Masters of War

He began with a thousand survivors in a mountain redoubt. He ended with a nation of four hundred million. In between lay the most consequential military career in the history of modern Asia. In the autumn of 1927, a thirty-three-year-old organiser stripped of his Party offices led a thousand ragged survivors into the Jinggang Mountains of Hunan Province. He had no formal military training, no artillery, no reliable supply line, and no reasonable prospect of survival. What he possessed was a mind of extraordinary analytical power and a conviction, formed by reading history since childhood, tested by catastrophic failure, and never subsequently abandoned, that the world was arranged unjustly and that rearranging it required, above all, organised, politically constituted military force. What followed across the next fifty years was a military career without parallel in the modern era. From the guerrilla campaigns of the Jinggang Mountains to the vast conventional battles of the Chinese Civil War; from the winter ambushes of the anti-Japanese resistance to the audacious intervention against the United States in Korea; from the doctrinal masterworks written in a cave at Yan’an to the diplomatic revolution of the Nixon opening. Mao Zedong brought to every challenge the same fundamental qualities: strategic patience, operational imagination, the ability to convert the apparent certainty of defeat into the platform for eventual victory, and an understanding of the relationship between political mobilisation and military effectiveness that remains, sixty years after his death, the foundational framework of asymmetric warfare theory. This volume in the Masters of War series examines Mao Zedong’s military career through a neutral, merit-based lens. It does not adjudicate the Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, or the Cultural Revolution. It examines the soldier, the strategist, and the commander: the architect of People’s War, the director of the Long March, the intelligence behind Huaihai, and the author of the most widely applied body of military doctrine produced in the twentieth century. The verdict it delivers is military. And militarily, it is unambiguous.