e upon Mao's military thought was the Chinese military tradition, as embodied in the military classic, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, a general and military theorist of the classical era. Sun Tzu shows an awareness of the political context of war that in some ways foreshadows Mao; he ranks the political support enjoyed by the national leadership as the most crucial factor in achieving victory. Sun Tzu also espoused a theory on the conduct of war that had a number of points of similarity to the theory of guerilla war. Victory in battle was not the objective in war, according to Sun Tzu; indeed, the ideal was to achieve victory without fighting a battle. The first objective in war, according to Sun Tzu, was to disrupt the enemy's strategy, then to break up his alliances, and only thirdly to fight battles. In another anticipation of Mao, Sun Tzu considered attacks against cities to be the least favorable option.
Mao frequently quotes the Clausewitz dictum in his military writings, yet in an important sense the reverse of that dictum also proved decisive in the career of his movement. Forged in war, Maoist doctrine has proven inadequate to the challenges of peace, and is in practice being quietly abandoned by the Chinese government.
Whatever else may be said of him, Mao Tse-tung, or Mao Zedong, has been acknowledged as one of the great military geniuses of the twentieth century. It is not a reputation he gained in victorious battles, the context in which most of the great generals of Western history have won their renown. Nowhere in Mao's career are there any great set-piece victories, like those we associate with Erwin Rommel or Douglas MacArthur. Indeed, the single most famous episode in Mao's military career is the Long March, a retreat--and, moreover, a retreat in which virtually all those who began perished. In the course of the Long March, the Chinese Communist army was decimated; of some eighty thousand who began ...