I
A little over a year ago a well-fed gentleman with Mongoloid features who wore a black fur hat with loose ear flaps and a western style overcoat stood near Stalin on a lofty reviewing stand in Red Square. On that day snow was falling and it was bitterly cold in Moscow, but the political atmosphere was far less frigid, for the personage being so signally honored by the World’s Number One Communist was Mao Tze Tung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the ruler of the Chinese state and the World’s Number Two Communist.
Less than six years ago this man, who, in spite of all that has happened in Korea, is so little known in our country, was living in a cave in the barren mountains of Shensi province in the interior of China, wearing coarse cotton clothes, eating millet and drinking weak tea. But in Moscow he was offered all the caviar and champagne he could hold. And why not? For it is within his power to give Stalin the biggest birthday present of all time—China—and the influence China can exert in Asia.
Mao (the “ao” is pronounced like the “ow” in “how”) Tze (Dzeh) Tung (Doong), the man who seized the “Mandate of Heaven” from Chiang Kai Shek, will be fifty-eight this year. For forty-four of those years he was a rebel against authority. First he rebelled against his father, then in succession, against his teachers, the Manchu government, Yuan Shih Kai (the first president of the so-called “Republic” of China), the Nationalist Party, and the Generalissimo.
From each of these campaigns he ultimately emerged the victor. In the light of this pattern it is germane to ask whether Mao went to Moscow last year to stand in the snow before the Kremlin in a hair shirt. It now appears that he did. Will his subservient attitude last? If so, for how long? Did Mao deliver China to Moscow? Did he promise to pull Asia into the orbit of Chinese Communist influence? If he promised this, can he swing it? How soon? Will he be a Chinese Tito? At present it is possible only to deduce tentative answers to these questions, which are perhaps the most meaningful that face us today.
Mao’s foreign acquaintances are few; for the greater part of the last twenty-five years he and his party were proscribed in China. During most of this time Chiang’s government had a fantastic price on his head; his relatives were classified as criminals; his first wife, captured by the Nationalists, was summarily beheaded; other relations suffered a similar fate. The party operated in the most inaccessible parts of China, sealed off from communication with the outside by an iron ring of Nationalist armies. There were no luxuries for the leaders or for anyone else. Life was dangerous for them all, but this was nothing new to Mao. From boyhood he has met a series of challenges that have exacted of him the utmost in physical and moral courage and have tested to the ultimate his qualities of leadership. He has survived all the tests and has proved that he can not only take it, but dish it out.
While there is not nearly enough information available on Mao to satisfy us, we at least know more about his formative years than we do of the corresponding period in the life of his contemporary, Stalin. Mao has given frank and revealing interviews; he has made literally thousands of speeches; he has written voluminously. The trouble is that very few of his speeches and writings have been translated. As a matter of fact, it is most improbable that there is a complete record of his pronouncements extant because from 1927 until 1936 the Communists were so busy fighting the armies of the Generalissimo that there was little time for secretarial work. But even a bare outline of his life and a study of the literary efforts that are available will provide us with important clues to the character and beliefs of this new “sun” who has “risen in the east” as the latest Communist hymn, now being taught the Chinese school children, goes.
II
Mao was born in Hunan province in Central China in 1893. Hunan is in the temperate zone. It is good farming country and has always been accounted a rich province, but, like all rich provinces, it has its poor. Mao’s father, a peasant farmer, was one of these. He was forced to sell the small plot of land he inherited to pay his debts. Then he joined the army in order to exist. After serving his term, he returned to his native village, bought back some of the ancestral holdings, and married. He farmed the land so well that during Mao’s childhood he was able to buy other parcels and by the time the boy was ten his father had attained the status of a “rich peasant.” (The adjective is used in a relative sense—no Chinese farmer could possibly be accounted “rich” by our standards.)
