historical usage of the term “people’s war” by the CCP. Ironically, during the civil war itself, CCP leaders did not widely or frequently use the term. In fact, although it is associated closely with Mao Zedong’s military thought, he only first described it in April 1945 in a report to the Seventh Congress of the CCP. 101 Moreover, he did not use the term frequently afterwards, in the late 1940s, and it rarely appeared in the party’s main newspaper, the People’s Daily . Nevertheless, many of the ideas now associated with people’s war, especially the centrality of mobilizing and organizing the masses, first appeared almost two decades earlier, even if they were not labeled as part of the concept. Mao’s 1927 report on the peasant situation in Hunan, for example, identified their potential for political mobilization. 102 Mao’s 1936 essay on strategy in China’s revolutionary war contains most of the ideas associated with people’s war but never uses the term. 103

The basic idea of people’s war is as follows. Wars of revolution or national liberation are just or righteous conflicts that pit a weaker party against a much stronger one. Such wars can only be won if the party can “mobilize, organize, direct, and arm” the people so that weakness can gradually be overcome, victories achieved on the battlefield, and the final political goals accomplished. 104 As Mao wrote in 1938, “The army and the people are the foundation of victory.” 105 A modernized army would “drive [Japan] back across the Yalu River.” At the same time, “the richest source of power in war lies in the masses.” 106 Similarly, Mao maintained that the political mobilization of the people would “create a vast sea in which to drown the enemy, create the conditions that will compensate for the lack of weapons and other things, and create the prerequisites for overcoming every difficulty in the war.” 107

When mobilized, the people provided manpower, materiel, and financial resources that would otherwise not be available and would help to gradually shift the balance of forces for the revolutionary or national liberation movement. A mobilized populace can also engage in “struggle” in domains other than military affairs to help bring about victory. 108 On the military side, in addition to providing recruits for the regular units of the Red Army, the peasantry were organized into militia and self-defense corps assigned to specific areas and tasked with local defense, small-scale guerrilla operations, and support and logistics activities. 109 As the size of the PLA grew in the last phase of the civil war, the role of the militia and self-defense corps became more prominent in providing aid and support for the regular field armies.

In his lectures in the 1930s, Mao viewed wars of revolution or liberation as being protracted contests. Such conflicts were viewed as moving through three stages: the strategic defense when the enemy attacks, the strategic stalemate when the enemy sought to consolidate its gains, and the strategic offensive when China counterattacked. These wars would be protracted not just because of China’s weakness, but also because time was needed to mobilize the population, develop a broad base of support among the people, organize them around the party’s goals, wear down the enemy militarily, and gradually be in a position to engage in offensive military operations. For the purposes of revolution or national liberation, a long war held out a much greater prospect of victory than a short one, given the imperative and benefits of popular support that would need to be nurtured and cultivated over time .

Although guerrilla warfare is often viewed as synonymous with people’s war, such a conclusion or view is incorrect. In Mao’s writings and in the various stages of the Chinese civil war, guerrilla warfare would only be waged in areas occupied by the opponent, such as Nationalist-held areas in the mid-1930s. Elsewhere, the emphasis would be on mobile operations by regular forces. In the various phases of the Chinese civil war, guerrilla warfare was most prominent in the initial establishment of base areas in central China in the late 1920s and in operations behind Japanese lines after 1937. In other phases, such as the encirclement campaigns in the early 1930s, the establishment of base areas in north China in the late 1930s, and the operations against the Nationalists after 1945, mobile warfare with conventional units was the dominant and primary form of warfare. In other words, in the three stylized phases of a protracted war, guerrilla warfare was only prominent in the second phase, the strategic stalemate. Because the opponent had maximized the amount of territory it could hold in this phase, the opportunities for using guerrilla warfare increased to wear down the enemy while the people were mobilized and organized in the base areas beyond the enemy’s control and behind enemy lines. By contrast, during the strategic defensive and strategic offensive, the main form of military operations was mobile warfare. Because of its emphasis on fluid fronts and mobility, mobile warfare is sometimes described as having guerrilla elements. Nevertheless, mobile warfare was based on the use of conventional forces in direct engagement and not irregulars.

The idea of a people’s war, and the primacy of peasant mobilization for the CCP, had an important corollary for the development of the armed forces. The core idea was that the army belonged to the people and existed to liberate the people. A high level of “political consciousness” would boost morale and enhance effectiveness. To aid the broader mobilization of the people, the army also needed to be seen and to see itself as united with the people and not, in contrast to the rapacious warlord armies of the day, as exploiting them. 110 Party control of the armed forces, first established at the Gutian Conference in 1929, was central, in addition to regulations on behavior and discipline that were issued in the early 1930s. 111 In addition, the army was tasked with functions other than fighting to aid the party’s broader political mobilization of the population. The army engaged in direct political work to facilitate the party’s efforts to mobilize the masses, as well as in agricultural and other forms of production to ease the economic burden on the peasantry. These roles were especially prominent when seeking to establish and enlarge base areas while avoiding direct engagements with a much stronger enemy.

