The Myth of Mao Zedong and Modern Insurgency

Francis Grice

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319775708
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319775715
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tackling one of the most prevalent myths about insurgencies, this book examines and rebuts the popular belief that Mao Zedong created a fundamentally new form of warfare that transformed the nature of modern insurgency. The labeling of an insurgent enemy as using "Maoist Warfare" has been a common phenomenon since Mao's victory over the Guomindang in 1949, from Malaya and Vietnam during the Cold War to Afghanistan and Syria today. Yet, this practice is heavily flawed. This book argues that Mao did not invent a new breed of insurgency, failed to produce a coherent vision of how insurgencies should be fought, and was not influential in his impact upon subsequent insurgencies. Consequently, Mao's writings cannot be used to generate meaningful insights for understanding those insurgencies that came after him. This means that scholars and policymakers should stop using Mao as a tool for understanding insurgencies and as a straw man against whom to target counterinsurgency strategies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Francis GriceThe Myth of Mao Zedong and Modern Insurgencyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77571-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Francis Grice¹

(1)

McDaniel College, Westminster, MD, USA

End Abstract

The Myth

Ever since the Communists seized control of China in 1949, a myth about the importance of Mao Zedong¹ and his teachings for modern insurgency has enjoyed widespread acceptance amongst many scholars and practitioners in the fields of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In its purest form, this myth is roughly as follows: Mao created a fundamentally new form of insurrectionary warfare that was more sophisticated and effective than any method used before. It was primarily as a result of these revolutionary new principles that Mao was able to lead the Communist Party of China to victory in the Revolutionary Civil War. His teachings then exerted a profound and widespread influence upon subsequent insurgencies around the world and continue to shape the strategies of guerrilla and terrorist groups today, including Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State .

The myth of Mao first emerged during the 1930s, when it was advanced by Edgar Snow and other members of the ‘China hands’ who worked in China and visited Mao and the Communists in Yan’an in 1944. They waxed lyrical about the wonders of Mao’s methods of insurgency, but did not immediately suggest its applicability for rebellions outside of China. This changed when Mao secured victory in the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War in 1949, after which Western commentators began presenting Mao as having formulated a new milestone in Communist warfare that was being used in Communist insurrections across the globe (Katzenbach and Hanrahan 1962; Osgood 1957, 55; Jordan 1962). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this perspective was broadened into the claim that Mao had provided a wholly new and universally employable model that was being used by insurgents of all political backgrounds around the world (Griffith 1966, 3–48; Pomeroy 1969, 27–28; Pustay 1965, 40–41; Thayer 1963, 21–22).

The two decades that followed saw continued support for the idea that Mao had created a highly original and globally applicable model of insurgency, as well as the emergence of two new perspectives. One of these was the claim that Maoist warfare represented one out of several options for insurgency and the other was that the era of Maoist warfare was being gradually eclipsed by a new age of ‘post-Maoist warfare’ (Woodmansee Jr. 1973; Willmott and Pimlott 1979, 54; Johnson 1973; Bell 1976, 19–30). The end of the Cold War brought with it an effort by many scholars to understand the Cold War as a single entity, including by synthesising its insurgencies into simpler categories. This led Mao to be presented once again as the defining figure for insurgencies of all political backgrounds across the world (Alexander 1995; Arreguin-Toft 2001). Finally, the events of September 11th and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reanimated the argument about whether Maoism was a timeless model that remained relevant for the current day or had been superseded by a post-Maoist model that still drew its roots from the Maoist model (Schaffer 2007; Gray 2005; Lyle 2011; Mackinlay 2009).

Depictions of Mao’s influence have not been limited to generalised discussions about his originality and influence, but have also involved claims that his methods have been deployed by insurgents in specific conflicts around the globe. These have ranged from Communist rebellions in places such as Vietnam, Peru, and Malaya to non-Communist uprisings in Algeria , Kenya , Ukraine, Palestine , and Guatemala . Taking the ongoing Syrian Civil War , for example, multiple scholars have claimed that both the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic State have intentionally adopted the strategies for insurgent warfare laid out by Mao (Mulcaire 2012; Arnett 2014; Whiteside 2016; Holmes 2014; Ibish 2014). Numerous commentators have also asserted that Al-Qaeda has explicitly chosen to follow a Maoist strategy in their quest to overthrow its enemies and establish a global Islamic caliphate (Gartenstein-Ross et al. 2016; Ryan 2013, 2016).

