The Road to Paris

  • Share
  • Read Later

(5 of 9)

As Chiang slowly moved toward Mao's hideout, Stalin moved to Mao's rescue. The new Comintern slogan was "united front" against the mounting fascist threat of Japan. It was successful. Chiang's campaign against the Communists was deflected and dissipated into resistance against a more powerful aggressor. The Chinese Red army was saved. It proceeded to expand spectacularly. During the eight years of the Japanese war, following Mao's directive "90% against the Kuomintang, 10% against the Japanese," it grew from 25,000 to 910,000 men, claimed control of 50 million people.

Though skillfully led and well-indoctrinated, it was still a guerrilla force, unable to face the Japanese or the Nationalists in open battle. The changeover to a regular army with decisive striking power needed Stalin's helping hand. Once more it was given, in Manchuria during the Russian occupation between August 1945 and April 1946.

In those nine months, large contingents of Mao's men trekked from below the Great Wall into the Russian-held northeast, were equipped with Japanese arms, retrained and sent out again. Within three years, not without heavy casualities of their own (1,600,000 killed, wounded and missing, according to their own estimate) and greater losses to the Chinese Nationalists (8,070,000, boasted Ambassador Wu last week before the U.N.), they won the China mainland.

To Victory. Military power, embodied in China's Red army, has been Mao's special creation, his fierce pride & joy. The strategy and tactics of guerrilla war have absorbed a good deal of his scholarly study. His trusty Commander in Chief Chu Teh and his brilliant field generals Lin Piao, Chen Yi and Liu Po-cheng have been the fighting brawn directed by his own bookwise brain.

For his guerrillas, Mao years ago reminted some good advice originally coined by Sun Tzu, China's sth Century B.C. Clausewitz: "When the enemy advances, we retreat. When he escapes, we harass. When he retreats, we pursue. When he is tired, we attack." For comrades everywhere he wrote a military treatise, Strategic Problems (published in Yenan in 1941), that probably ranks as a classic on irregular warfare. Its precepts boldly give directions for destroying "an enemy 20 times our number."

Mao's most vivid literary images are devoted to the military art. "Guerrillas," he once wrote, "should be as cautious as virgins and as quick as rabbits . .. [They] are like innumerable gnats which, by biting a giant in front & rear, ultimately exhaust him." He exulted in armed struggle: "A Communist war which lasts ten years may be surprising to other countries, but for us this is only the preface . . . Historical experience is written in blood and iron." No warlord has left a more gory trail of death than Mao, not since the mad General Chang Hsien-chung, who slaughtered 30 million in Szechuan during the Ming Dynasty and left an engraving in stone which read:

Heaven created ten thousand things for the use of man.

Man has not one thing to present to Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9