Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: Knowing Thyself and Knowing the Enemy

Though Mao’s own positions evolved considerably after this early analysis, those of his peers (and those who were in charge of the CCP at the time) did not [3]. The course of the revolution in Southern China ultimately proved the CCP wrong. The CCP’s myopic focus on the advantages of its own position and its unwillingness to countenance its potential and actual weaknesses drove it to double-down on strategies that were counterproductive to its cause. Its focus on poor peasants alienated both the rural middle class and rural elites, two crucial groups who eventually defected to the KMT when the CCP’s military was defeated.

The CCP’s military defeat was a product of similarly myopic thinking. Militarily, the CCP initially combined a number of tactics pioneered by Mao Zedong: (1) “strengthening the defenses and clearing the fields” (jianbi qingye); evacuating civilians from areas within striking distance of KMT forces, removing any food or livestock of which the KMT could make use, and destroying infrastructure critical to the KMT war effort such as roads and bridges. It then (2) lured the enemy into areas under its control (youdi shenru), but did not initially engage. Instead, it waited for them to disperse and then overpowered smaller units and attacked KMT reinforcements. After Mao was removed from his post by his political rivals within the CCP, the Red Army adopted conventional tactics, concentrating its forces and sending them into pitched battles of attrition against conventional KMT forces. The results were catastrophic and eventually sent the CCP on a 9,000 kilometer retreat known as the Long March.

After Mao took control of the CCP, he undertook a comprehensive reform of Party policy [4]. The philosophical foundation of Mao’s approach to both military and political policy is “On Practice,” a 1937 essay in which Mao states in no uncertain terms that

Marxists hold that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world…If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by ‘failure is the mother of success’ and ‘a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit.’ [5]

Mao’s statements may seem like common sense, but Mao did more than enumerate a dialectical relationship between theory and practice; he institutionalized them in the CCP and the Red Army. As a result, generals and commanders could utilize the tactics that best fit the situation they faced and administrators could formulate policy that both adhered to the spirit of the CCP’s United Front policies and conformed to local conditions [6]. At the CCP center, Mao and his colleagues emphasized the importance of formulating policy based on a comprehensive and realistic analysis of the CCP’s political and military programs. The rejection of dogmatism at the center was mirrored at the local level, ensuring that sober analysis rather than blind faith guided the implementation of policy.

Fellow contributor Cheryl Rofer highlighted the stark disjunction between the perceptions of American policymakers in the run-up to the Iraq War and the reality of the war and occupation on the ground and the perception of Russian policymakers prior to their intervention in Syria and the reality on the ground. The verdict has yet to be written on the latter, but analyses of the US’s intervention in Iraq have rightfully condemned the US’s complete lack of proper planning. Optimistic assessments by men like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both quoted by Cheryl in her post) are illustrative of an approach to strategic analysis that overestimates advantages and minimizes potential problems. While that may not guarantee ultimate defeat in a war, it is certainly not a recipe for success.

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