The positioning of Mao as a pivotal figure for understanding the development and character of modern insurgency has gone beyond mere academic discourse to infect the counterinsurgency doctrine that governments have used since 1949 to direct their armed forces against rebellious groups at home and abroad. Mao’s influence has been highly visible in most counterinsurgency doctrine documents since 1949, such as the American manuals FM31-22 U.S. Army Counterinsurgent Forces (1963), FMFM8-2 Counterinsurgency Operations (1980) and FM90-8 Counterguerrilla Operations (1986). Each of these described insurgent warfare as involving three phases that effectively amounted to paraphrased versions of Mao’s language. The foreword of the second edition of FMFRP 12-18 Mao Zedong on Guerrilla Warfare (1989) was markedly explicit, stating that ‘it is important to understand his [Mao’s] philosophy of warfare because it is the basis of today’s guerrilla forces.’ The same Maoist contamination can be seen in other Western counterinsurgency doctrines, including the British and French .

Mao’s presence in Western counterinsurgency doctrine remains widespread today. The American FM3-24: Counterinsurgency Field Manual of 2006, for example, was labelled by a number of scholars at the time as adopting a predominantly Maoist conception of the nature of modern insurgencies (Hoffman 2007, 71–74; Peters 2007). An analysis of the manual itself verifies this claim because, while the document purports initially to recognise multiple modes of insurgency, many of its descriptions and the methods that it uses to counter them focus on ‘protracted people’s war,’ which appears to be essentially Maoist in character (US Army/Marine Corps 2007, 9–15). The predominantly Maoist perspective of FM3-24 is unsurprising given that it lists numerous Cold War insurgency theorists in its acknowledgements. Most of these subscribed to the creed that Mao had created a radically new model of insurgency and had exported it across the globe. One of the names, for example, is the British military advisor Robert Thompson. Writing during the Second Indochina War, Thompson asserted that Mao had created a revolutionary new kind of warfare and that this was being used across the globe by Communist and non-Communist insurgencies alike (Thompson 1969a, 2–5). He also claimed that the counterinsurgency measures that he recommended were intended to tackle the intricacies of this new and universally applicable type of uprising (Thompson 1969b, 16 and 46–48). The US Army and Marine Corps refreshed the manual in 2014, but the new version contains many of the same Maoist-based assumptions that have plagued US counterinsurgency manuals since 1949.

Mao’s prominence in academic thought and counterinsurgency doctrine would be unproblematic if he was genuinely the central figure in the development of insurgency that his devotees make out. Unfortunately, however, the deific portrayals of Mao by many scholars and doctrine writers are severely flawed. This book systematically examines, critiques, and ultimately rebuts the assumption that Mao created a master formula which subsequent rebel factions have used and which their adversaries can apply to understand their actions. Instead, the book demonstrates that Mao neither created nor transformed the character of modern insurgencies, that he failed to produce a coherent vision of how insurgencies should be fought, and that he was uninfluential in his impact upon subsequent insurgencies, including his own. Consequently, his recorded writings and speeches cannot be used to accurately generate any special insights for understanding those insurgencies that came after him. The myth of Mao’s significance arose, not because it was true, but because a variety of incentives led Mao and his followers, insurgent groups in other countries, other governments facing insurgencies, and the West to perpetuate the myth.

Unpicking the myth of Mao is a crucially important endeavour because the belief that Mao exerted a strong influence on the nature of insurgent warfare has exerted a discernible impact on the way that insurgencies are evaluated and counterinsurgency strategies are developed. This includes analysts failing to correctly identify the existence of insurgencies because they lack Maoist features, creating ineffective or harmful counterinsurgency strategies by aiming to tackle Mao’s teachings (rather than the actual features of the insurgency they face), and inaccurately presenting the current period as ‘post-Maoist’ on the basis that the Cold War period was ‘Maoist.’ In order to more accurately understand the nature of insurgencies, past and present, and to formulate better counterinsurgency strategies, it is first necessary for scholars and policymakers to move past the idolisation of Mao as a kind of insurgent mastermind that so permeates the academic and policy worlds.

This book is not the first work to critique the significance of Mao’s teachings for insurgency. Yet, while this claim has been made before, it has never been done in sufficient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What Mao Actually Taught
• 3. The Unoriginal Mao
• 4. Mao and the Chinese Revolutionary Civil War
• 5. The Insignificant Mao
• 6. The Deification of Mao
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter