Sarah Paine

He said, okay, China's a large semi-colonial country.

It's an undeveloped country, point one.

Second, its enemy's really strong, point two.

Thirdly, the Red Army's weak.

And fourthly, there's an agrarian revolution going on.

And from this, he concluded that revolution was definitely possible, but it's gonna take a long time.

So he didn't kid himself about quick wins.

He's gonna come up with a strategy for protracted warfare.

And he thought that Japan had certain weaknesses that the communists could leverage.

For instance, the Japanese had inadequate manpower to garrison a country the size of China.

This meant that guerrillas could roam far and wide behind Japanese lines.

Also, the Japanese were brutal, just gratuitously brutal.

And they're outsiders.

And this means that the peasantry are naturally going to gravitate towards the communists.

Regardless of what the communists do, just simply based on what the Japanese are doing, they're going to gravitate towards the communists.

And also the Japanese had grossly underestimated the Chinese.

And as a result of these underestimating the Chinese, they made errors.

And when they made errors, they started quarreling among themselves and making more errors.

And the communists could leverage these things.

Mao's most famous