The Provenance of “Mao’s” On Guerrilla Warfare
Abstract
Using primary sources, this article identifies the source text of “Mao’s” On Guerrilla Warfare, which most of the existing Anglophone scholarship assumes was lost to history. The details surrounding the creation of this work attest to how the Anglophone literature tends to overrepresent Mao and neglect the contribution of others in the development of the broader canon of Chinese Communist military thought.
“Mao’s” Lost Classic
In 1940, Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith translated an alleged 1937 work by Mao Zedong titled “Yu Chi Chan” (游击战; Pinyin: You-ji-zhan) into English, and published it as On Guerrilla Warfare. Under the Kennedy Administration in the early years of the Vietnam War, it was popularized in US military, academic, and policy circles. It provided a foundation for understanding the logic of insurgency movements and came to play a significant role in the shaping of Western counterinsurgency thought.
This legacy stands in stark contrast to the book’s fate in China. No text matching the contents of On Guerrilla Warfareor the Chinese title Griffith recorded has ever been included in official collections of Mao’s writings. Based on my personal correspondences with Chinese military officers, academics, students, and internet search results for variations of “Mao Zedong, Guerrilla Warfare” on the Chinese internet, most Chinese individuals and organizations to whom Mao Zedong’s military thought is at least adjacently relevant are clearly oblivious to the existence of On Guerrilla Warfareand to the influence of its translation abroad.
When asked for a source text some years after his initial translation, Griffith admitted that he could not produce one. Neither could subsequent Anglophone scholars of Chinese revolutionary warfare. The dominant narrative within Anglophone discourse became that “the provenance of the original Chinese text is unclear.” This is false. The source text was never technically lost to history. However, due to Griffith’s erroneous record of its key identifying details, its lack of prominence among contemporaneous works of Communist military thought, and the lack of awareness in China of its prominence in the Anglosphere, its identity has never been effectively communicated to Anglophone academia.
I confirm for the Anglophone academic world that the original Chinese title of the source text of On Guerrilla Warfareis “抗日游击战争的一般问题” (Pinyin: Kang-ri-you-ji-zhan-zheng-de-yi-ban-wen-ti; ENG: General Topics of Guerrilla Warfare in the War Against Japan.)* For consistency, I will continue the use of Griffith’s translated title. The book has been out of print since 1947, but photocopies of several editions are available online. Based on the editor’s note and publication details, Griffith’s recollection of its authorship and publication date are also incorrect. It was not published in 1937, but rather on July 7, 1938. It was not the work of Mao alone, but rather the collective work of Mao Zedong (毛泽东), Liu Yalou (刘亚楼), Chen Changhao（陈昌浩), Xiao Jinguang（萧劲光), and Guo Huaruo（郭化若). It was originally published in the collective name of “抗日战争研究会”(Pinyin: Kang-ri-zhan-zheng-yan-jiu-hui; ENG: The Research Association for the War of Resistance Against Japan. Hereon: The Yan’an Research Association). It was also not a standalone work, but the opening volume in a five book series, “抗日战争丛书” (Pinyin: Kang-ri-zhan-zheng-cong-shu; ENG: The War of Resistance Against Japan Series).
Verifying the Source Text
Though it is very seldom read, the source text under its original title is not completely unknown within China. Memoirs from the revolutionaries involved in its creation have mentioned the title and described its contents in passing. In recent years, a handful of publications on the history, translation, or international communication of works from the revolutionary period have at least mentioned the title among other contemporaneous Communist military publications. However, excepting a post on the social question and answer platform Zhihu, which drew the link between the little-known source text and Griffith’s well-circulated translation, most who have come across it before did not recognize that it warranted any special attention.
The title of the source text is not entirely unknown to the Anglophone discourse either. Stuart Schram had noted its relation to On Guerrilla Warfare in his translator’s forward to Basic Tactics in 1966, another work attributed to Mao. Likely misled by Griffith’s notes, Schram mistakenly labelled it a more polished, later edition of the text Griffith had translated. Griffith had indicated that the book he had translated was published in 1937. However, 1937 is entirely impossible as a publication year. To find the most damning evidence against it, one needs to look no further than the contents of the translation. The second chapter of On Guerrilla Warfare references conventional units conducting guerrilla operations against the Imperial Japanese Army on Chiang Kai-Shek’s instructions following “The Fall of Feng Ling Tu“(风陵渡失守; Pinyin: Feng-ling-du-shi-shou), an incident that occurred for the first time in early March 1938. “Feng Ling Tu”, or Fenglingdu, is a major port on the Yellow River facing Tongguan, a fortified mountain pass on the intersection of the Wei and Yellow Rivers. The fortress was the only point through which the Japanese could enter Shaanxi. The Japanese takeover of Fenglingdu marked a dangerous turn in the Battle for the Defense of Tongguan, which lasted to the end of the war. Fenglingdu would change hands several times throughout.