Mao’s father—like all other fathers—had ambitions for his son. Between the ages of eight and thirteen Mao attended a local primary school. Here he came into violent collision with a teacher who insisted that he devote strict attention to mastering the Classics. The result was that Mao developed a violent dislike for the teacher and a decided antipathy to the Classics. Rebellion against one’s teacher has in China always been regarded as such a grievous violation of the code of behavior that no words are sufficient to describe its enormity. One’s teacher occupies at all times, and as long as he lives, an unique position. I invariably treated my Chinese teachers with the utmost deference, rising when they entered the room, and standing until they were seated. One addresses one’s teacher as “Prior Born Sir” and does not contradict him. The code that governs the student-teacher relationship in China has been sanctified by long and universal conformity, and he who openly violates it is either stupid, reckless, or extremely strong-willed. Mao is neither stupid nor reckless.
During his youth his home life was never pleasant. He believed his father to be an unreasonable and tyrannical man. After describing one of many household rows, Mao said: “Thus the war ended and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion my father relented, but when I remained weak and submissive he only cursed and beat me the more.” Perhaps this early experience will not prove irrelevant in the future. At the same time Mao discovered that in union there is strength; he, his mother, and the day laborer formed a “United Front” against his father.
When he was thirteen, he was taken out of school and required to devote most of his time to farming and keeping household books. Although his father had forbidden him to read at night and would not allow him a light after dark, Mao managed to get his hands on enough candle stubs to circumvent this prohibition. He had an inordinate desire to learn and read a great deal, principally such Chinese epics as the Shui Hu (“All Men Are Brothers”) which was his favorite. He liked the book because it was filled with stories of rebels, and because he perhaps recognized in the leading characters, to many of whom are ascribed Robin Hoodlike virtues, men who defied law and convention and helped the poor, the needy, and the oppressed. Could not he, Mao, someday kill the tigers who were eating the people as had Wu Sung, one of these heroes? That there were tigers in life he had discovered, perhaps not of the four-footed variety, but tigers nevertheless.
It was not long before farm routine under the stern hand of an unsympathetic father proved too much for Mao. He ran away from home. He must have been about fifteen. He was not yet at all sure about what he wanted to do; he was only sure that he had to learn before he could do. For several years he drifted while he tried various schools. Finally he settled in a normal school where he plunged again into books. His reading, while not particularly selective, ranged over a broad field. “Western style learning” was then impinging on the thought of feudal China. It was being spread in oceans of cheap translations, most of them pirated, and in magazines and daily newspapers of all types and hues. Mao drank thirstily of this flood. He read so much that his teachers took him to task for his studied neglect of the Classics, and his father, who was sending him a few dollars a month, repeatedly berated him for spending half his allowance on cheap periodicals and trashy newspapers.
There occurred about this time an incident that he says made a “deep impression” on him and influenced his whole life. During a severe famine in his native province thousands of starving peasants rioted in Ch’angsha, the provincial capital. The Manchu governor, whose statements on the situation (as Mao reported them) are reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake,” put down the rebellion with brutal despatch. Mao had identified himself with the cause of the peasants—the crushing of the revolt was all that was needed to crystallize his ideas, so long in ferment. He had discovered his tiger, but he had not yet found the weapons to bring it to bay.
He was introduced to liberal thought when he began reading western literature in earnest. He became familiar with Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Voltaire. It was not until he became an assistant at the National Library in Peking in early 1920 that he began to delve into the mysteries of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. It was during this time that he became a Marxist.
In the next year, when he was twenty-eight, he was one of twelve who attended the first meeting of the leading Communist thinkers in China, held in Shanghai. There the Chinese branch of the Communist Party was formed. At the same time Chou En Lai, the suave Premier and Foreign Minister of the present Peking Government, was organizing the CCP in Paris where he was then a student. A little later Chu Teh, famous wartime commander of the Pa Lu Chun (The Eighth Route Army) and now a Vice President of the Peking regime, was helping to found a CCP in Germany where he, too, was studying Marx and Engels. With Mao, these men constitute the triumvirate that rules China today.
Mao was not a bomb-throwing revolutionist. He did not subscribe to the technique of assassination characteristic of the underground in Russia, but from his earliest days he was an energetic pamphleteer and organizer. In 1922 he was one of the selected Communists admitted to Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s revolutionary Kuo Min Tang, and it did not take him long to rise to a position of influence. In The Political Weekly, a KMT paper which he edited in 1924, he advocated radical land reforms and the education and organization of the peasant masses. The system of land tenure, the crushing and completely unregulated burden of taxation, the widespread practice of usury, universal illiteracy, and foreign imperialism were his “tigers.” At the same time that he was fulminating editorially, he was conducting a school for training peasant organizers for the KMT. In this field he had acquired considerable practical experience while organizing the peasants against the landlords in his native province of Hunan. There he had his most narrow escapes from the law when he ran afoul of government gendarmes and local police and was lucky to escape with his head.
