Sarah Paine

And I've listed a variety of them here, and I'm gonna go through them in turn.

And these are the things that the counterinsurgent then has to counter.

All right, rural mobilization, this is obviously a big deal in Mao.

And if you compare, I'm gonna be doing a lot of comparisons with the Vietnam War and the Korean War, because they're communists and all these things.

And you can see Mao's rural mobilization was very successful in China.

The North Vietnamese rural mobilization was also really good.

South Korea, not so much.

Why?

The leader of North Korea trying to mobilize the peasantry in the South, that wasn't so successful.

And why?

Syngman Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately did land reform.

And this glues loyalty of soldiers to the leadership doing this.

And maybe that is not the only factor, but an important factor for why the Korean War turns out differently.

Base areas.

Mao says those are really important.

The North Vietnamese used them to great effect.

They had all kinds of areas in the South and then on the borders of South Vietnam.

North Korea, not so much.

It couldn't form base areas in the South.

Why?