The Myth of Mao Zedong and Modern Insurgency by Francis Grice

Author:Francis Grice
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Holding on to Territory: Accurate

Mao repeatedly defended fixed locations during his rise to power. This began as early as 1928, when he led a small Communist contingent into the inaccessible Jinggang Mountains and tried to hold on to the territory against local landlord militias and the Guomindang who opposed him (Boot 2013, 332–333). This approach was repeated on a wider scale a couple of years later when Mao founded the nearby Jiangxi Soviet and went on to resist, with varying success, four Guomindang encirclement campaigns, before finally succumbing to the fifth (de Lee 1979, 22). It was only once all had been lost on all fronts and annihilation seemed imminent that the Communists finally conceded that they must abandon this fixed area of land and attempted a breakout (Laqueur 1976, 247). Their success in breaking free has often been depicted as evidence of a strategy of trading space for time rather than holding territory , but really the Communists were just reacting in the same way as any other besieged force facing surrender or retreat. Moreover, it was not actually Mao but the Comintern agent Otto Braun who made the fateful decision to abandon Jiangxi and begin the Long March (Durschmeid 2008, 189). Mao was not even informed about the decision, which was made in May 1934, until August (Sun 2007, 161–162). No element of the decision to flee can be attributed to Mao and, in fact, it seems likely he would have opposed such a move if given the option. The extent to which Mao rejected the notion of abandoning a base even in the face of extreme enemy pressure had been demonstrated two years earlier, when he condemned the leader of the neighbouring Fourth Red Army for ‘warlordism and flightism’ after he broke out of a Guomindang encirclement operation and headed for the safer area of Sichuan to the north (Fenby 2008, 243).

Once the Long March had been completed, Mao again embedded his forces within a fixed base, this time in Yan’an. Mao remained there for over a decade, through the entire war against Japan , until he was forcibly ejected in early 1947 (Wilson 1971, 247). Again, his retreat was not by choice, but a result of the overwhelming force of the Guomindang attack, which caught his forces off guard and overwhelmed them (Paine 2012, 250). Mao’s emotional attachment to Yan’an was so great that one of his first counteroffensives after losing the area was directed at the nearby city of Sipingjie . As one historian notes, this ‘was a tactical blunder by the PLA, brought on by Mao’s insistence on some form of revenge for the loss of Yan’an’ (Westad 2003, 157).

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