In 1927, two years after the death of Sun Yat Sen, the Communists were expelled from the KMT. There is a rather pointless argument as to who at that time did what to whom. Each Party passed a resolution declaring itself to be the true inheritor of the mantle of Sun Yat Sen and assailing the other as traitorous to the principles of the patriot—a line that was to be followed by both during their long struggle for power in China. That the gentle Dr. Sun would scarcely recognize his “Three People’s Principles” as they were and are applied by either the Communists or the KMT has become increasingly obvious. They serve, however, as convenient pegs on which to hang out the propaganda lines. Madame Sun, the idealistic widow of the Founder of the Chinese Republic, though at present a member of the Communist government in Peking, was not at the time inclined to support the claims of either of the self-styled executors of her husband’s political estate. After castigating both as betrayers of the Revolution, she went into retirement.
It was at this time that the most feverish activity commenced in the ranks of the Chinese Communists. Some of their leaders were killed, some deserted to Chiang Kai Shek, and some fled to Russia. There were others, however, who managed to escape the attention of the Generalissimo’s secret police and who gradually gathered in the hills of South China where, under Mao’s leadership, they began to establish local Soviets. Mao became a division commander in the newly organized Red Army. This military experience was invaluable and developed his keen tactical sense. Two years later he resigned this position when he was elected to Party leadership, and Chu Teh was named Commander of the Red Army.
III
Mao’s life from 1927 to 1933 is for historical purposes almost a total blank. During these years the Communists were building bases in south central China, carrying on a vigorous campaign against the landlords (to whom when they laid hands on them they gave short shrift) and fighting off five successive “Communist Extermination Campaigns” launched by the Nationalists against them. The first four of these ended in complete disaster for the armies of the KMT. Divisions defected, commanders went over, isolated columns were annihilated. In the “Fifth Extermination Campaign” Chiang called upon his German advisory group, headed by General von Falkenhausen, to devise ways and means of finishing off the business that had drained the treasury, weakened his armies, strengthened his enemies, and caused him to lose face both at home and abroad. For once in his career the Generalissimo listened to advice; he adopted the tactics recommended to him by the Germans and they were sufficiently effective to induce the Communists to move along. They moved some 6,500 miles from South China to Northwest China in one of the great migrations of history, fighting countless pitched battles and skirmishes en route. The man responsible for the success of the famous “Long March” was the leader of the CCP, Mao Tze Tung.
By 1936 the Communists were well-established in the remote Northwest, but the Generalissimo was by no means content to permit them to remain there in peace. He ordered the “Northeast” Army (which had fled before the Japanese from Manchuria in 1931) to begin another and final Extermination Campaign. The Northeast Army, infiltrated by Mao’s “United Front” propaganda, and having had a bellyful of civil war, was not interested. When the Generalissimo went to Hsian to stir them up, they kidnapped him and at pistol point forced him to agree to stop the civil war and to ally his forces with the Communists to halt the Japanese.* There are many reasons to believe that Mao’s intercession at this point saved the Generalissimo’s life.
At this time Mao was forty-three years old. For ten years he had been in the wilderness, proscribed by the ruler of China and completely ignored by Stalin. The Russians during these years had not only turned a deaf ear to his pleas for aid but had assisted the Generalissimo in more ways than one. In spite of this apparent defection, Mao’s faith in his destiny never wavered. He was a model of resolution. It is important that we in the West appreciate the strength of will that sustained him in the decade from 1927 to 1937. For unless we do, we are likely to continue to underestimate the man as we have done disastrously to date.
The truce with the Generalissimo was for the Communists a strategic victory of the first magnitude, and an essential preliminary to all that has followed. It was gained by a bold man who took advantage of his opportunity when the chips were down.
