People's war

Overview

In China

In its original formulation by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, people's war exploits the few advantages that a small revolutionary movement has—broad-based popular support can be one of them—against a state's power with a large, professional, well-equipped and well-funded army. People's war strategically avoids decisive battles, since a tiny force of a few dozen soldiers would easily be routed in an all-out confrontation with the state. Instead, it favours a three-phase strategy of protracted warfare, with carefully chosen battles that can realistically be won.

In phase one, the revolutionary force conducting people's war starts in a remote area with mountainous or forested terrain in which its enemy is weak. It attempts to establish a local stronghold known as a revolutionary base area. As it grows in power, it enters phase two, establishes other revolutionary base areas and spreads its influence through the surrounding countryside, where it may become the governing power and gain popular support through such programmes as land reform. Eventually in phase three, the movement has enough strength to encircle and capture small cities, then larger ones, until finally it seizes power in the entire country.

Within the Chinese Red Army, the concept of people's war was the basis of strategy against the Japanese, and against a hypothetical Soviet invasion of China. The concept of people's war became less important with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasing possibility of conflict with the United States over Taiwan. In the 1980s and 1990s the concept of people's war was changed to include more high-technology weaponry. Historian David Priestland dates the beginning of the policy of people's war to the publication of a "General Outline for Military Work" in May 1928, by Chinese Central Committee. This document established official military strategies to the Chinese Red Army during the Chinese Civil War.

The strategy of people's war has political dimensions in addition to its military dimensions. In China, the early People's Liberation Army was composed of peasants who had previously lacked political significance and control over their place in the social order. Its internal organization was egalitarian between soldiers and officers, and its external relationship with rural civilians was egalitarian. Military success against an adversaries with major material advantages (in Mao's experience, the Nationalist forces and the invading Japanese army), required weakening the adversary through attrition and strengthening one's own forces through accumulation, a method which could only succeed if the guerilla army had the people's support. As sociologist Alessandro Russo summarizes, the political existence of peasants via the PLA was a radical exception to the rules of Chinese society and "overturned the strict traditional hierarchies in unprecedented forms of egalitarianism."

Other usage in Chinese rhetoric

In China, the generalized use of military terminology to other aspects of society is influenced by factors including the use of military terms in political struggles and media as well as the longstanding respect for the People's Liberation Army.****

Chen Boda's 1960 strategy of "electrocentrism", through which the electronics industry should develop technological advancements and become embedded at all levels of China's economy, incorporated the philosophy of fighting a people's war to "smash electronic mysticism" and rapidly develop in the age of electronics. This included small-scale enterprises (not just large enterprises) producing electronics to spur development.

In 2014 Party leadership in Xinjiang commenced a People's War against the “Three Evil Forces” of separatism, terrorism, and extremism. They deployed two hundred thousand party cadres to Xinjiang and launched the Civil Servant-Family Pair Up program. Xi was dissatisfied with the initial results of the People's War and replaced Zhang Chunxian with Chen Quanguo in 2016. Following his appointment Chen oversaw the recruitment of tens of thousands of additional police officers and the division of society into three categories: trustworthy, average, untrustworthy. He instructed his subordinated to "Take this crackdown as the top project," and "to preempt the enemy, to strike at the outset." Following a meeting with Xi in Beijing Chen Quanguo held a rally in Ürümqi with ten thousand troops, helicopters, and armored vehicles. As they paraded he announced a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” and declared that they would "bury the corpses of terrorists and terror gangs in the vast sea of the People's War."

In February 2020, the Chinese Communist Party launched an aggressive campaign described by General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping as a "people's war" to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Outside China

Mao's doctrine of people's war influenced various Third World revolutionary movements including the Naxalites and the Shining Path.

From 1965 to 1971, China held yearly military training for Palestinian fedayeen, including instruction in Mao Zedong Thought on guerilla warfare and people's war.

From 1966 to 1970, Syria was indirectly ruled by the neo-Ba'athist and totalitarian regime of General Salah Jadid, which actively promoted the ideas of Marxism–Leninism and the Maoist concept of People's War against Zionism, which was expressed in its huge support for leftist Palestinian fedayeen groups, granting them considerable autonomy and allowing them to carry out attacks on Israel from Syrian territory. Just a few months after the coming to power, Jadid's regime completed the formation of the Palestinian paramilitary Ba'athist group called al-Sa'iqa, which carried out attacks on Israel from Jordanian and Lebanese territory, but was completely under the control of the neo-Ba'athist regime in Syria.

Mao-era China contended that the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War demonstrated that only people's war, not other strategies or methods, could defeat imperialism in the Middle East.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf's (PFLOAG) goal was to use people's war to establish a socialist Arab state in the Gulf region.

In non-communist states such as Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used the protracted people's war against Ba'athist Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

List of people's wars

Conflicts in the following list are failed and successful wars labelled as people's wars by Maoists, and also both failed and ongoing attempts to start and develop people's wars. In addition to the conflicts in the list, there also have been conflicts not primarily led by Maoists or seen as people's wars, but had Maoist groups involved within them who viewed the conflicts partly as such, including the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Arab–Israeli conflict) and the Communist Party of Burma (Myanmar civil war).

References

Citations

Sources

References

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