The editor’s preface refers to the text as a summation of the “past ten months” of experience in guerrilla warfighting in the War of Resistance, indicating that the work’s contents were prepared approximately two months in advance, to be released on a significant date. In the editor’s note for the advanced release of Mao Zedong’s “Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War in Japan” on May 30, 1938 in the weekly paper Jiefang, it was confirmed that a draft of the full text, then titled “抗日战争” (Pinyin: Kang-ri-zhan-zheng; ENG: The War of Resistance Against Japan), had already been completed. The date of release, July 7, 1938, was likely intentionally selected to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Lugouqiao Incident (Marco Polo Bridge Incident), the event which marked the escalation of Japan’s assault on China to a full-scale war.
On the issue of authorship, Griffith’s original 1940 translator’s note actually makes reference to Mao’s “collaborators”, but he proceeds to forget them entirely by 1961. In the source text, prose varies drastically between chapters, indicating that different contributors worked on each, though it is unclear how much each coauthor contributed. Only the last chapter, which Griffith rendered as “The Strategy of Guerrilla Resistance Against Japan”, is known to be the work of Mao, as it was published separately under Mao’s name approximately a month before the release of the complete book. Only this chapter is included in Mao’s official publication list, but the editor’s note from its advanced release suggests it is not the only part of the book that Mao wrote, as it was said to be an excerpt from a longer chapter originally bearing the title eventually used for the full book. The last chapter is more commonly known by the title used in Foreign Language Press Peking’s official translation, “Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan.” Griffith makes reference to this title in his 1961 forward, claiming that it was often conflated with the On Guerrilla Warfare he had translated, and failed to make the connection that the essay was the last chapter of the text that he had translated. After comparing the last chapter of the source text to the well-circulated standalone essay, I can confirm that the two texts are identical and additionally note that Griffith’s translation of the chapter was incomplete.
These errors likely came from Griffith’s weak grasp of the Chinese language, to which he admitted, and from unfamiliarity with the Chinese calendar system – the publication date in the original was written as “Year 27, 7th month, 7th day”, meaning the 7th of July (on the International/Gregorian calendar) of 1938, the 27th year of the Republic of China. The Republic of China was officially founded in 1912, with the calendar count starting at one, not zero. If Griffith paid closer attention to the events described in the contents he had translated, he may have realized the error sooner.
Mao et.al, An Underexplored Iceberg of Strategic Thought
The identification of the Chinese source text of On Guerrilla Warfare reveals and corrects previously little-known key details about its creation. These details about the source text reveal more than just Griffith’s errors. In particular, the fact that On Guerrilla Warfare was written by not Mao, but Mao et.al, illuminates that the intellectual architecture of the work was a lot more complex than a top-down imposition of Mao Zedong’s ideas, an often neglected characteristic that can also be said of the broader canon of Chinese Communist military strategic thought in general. Anglophone scholarship on Chinese Communist strategic thought has traditionally overrepresented Mao Zedong’s role and often completely neglects the writings of his collaborators. It also neglects the inspirations that others could have contributed to what became known as Mao’s military thought in favor of the interpretation that Mao was the mastermind who influenced everyone else. While Mao Zedong had significant creative influence as a political and military leader, each of Mao’s four coauthors, and many others associated with the Yan’an Research Association, had their own ideas, and a sizeable collection of their own publications to go with it.
The Yan’an Research Association can best be understood as a loose association of intellectuals within the Chinese Communist cadre acting as a think tank and military education specialist group. Many of its known members held significant leadership and teaching positions at Kangda (抗日军政大学; ENG: The War of Resistance University for Military and Political Affairs) and its various branch schools. They prolifically wrote materials for political and military education. Mao Zedong and other members of the military leadership had founded the group on the eve of the escalation of Japan’s invasion of China to a full-scale war in 1937. It was part of a greater goal to promote a culture of military intellectualism within the Red Army (later the Eighth Route Army) both to better understand the enterprise of warfighting, especially at the previously little-understood strategic level, and to improve the quality of military education across all ranks, including for guerrillas. The result was a rich collection of military writings, including On Guerrilla Warfare and its sister works.