Neither side was happy with the arrangement; neither trusted the other—and with good reason. So, although bloody hatchets were buried, all knew that the solution could be no more than temporary. The evidence of a united front against them was the signal for the Japanese, who now realized that they had already waited too long, to touch off the “China Incident,” an incident that was to blossom into a continental war, and to drag on for eight years.
IV
The Hsian agreement allotted to the Communists the conduct of all guerrilla operations, a form of warfare at which they had proved, to the discomfiture of the Nationalists, that they were adept. The theories on which they operated had been developed by Mao Tze Tung, and in 1938 he wrote a text book, Yu Chi Chan—Fast Moving, Hard Striking War—in which he postulated a form of strategy and tactics for revolutionary guerrilla war. It was the strategy and tactics set forth in Yu Chi Chan that were to drive the Japanese into a frenzy in North China, and that were later to be so successful when used against the armies of the Generalissimo. This doctrine is entirely valid today—and tomorrow—under conditions that prevail in many countries of Asia.
Mao begins this classical essay with a simple definition of the relationship of guerrilla warfare to the people:
“Without a political goal guerrilla warfare must fail as it must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, cooperation and assistance cannot be gained.”
He expressed this idea more pungently when he compared the guerrillas to fish and the people to the water in which they swim. Unless the temperature of the “water” is maintained at a proper level, the “fish” can neither swim nor propagate. Intimate association with the people is essential; there can only be such association if there are identical objectives. But a vast majority of Asiatic peoples have had no objectives other than to eat and to be sheltered. Mao states that it is a function of the Party leadership to tell them what their objectives ought to be.
Mao’s thesis is that guerrilla warfare is “revolutionary,” and that “counter revolutionary” guerrilla warfare can never be successful because it is essentially rootless in character. It lacks, according to Mao, political and economic bases.
In a lengthy section Mao deals with the guerrilla activities of the Russians against Napoleon during his retreat from Moscow; with the long-drawn-out battles waged by Moroccan irregulars against French and Spanish forces; with the struggle between Red and White partisans in the Russian civil war. He points out that while these conflicts provide many valuable lessons, a doctrinaire approach to historical experience will inevitably be fatal. Experience is valid only if it is properly related to existing social, economic, and political conditions. To support this argument he invokes Clausewitz, the great German philosopher of war:
“Wars in every period have independent forms and independent conditions, and therefore every period must have its independent theory of war.”
On strategy and tactics for guerrillas, Mao has much to say and here he begins to be specific:
“The strategy of guerrilla warfare is manifestly unlike that employed in orthodox operations, as the basic tactic of the former is constant activity and movement. There is in guerrilla warfare no such thing as a decisive battle; there is nothing comparable to the fixed, passive defense that features orthodox war. The general features of reconnaissance, general deployment, and development of the attack . . . are not common to guerrilla war.”
This statement does not mean that guerrilla forces can never engage in “set” battles, for if they develop progressively into regularly organized and equipped units they can, as the 8th Route Army did on more than one occasion when it fought the Japanese in battles of divisional scale. But they must not do this until they are ready. In South China in 1933 the Red leaders learned a bitter lesson when they took up a static defense against the vastly superior forces the Generalissimo threw against them in the last of his series of “Communist Extermination Campaigns.”
As to tactics for guerrillas Mao advises:
“Select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and come from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack, withdraw; deliver a lightning blow; seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerrilla strategy an enemy’s rear and flanks are his vital points, and there he must be harassed, dispersed, exhausted, and annihilated.”
The influence of the ancient Chinese military thinker Sun Tze is clear—in fact, some of the phrases are in Sun Tze’s precise words.
In a few sentences Mao wraps up the question of speed and surprise in combat operations:
“(To gain) surprise, speed is essential; the movements of guerrilla troops must be secret and of supernatural rapidity; the enemy must be taken unawares and the action entered speedily. The basic method is the attack in a violent and deceptive form.”
V
The greater part of the second half of Yu Chi Chan is devoted to a detailed discussion of such practical matters as organizing guerrilla territory in the enemy rear; (“The front of the guerrillas is in the enemy rear”); of administering guerrilla areas and districts; of forming, equipping and training guerrilla units, self-defense corps, youth organizations, and intelligence and propaganda groups.
