Lin Piao (Lin Biao)

1907-1971, Chinese Communist General
Lin Piao, one of the three or four outstanding generals who fought for the Communist cause in China, was a superior practitioner of guerrilla warfare. Lin grew up near the city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River in central China as the son of a well-to-do factory owner. He became involved in radical student circles in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when he joined the Communists and entered the Whampoa Military Academy. Though the academy was officially Nationalist, Russian advisers taught there, and many Communists studied there until the breakdown of the United Front in 1927.
Using guerrilla tactics, Lin scored several crucial victories to secure the Kiangsi Soviet (1931-1934), the first sizable piece of territory under Communist control. It was also Lin who in 1934 led the famed Communist breakout from Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement that began the Long March, and who scored a famous victory over the Japanese at the Ping-hsing Pass near the Great Wall in September 1937.
Lin knew, however, that guerrilla warfare was the weapon of the weak. Close to Mao Tse tung and with a reputation for tactical and strategic brilliance, in 1945 he was appointed the commander of all Communist forces in Manchuria, where the fate of China was decided in the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). Although initially forced to adopt guerrilla tactics, Lin gradually welded guerrilla units together into large armies capable of conventional warfare. Taking the offensive in 1947, he isolated Chiang Kai-shek's forces in the cities and put them out of action during the Liao-shen campaign of 1948. This was one of the great battles of the civil war period in which Lin showed off his tactical skills. His forces subsequently marched south, first taking Tien-tsin in a bloody battle and then securing the surrender of Peking. By the end of 1949, Lin's armies had marched through central China and taken the last major city in the south, Canton. Lin was only forty-two years old.
Lin today is much reviled. His reputation has suffered, perhaps because bouts of mental and physical illness kept him out of action during the Anti-Japanese and Korean wars. During the first, Lin was in Moscow between late 1938 or early 1939 and 1942, perhaps to recuperate from battle wounds, perhaps for other reasons. Between 1942 and 1945 Lin taught at the Resistance University at the Communist capital of Yan-an. In 1959 he became minister of defense and sought to strengthen Maoist principles in the army. He is famed for editing Mao's Little Red Book, requiring soldiers to study it endlessly, and he helped bring about the Cultural Revolution. In 1971 Lin attempted a coup d'état. Fleeing the country, he died when his plane crashed or was shot down over Mongolia.
Hans J. Van De Ven

Mao Tsé-tung (Mao Zedong)

1893-1976, Chinese Revolutionary War leader
Unlike Napoleon, Mao Tse-tung never directly commanded a decisive battle, and he therefore cannot be classed as one of the world's great generals. Nonetheless, if Mao's contributions to Marxist theory and his performance as ruler have been disparaged, his reputation as a thinker about military affairs has remained intact. It was Mao who elaborated the principles of revolutionary war and provided the Chinese Communist Party with a strategy to seize power.
Mao's awakening to the importance of military power came in the late 1920s. Having grown up in comfortable rural circumstances, Mao attended a modern school in Changsha, the provincial capital of his native province of Hunan in south-central China. He became involved in radical student activities in the late 1910s and 1920s and was present at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Like all early Chinese Communists, he initially did not question that revolutions were brought about by uprisings in urban centers, as was true for the October Revolution in Russia. In 1926 and 1927, at the closure of a period of large-scale civil war when Chiang Kai-shek, who had succeeded Sun Yat-sen as Nationalist leader, had deployed modern armies to seize power and crush the Communists with whom he had first cooperated, Mao first concluded that China's countryside, and not its cities, was where China's revolution should begin. He also decided that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun." This opened the door to a strategy of Communist revolution integrated with military conquest.
The most salient aspects of revolutionary war are as follows. The party had to be in control over the military. Although the relation between the army and the party was never simply one of subordination, party control over the army was real. As soon as Mao set up guerrilla forces, he also instituted a commissar system. Soldiers were required to manifest Communist ideology in their behavior. The party always was the final arbiter over policy and military strategy.
From the fate of past peasant rebellions, Mao drew the conclusion that a band of guerrillas roaming the country could not secure revolutionary success. Base areas not only provided Communist armies with places for rest and the party leadership with a safe haven; at these locations, much of the population was drawn into a three-tiered system of local self-defense forces, militias, and regular armies, thus providing the military with an ample supply of personnel. Also, at base areas the movement's revolutionary social, economic, and political policies were put into effect. In Mao's words, base areas were "the buttocks of the revolution."
Revolutionary war also embraces a varied set of strategic and tactical principles for combat. Mao's principles stipulated that the goal of warfare was not the defense of territory, but the preservation of Communist forces and the collapse of those of the opponent. If a territory could not be held, it would be given up. Communists attacked only when they had significant superiority of troops, when they had the initiative, and when technical superiority could be nullified by close combat. Even though revolutionary war has been closely associated with guerrilla war, Mao Tse-tung always placed it in the context of mobile and conventional warfare.
Mao, for instance, argued in 1938 in "On Protracted War" that the fight against the Japanese would go through three phases. In the first phase of fighting the Japanese would advance to a standstill. Guerrilla warfare would be most important during the second phase of stalemate, after Japanese supply lines became stretched out and manpower scarce and when Chinese forces were building up their strength. Large armies fighting conventionally would destroy the enemy in the final offensive phase.
These ideas flowed naturally out of Communist experiences with Nationalist attacks on the Kiangsi Soviet in central China in the first half of the 1930s. The first attacks had been defeated by Mao's policy of mobile warfare and "luring the enemy in deep." Positional defense, however, was attempted. Even though other reasons contributed to the Communists' defeat, the Nationalists did force the Communists to leave the Soviet and begin the Long March in the autumn of 1934. Because Mao had led the Soviet's military during the first attacks but not the last, the defeat did give Mao the opportunity to oust his opponents and take charge again of military affairs at the Zunyi Conference of 1935. Mao then led the Communists to the safety of north China. It was a turning point in the history of Chinese Communism and the life of Mao.
Though developed specifically with reference to the Japanese invasion of China, Mao's principles could be applied also to the problems the Communists faced in the Civil War period ( 1945-1949) (q.v.). In broad terms, Communist warfare did develop along the lines indicated by Mao. But his military thinking did not defeat the Japanese; rather, the many campaigns fought by the Nationalists in China and, of course, by the Americans in the Pacific war did so. The Nationalists themselves had been exhausted during the war against the Japanese and were overwhelmed by the difficulties of taking charge once more of a vast country wrecked by decades of war and rebellion.
Mao Tse-tung was not only a military theoretician. He was the chairman of the party's military committee and deeply involved himself in military decision making. He was responsible for, or at least assented to, all the major strategic shifts that the Communists took on their way to power, including the decision to build base areas in north China, to conclude a second United Front with the Nationalists during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), and to give priority to Manchuria during the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). Manchuria's industry had been developed by the Japanese, and it was close to the Soviet Union. Sometimes Mao disregarded the advice of the military, as he did when he decided that China should join in the Korean War. That decision was likely informed by the belief that the United States might drop a nuclear bomb on north China and Chiang Kai-shek use the Korean War to order his armies back to mainland China from Taiwan. Whether or not Mao's preemptive action prevented the occurrence of these events cannot be known. Mao, in short, was the revolution's chief of staff.
Hans J. Van De Ven