After 1949, the meaning of people’s war changed. Inside China, the term only began to be used widely in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward and amid the “anti-dogmatism” movement to counter excessive reliance on Soviet ideas in military affairs (as discussed in the following chapter). In 1965, the concept was further popularized inside and outside China with the publication of an essay on the twentieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender, signed by Lin Biao, entitled “Long Live People’s War!” 112 Discussion of people’s war then peaked during the radicalization of the Cultural Revolution. People’s war was cast as an indigenous Chinese approach that reflected Mao’s military genius as a model for others to follow, especially in Vietnam. Outside China, the term was associated with a strategy of continental defense in which China would trade time for space and leverage its large size and population to defeat an invasion or attack in a protracted war. 113 In the 1980s, foreign analysts would describe China’s strategy as “people’s war under modern conditions.” 114 As subsequent chapters in this book will show, such a view of people’s war is also inaccurate. It implies an exaggerated role for irregular forces, guerrilla warfare, and societal mobilization, and downplays the centrality of conventional forces and operations and the role of mobilization in directly supporting military operations by providing manpower for the PLA.

More generally, after 1949, people’s war had other meanings, both of which resonated with the PLA’s experience during the civil war. In practice, it contains the idea that China, as a newly independent but materially weak state, would need to continue to mobilize its population and resources to prevail in a major conflict, especially if attacked. Even after the end of the Cold War, continued references to people’s war underscores the focus on societal mobilization to enhance China’s strength. 115 Today, for example, the PLA defines people’s war as “organizing and arming the broad masses of the people to carry out war to oppose class oppression or resist the invasion of foreign enemies.” 116 A current example might be the emphasis on “military-civil integration” ( junmin ronghe ), which seeks to tap civilian expertise to develop new warfighting technologies. 117 People’s war also has a clear political meaning or connotation—namely, that the PLA should never forget that it is a party army under the absolute control of the CCP.

Since “ jianshe ” does not have an English equivalent, the term requires brief clarification. It first became widely used in the early to mid 1950s, when the party’s main goal was “socialist modernization,” which required building or constructing different parts of the party state. The military component of this effort was thus “army building.” Economic development, for example, is sometimes described as “economic construction” ( jingji jianshe ). Today, the PLA defines army building as “a general designation of all activities to build armed forces [ zujian jundui ], maintain and improve the system of military power, and increase combat power.” 118

Other commonly used terms involve military struggle and war preparations. These are not as closely tied to the civil war experience, except in the general sense of the CCP’s struggle with the Nationalists for the control of China. Today, the PLA defines military struggle (junshi douzheng ) as “the primary use of military means to carry out struggle,” referring to the competition among states to achieve political or economic goals. 119 Military struggle, however, does not necessarily only refer to actual combat or military operations but also to the general deterrent and compellent roles of military force. The PLA definition thus notes that “war is the highest form of military struggle.”

Accordingly, preparations for military struggle ( junshi douzheng zhunbei ) refer to all efforts to prepare an armed force to fight. The PLA defines preparations for military struggle as “preparations carried out to satisfy the requirements for military struggle.” 120 The core is “war preparations,” or “ zhanbei ,” which might be better translated as “combat readiness.” The PLA defines zhanbei as “the preparation and alertness of the armed forces in peacetime to respond in a timely manner to wars or sudden incidents.” 121 It is described as “the regular basic work of the armed forces in peacetime.” 122

For more than twenty years before the PRC’s founding in 1949, the Red Army and then the PLA had focused on ensuring the survival of the CCP and defeating the Nationalists so that it could seize power and build a new socialist state. After 1949, however, the PLA faced a series of daunting new tasks, which were intertwined with the development of the country’s first national military strategy.

The first major task was how to shift from being a revolutionary army focused on seizing power to one that would be able to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the newly established nation-state. Previously, by emphasizing its survival and maintaining its effective strength, the PLA would avoid combat engagements or even cede territory to be able to fight another day. Such an approach was appropriate during the civil war, when the CCP’s armed forces were often significantly weaker than the Nationalists, but it was at odds with defending a nation-state .

The PRC’s security environment in many ways greatly complicated the task of defending a new nation-state. First, the PRC faced a challenging geopolitical situation. China’s sheer size along with the diversity of the terrain and climate within and along its borders would require an army that would be able to operate in different environments. 123 When the new state was founded, the CCP was not even in full control of the territory it claimed to govern. From 1949 to 1952, the PLA continued to consolidate the CCP’s control of the country through “bandit suppression” campaigns against remnant Nationalist troops and local warlords in addition to mounting a campaign to seize and incorporate Tibet in 1951. The PLA would have to defend a long coastline and an even longer land border. China would become involved in territorial disputes with each of its neighbors on land and at sea, which created a series of ongoing disputes with the ability to erupt into armed conflict and, at times, distract that state from other security issues. 124