It should be remarked that Mao considers youth organizations to be of vital importance. Children are quick to perceive and are as a general rule without fear. In addition, they are loyal and have very good memories. Hence they make excellent spies. (Americans are, of course, particularly susceptible to the appeal of a ragged and apparently homeless child.) Old men and women, too, have their part to play in guerrilla espionage. Our troops in Korea can probably testify that they discharged their duties efficiently.
Mao realized that propaganda is a major aspect of guerrilla warfare and that the creation of effective propaganda, its production and dissemination, is of critical importance. For instance, in a guerrilla company of 125 officers and men, one officer and three men are assigned by him to “Public Relations Duty.” The ratio of “Public Relations” personnel to combat troops increases in higher echelons, and in a guerrilla regiment of some 1,500 there are not less than ninety-six officers and men in the political section. The duties of these groups are to propagandize both troops and civilians. Our experience with POW’s—or the lack of them—in Korea is profound evidence of the effectiveness of such groups.
In the last two chapters Mao returns to some basic concepts of war. He has good advice for professional soldiers:
“There are some militarists who say: ‘We are not interested in politics but only in the profession of arms.’ It is vital that these simple minded militarists be made to realize the relationship that exists between politics and military affairs. Military action is but a method used to attain a political goal.”
Mao does not believe that guerrillas alone are capable of winning wars. His theory is that they provide a decisive element, and that they can and will develop into orthodox formations. As this development progresses new groups of guerrillas are formed by constant recruitment from the people. Thus there are at any given time guerrillas in all stages from the most fundamental—home guardsmen armed with pikes, staves, ancient pistols and bird guns—through the small bands that operate independently against communications, to regularly organized and equipped divisions. It is this system of progressive development which accounts largely for the fighting qualities of the troops that administered more than one severe beating to large Japanese forces, that cut through the Nationalists like a warm knife through butter, and that later in Korea staggered our 8th Army and X Corps with the ferocity of their attacks. This is undoubtedly the pattern Ho Chi Min is following today in Indo-China.
VI
It was, of course, not alone the application of the political and military theories of Mao Tze Tung that was responsible for the debacle that overtook the Generalissimo. But in any review of the events of 1945-48 Mao’s fingers may be discovered in the pie. At some point shortly before the Japanese surrender—and no one except Mao and the Russians knows exactly when—arrangements had been made between Mao and Moscow (which as usual was playing both ends against the middle; Russia was supposedly allied with the Chiang government) for the Chinese Communists to receive the bulk of Japanese arms surrendered in Manchuria. Mao knew that he must get his hands on this equipment; without it his troops could not possibly take Manchuria from the American-equipped Nationalists, and if he could not take and hold Manchuria—extravagently endowed with natural resources—there could be no Chinese Communist empire. Very few foreigners were optimistic about Mao’s chances. Practically everyone overestimated the Nationalists and underrated Mao. Practically everyone but Mao, that is. He counted on the Nationalists to blunder, and they did.
It might perhaps be a salutary exercise to review briefly the events that prefaced the downfall of the Generalissimo. Mao, of course, had an intimate knowledge of KMT personalities and party politics. He figured that the Nationalist strategy would operate in a sociological vacuum. He was right, for if the Nationalists had any political and economic objectives acceptable to the people, no one (including on-the-spot army commanders and politicians) knew what they were. The State Department “White Paper” observes that the Nationalists made no attempt to create efficient local administrations which could attract wide popular support. This was exactly what had to be done.
In the field of military strategy the only perceptible difference between the post World War II Nationalists and the Japanese was that whereas the latter had moved south along the principal lines of communication, the Nationalists moved north along them. Both garrisoned the principal cities and towns to the neglect of the rural countryside. And the rural countryside is China. The Communists made no attempt at first to take over cities. They gave their full attention to organizing the peasants. Conditions in the countryside favored Mao’s apparently too cautious policy. For eight years there had been very little Nationalist influence north of the Yangtze. In this vast and fertile area of the North China plain the men of General Chu Teh’s Eighth Route Army and Communist political organizers roamed at will. The Japanese were in the cities; the Communists had the rural areas. Much can be done in eight years—and much was done. The Communists brought the water to the right temperature. The right temperature was too hot, first for the Japanese and later for the Nationalists.
