Sarah Paine

The nationalists did.

The nationalists did every bit of the conventional fighting except one, and that's the Hundred Residents Campaign that Mao fought in North China in 1940, and he was smeared.

The Japanese responded with the Three Alls Campaign, which is kill all, burn all, loot all, which is what they did, and it wiped out loads of communist base areas in North China.

So Mao never tried that ever again.

And he certainly didn't write about it in his collected works.

Don't talk about failures there.

So it's interesting what he's talking about really applies to the Civil War.

And Mao understands these different layers.

So as the nationalists are busy fighting the Japanese and actually being destroyed by them,

The communists are pretending that they're fighting the Japanese.

They're later going to take credit for it and say, we won against the Japanese, which is nonsense.

There was also the United States in that as well.

Because he's using that to strengthen the communists during all of this, both rural mobilization.

So when Japan's defeated and the communists, when the Civil War resumes full bore, he's in a good situation.

Okay, that's it on Mao the operational military leader at the operational level.

Now let's put it all together as Mao the grand strategist of linking all elements of national power into a coherent strategy.

These are Mao's instruments of national power.

The peasantry, propaganda, land reform, base areas, institution building, warfare, and diplomacy.

The U.S.

military, when they're thinking about elements of national power, love this little framework, DIME, because D is for diplomacy, I is intelligence, M for military, E for economics as being critical elements of national power.