Sarah Paine

So Mao is in the Jiangxi Soviet, and he thinks his smart strategy is to lure the enemy into your own terrain, which is favorable to you, let them get exhausted, then you spring the trap and you annihilate them.

Communist Central in Shanghai thought this was nuts, that you shouldn't be ceding territory at all.

So Mao, for the longest time, he's off in Jiangxi, they're off in Shanghai, they're a long way apart, and so Communist Central can't do anything about it, Mao does his own thing.

So the Communist Central sends Xiang Ying to Jiangxi Soviet to fire Mao personally.

And you can imagine how this works for his later career, not well.

And he fires Mao, and this is where his strategy winds up producing the Long March.

the Long Retreat in which they lose 95% of their people by trying to defend territory.

So people began to get it that Mao may have known what he was doing.

And then on the Long Retreat, Mao chose as his terminal point of retreat, like where are you going to wind up, as up in Yan'an, way up north and deep in Muslim and Mongol lands, but near the Soviet border.

And Mao thought that was essential because they're the big benefactor.

Whereas this gentleman, Zhang Guotao, who was the military commissar of the Fourth Army, thought nonsense.

We're Han Chinese, we want to be in Han land, so he wanted to go into Western Sichuan, which he did, and he suffered a series of defeats over 1935.

And as a result, he was never as important ever, ever again, and eventually defected to the Nationalists.

So Mao had proven himself prescient and right and determined, and he had kudoi and determination, and people eventually recognized that.

All right, Mao and Clausewitz define war somewhat differently.

Clausewitz has this famous line, war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

Mao says, no, no, war is politics.

By other means, it is something that is used to achieve political ends.

So far, that's not incompatible.

But then here's Mao's twist.