In 1945 the armies of the Generalissimo started north to occupy the great cities of the North China plain and Manchuria. The “White Paper” describes the decision and its effect in these words:
“The government was faced with the alternative of postponing the attempt to reoccupy Manchuria or of overextending its military forces in attempting to reoccupy it. This was in no case an easy decision to make. United States military advisors pointed out the dangers of occupying Manchuria in view of the logistical difficulty of supporting operations there while trying to pacify China proper. The Chinese government in deciding to put its best armies and main effort into reoccupying Manchuria at the end of a 1,000 mile long supply line committed itself to a scale of operations it could not support and opened the way to the eventual piecemeal destruction by the Communists of its widely scattered military units.”
As both the American advisors and Mao had foreseen, the Generalissimo’s armies soon found themselves in the same strategic situation that had ruined the Japanese. Their best troops, immobilized in the cities while the Communists ripped to pieces the tenuous lines of rail and road communication, rapidly became political and military liabilities. The Communists thus gained the initiative, for they had mobility and were able to concentrate their forces against selected points at times of their own choosing. Therefore, although the Communists were for many months in 1946 and 1947 numerically inferior to the Nationalists and much more poorly equipped than they, the scales were slowly tipping in favor of Mao. General Barr of our Military Advisory Group summed up the situation succinctly when he said that the Nationalist Army “was burdened with an unsound strategy conceived by an inept high command.”
But it is obvious that there were far graver implications than the purely military. The Nationalist troops had to eat, and the demands of hordes of non-productive consumers soon aroused the ire of middle class shop-keepers, artisans, and other city workers who were taxed exorbitantly to sustain the soldiers in a state of enforced idleness. At the same time the Communists, who lived off the countryside, clamped on the food blockades that had been so effective against the city-bound Japanese. Food coming in was reduced to a trickle, prices soared, taxes .doubled and tripled. Nationalist currency blew up. The poor in the cities began to starve.
Unsound strategy, political ineptitude, and economic paralysis that did not creep but ran combined to provide the Communists (who are extremely sensitive to propaganda opportunities) with unlimited ammunition. Here, again, the Nationalists were at a disadvantage, for not only had they no program, but they lacked a propaganda organization. They had no means of reaching the masses of the peasants who were, by the very nature of things, the target. The snowball was getting bigger and rolling faster with each passing day.
“No adventurism” is one of Mao’s mottoes. What a contrast with this was the headlong rush of the Nationalists into Manchuria without more than a superficial attempt to put into effect programs that might have won over the peasant population between the Yangtze River and the Great Wall! Underextended politically, overextended militarily. When the time came the Communists simply kicked the chairs out from under the Nationalist armies which had conveniently stood upon them to stick their individual and collective necks into the waiting nooses. The hangman was Mr. Mao.
VII
“Historical experience is written in iron and blood. We must point out that the guerrilla campaigns being waged in China today are a page in history that has no precedent. Their influence will be confined not solely to China in her present anti-Japanese war, but will be world-wide.”
Mao Tze Tung—1937
It required intellectual boldness to believe these words and to write them in 1937. But that is a quality in which Mao is not lacking. He had the courage as a youth to defy both his father and his teacher. He had the strategic sense to persuade his mother and the farmhand to ally themselves with him in a “United Front” against his father. He dared to be one of a handful of avowed Communists in China in 1920. His entire life testifies that in the quality of courage he need yield place to none. Mao’s faith in his destiny as the leader of a Communist China has been steadfast in spite of hardship and adversity. It should not be anticipated that he will diverge from this pattern. He may, as he has in the past, make tactical concessions here and there to gain vastly more important strategic salients elsewhere. He may retreat, but it will be only when he feels secure in the knowledge that such retreats set the stage for future advances. He retreated 6,500 miles once—and eventually came out on top.
There is a tendency in this country to regard Mao as just another puppet whose place is in Stalin’s vest pocket. Nothing could be more egregiously wrong. He is, it is true, a hardened Communist; at the same time he is of Chinese peasant stock, and a man who has proven himself to be a good theoretician and a first class operator. He is big enough to stand on his own feet, and to claim his own place in the sun.