Second, despite establishing a new state, the CCP had not completely defeated its adversary in the civil war. The bulk of the Nationalist force, including the government led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan in late 1949. 125 Defeating the Nationalists on the island would require an invasion and amphibious assault—a formidable military task for any military, but especially challenging for a military such as the PLA that had not yet formed an air force or a navy and remained composed of primarily infantry units. The PLA’s failed attempt in 1949 to seize Jinmen, an island only a mile off the coast of Fujian province, reflected the severity of this challenge. 126

Third, within a year, the PRC found itself locked in confrontation with the world’s most powerful country at the time, the United States. Given the CCP’s early history of seeking to ensure the party’s survival against the much stronger Nationalists, facing off against a stronger adversary was a familiar challenge. Now, however, the nation-state and not just the party was at risk. Moreover, China would not catch up anytime soon, as its economy remained based on agriculture and had only begun to industrialize in certain regions, such as the northeast. By the fall of 1950, a year after declaring the establishment of the PRC, China would intervene on the Korean Peninsula, engaging the United States on the battlefield to rescue North Korea and defend its northeastern border. 127

The second major task was how to build an armed force that could meet the challenges of this new environment—ensure sovereignty and territorial integrity of the new state, conquer Taiwan and defeat the Nationalists, and defend China against a much more powerful adversary. How the PLA developed as a military in the civil war provided several legacies that would need to be overcome.

The first was a legacy of decentralized operations, command, and control. In the 1930s, the Red Army was organized into three main front armies that were only loosely commanded by the national party leadership but usually operated independently in their base areas. A similar pattern repeated itself when elements of the Eighth Route Army established base areas throughout northern China. In the civil war, the PLA was organized regionally, depending on a unit’s area of operations. By the end of the war, there were four large field armies, which operated in different areas of the country. The party’s central headquarters delegated a substantial amount of decision-making authority, especially at the level of operations and campaigns, to local commanders. This reflected the wide distances over which units were operating in different parts of the country, along with the center’s lack of detailed knowledge of local circumstances and the challenges of maintaining communications. The center would provide general guidance for the goals to be achieved in different areas, but even the assessment and discussion of these goals would reflect a great deal of input from local commanders. After 1949, as this book argues, the party delegated substantial responsibility for military affairs to top military leaders. The party leadership’s willingness to delegate such responsibility has its roots in the civil war. 128

A second and closely related legacy was wide variation in how units were trained, organized, and equipped. As the PLA was composed of units that had been established at different times and in different parts of the country, the PLA had no standard table of equipment and organization used across all units. Typically, PLA soldiers were equipped with weapons they had acquired on the battlefield, either from defeated or surrendered Nationalist or Japanese units or captured from enemy armories. At the end of the civil war, PLA infantry units used rifles with more than a dozen different calibers.

Starting in 1945, the size of the PLA increased substantially. The size and scope of operations also increased from involving perhaps tens of thousands of soldiers to hundreds of thousands. This affected all aspects of force development, including operational doctrine, training, organization, logistics, supply, and command. Such efforts were perhaps most prominent in the northeast, where Lin Biao developed a large force that would eventually be known as the Fourth Field Army. The initial exploration of developing a large standing army, and the challenges of managing one, were explored during the final phase of the civil war and would be an important task that the leadership would take up after the PRC was established. 129 Creating a unified force with standardized organization, equipment, training, and procedures for managing the various challenges of defending a new country would be one of the main tasks for senior officers to address in the 1950s.

A third legacy, reflecting the weakness of the Chinese economy, was the technological weakness of the PLA. In 1949, the PLA had very few indigenous defense industries apart from munitions and light arms. China had no ability to manufacture the weapons it would need for a modern force, such as armored vehicles and airplanes .

When the People’s Republic was established in 1949, the new leadership faced the daunting task of building a new state after more than twenty years of civil war with the Nationalists, along with Japanese occupation since 1931. As China’s top leaders embarked on this endeavor, they would draft China’s first national military strategy, which was adopted in 1956. The years of experience accumulated on the battlefield, and the PLA’s main approaches to warfighting—how to combine mobile, positional, and guerrilla warfare—would cast a long shadow over the formulation of strategy until the adoption of the 1993 strategy. The concepts associated with strategy that were developed during this period—including the strategic guideline, active defense, and people’s war—continue to frame how China conceives of military strategy today.

a The Hunan-Hubei base under He Long was known as the “Xiang-E-Xi Soviet.” He Long commanded the Second Front Army in this area. The Hubei-Henan-Anhui base under Zhang Guotao was known as the “E-Yu-Wan Soviet.” Zhang commanded the Fourth Front Army. The Red Army forces in the Central Soviet were known as the First Front Army. These were the three main communist forces during the early 1930s.

b A typical translation of “ houfa zhiren ” is “gaining mastery after the enemy has struck.” Schram helpfully translates this term as “gaining control by striking last,” which I have modified slightly. See Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power , Vol. 5 (Toward the Second United Front, January 1935-July 1937) (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 80.