On Guerrilla Warfare was written as the opening volume in a series of guidebooks about guerrilla warfare against Japan, War of Resistance Against Japan Series (抗日战争丛书; Pinyin: Kang-ri-zhan-zheng-cong-shu). Other titles from the same series include Mao’s On Protracted War, Zhu De’s On Guerrilla Warfare Against Japan (论抗日游击战争; Pinyin: Lun-kang-ri-you-ji-zhan-zheng), Luo Ruiqing’s Political Work in the Anti-Japanese Armed Forces (抗日军队的政治工作; Pinyin: Kang-ri-jun-dui-de-zheng-zhi-gong-zuo) and the sequel to On Guerrilla Warfare, Problems of Tactics in Guerrilla Warfare Against Japan (抗日游击战争的战术问题;Pinyin: Kang-ri-you-ji-zhan-zheng-de-zhan-shu-wen-ti), which was also a collective work. On Guerrilla Warfare, Problems of Tactics, and Political Work were planned together, as a trilogy.
All of these works were commissioned through the Yan’an Research Association, with primary editorial responsibilities overseen by the would-be Lieutenant General Guo Huaruo, the Whampoa Military Academy 4th Cohort valedictorian whom Mao had pulled into his inner circle of staff officers. The exact authorship of each chapter in On Guerrilla Warfare was unstated except for Mao’s final chapter. However, it is possible to speculate the contribution of some of the coauthors based on the letters exchanged between them, their memoirs, various secondary historical works, and the rest of their contemporaneous publications. From these materials, one can gather the extent of their interactions and mutual influence, and the various currents of military thought that were part of the discourse of the time.
Some of the coauthors occupied their own niche within Yan’an’s intellectual ecosystem. Chen Changhao, who would become better known for work in translating Marxist works from Russian, had at the time published on national revolution, and in 1940 would publish a thick volume on the modern history of global revolutionary movements. Based on this record, he was the most likely author of the third chapter of On Guerrilla Warfare, “Guerrilla Warfare in History”. The most prolific of the coauthors was Guo Huaruo. To facilitate Guo’s role in the creation of On Guerrilla Warfare, Mao assigned him a heavy reading list on strategic theory that included Clausewitz’s On War and the nationalist scholar Jiang Baili’s Treatise on National Defense. In addition to these, Guo also read works of Marxist dialectical thought and ancient Chinese military manuals. The ideas he mastered in this time allowed him to develop a reputation for his research on ancient Chinese strategic thought, especially Sun Zi’s Art of War.
Guo Huaruo’s memoir reveals that Mao had initiated the guerrilla warfare series project with a seminar on how guerrilla warfare doctrine should be codified, and that he had assigned discussants specific aspects of guerrilla warfare to write about. These were topics which overlapped with the contents of On Guerrilla Warfare. Guo Huaruo was told to write about strategy, Xiao Jinguang about command, and Liu Yalou about tactics. The final contributions of each of these coauthors do not line up this neatly – not all these topics had their own chapter. Guo’s letters with Mao suggest that both he and Mao had written about the strategic level of guerrilla warfare, exchanged notes, and influenced each other’s ideas. In fact, the skeletal structure of the famous Problems of Strategy chapter, though officially treated as the work of Mao Zedong alone, is nearly identical to the outline of problems of strategy in guerrilla warfare that Guo had come up with, as included in his memoir. Xiao Jinguang’s account of the initial seminar additionally notes that his own ideas on command were also incorporated into Mao’s chapter. These accounts are direct evidence that Mao consulted the ideas of those around him to flesh out his own.
Conclusion
By overrepresenting Mao Zedong, Anglophone literature has missed out on a whole network of interrelated thinkers who were actively encouraged to draw insights from a mix of both theory and practice as they fought and adapted to a war against a stronger enemy that less frequently clashed with Western armies on land. This vast intellectual ecosystem contains a bonanza of underexamined ideas on strategy. It also presents valuable case studies on the wartime development and evolution of military thought. On Guerrilla Warfare is a microcosm of this intellectual ecosystem. As the most accessible of “Mao’s” works, it provides a convenient starting point from which future scholars can further examine the underexplored aspects of the origins and development of the Chinese Communist school of strategic thought.
* For those who would like to examine the source text for themselves, multiple editions are available in digital form in the archive Digital Archive of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations (抗日战争与近代中日关系文献数据平台; Pinyin: Kang-ri-zhan-zheng-yu-jin-dai-zhong-ri-guan-xi-wen-xian-shu-ju-ping-tai), a project of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