A brief historical digression is germane. The emperors of China for many hundreds of years ruled from Pei Ching. It is no accident that Mao set up his government there. By so doing he affirmed a continuity broken only by Chiang Kai Shek. The Northern Capital is historically associated with an imperial China that exercised undisputed hegemony over southeast Asia.
Another important concept that we must appreciate if we are correctly to assay Mao’s position is that of “The Mandate of Heaven.” Here and in Britain the governmental mandate is bestowed by the people. In China things are different; the mandate is bestowed—or withdrawn—by heaven. Lost, it has never been regained. The elemental fact is that in Chinese eyes Generalissimo Chiang has lost the “Mandate of Heaven.” Otherwise, he would not be in Formosa.
Mao has other cards in addition to those that have been mentioned. For one he has Madame Sun Yat Sen. This eminent relict of the George Washington of China, who is the older sister of the Generalissimo’s wife, occupies a position of importance in the Peking government. She deserted her younger sister (Mme Chiang) and her husband’s former secretary and trusted confidant (Chiang) to accept a position with Mao. To hundreds of millions of her countrymen Madame Sun is the symbol of the revolution. And she is in Peking—not Formosa. She is working for Mao, not for her brother-in-law. This may not seem particularly important to Americans—it is of the utmost significance to Chinese, for Madame Sun is a link which confers upon Mao’s regime moral and historical continuity with the Chinese Revolution which her husband inspired.
That the Communist line is anti-foreign strengthens rather than weakens Mao’s position, for Chinese policy has for several centuries been deeply tinged with this hue. It is also important to remember that Russia is the country with which China first established diplomatic contact. And it was to Russia that Dr. Sun turned in desperation after his pleas to the Western powers for aid to China had fallen on deaf ears. And Lenin responded. Thus, there are in Chinese eyes fewer barriers to an intimate relationship with Russia than with any other country.
VIII
Mao’s probable long-range intention is to regain control of Korea, Tibet, Indo-China, Burma, Malaya, Formosa, Hong Kong, and Siam, all of which are contiguous to China and were for long historical periods appanages of the empire. This ambition is consistent with Communist doctrine, with Chinese history, with the anti-imperialism of Dr. Sun, and with the concept that Asia is for the Asiatics. It will not be too hard to accomplish this—given time. And time is a dimension that neither the Chinese nor the Communists worry too much about.
Culturally and ethnically the indigenous peoples are closely related to the Chinese and in all of the targets there are important Chinese minorities. We may be sure that the covert methods of subversion with which Mao’s operatives are so familiar will be applied in these areas. This, of course, will be a carefully regulated process. One of Mao’s watchwords is “No adventurism.”
It is most probable that Mao’s subservient attitude to Moscow is temporary. On the other hand, as the factors that favor a prolonged working arrangement with Russia are weighty, it is unlikely that he can be weaned away by promises or threats. It is, however, reasonable to believe that he will make a break if Russian demands become too onerous. Only he can be the judge of what constitutes this state of affairs. Mao is now master of a continental nation with almost half a billion inhabitants, but with the most primitive communications. It would be extremely difficult for Stalin effectively to chastise any deviation, a fact which Mao appreciates.
That the policies of Peking and Moscow currently coincide does not mean that they will continue to do so. They may well diverge over the question of which capital is ultimately to control the Asian rimlands. Here China can hardly fail to insist that her historical rights be recognized.
Finally, it is the personality of Mao that dominates the Asian picture. He is not a Moscow trained man. He is a Chinese who is certainly aware that he must get his country something tangible in exchange for what he is giving the Kremlin. It is an evident fact that China needs above all a chance to recover from the body blows she has suffered during the last twenty years. Mao knows this. He knows, too, that while his countrymen are patient and enduring, they are a people who have not hesitated, when pushed too far, to aid Heaven in seeking out one more fitted to receive a “new mandate.”
A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy in the class of 1929, Colonel Griffith was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps and served in Nicaragua and China prior to World War II. During World War II he served in England and in the Pacific, and commanded the First Marine Raider battalion on Guadalcanal until wounded and evacuated. Later he commanded the Battalion on New Georgia. In 1948, he graduated from the senior course at the Naval War College and was attached to the Staff there until June, 1950. He is now Chief of Staff, Troop Training Unit, Atlantic Fleet.