Mao Zedong and People's War

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From Guerrilla Insurgency to Revolutionary Uprising: Examining Mao Zedong’s Concept of “People’s War” and it’s Connection with Southeast Asian Conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s By Joshua Lee 100210475 History 3350 Dr. Collin Green April 10, 2013 Mao Zedong’s concept of “People’s War” is a school of military theory at the strategic level that was shaped by the experiences, realities, and challenges faced by the Chinese Communist Party. More specifically, the time frame of these experiences, realities, and challenges which shaped “People’s War” started from the collapse of China’s “First United Front”, until the end of the Chinese Civil War with the Chinese Communist Party achieving victory and asserting dominance over the entirety of mainland China. It is undisputable that People’s War has its foundations in Guerrilla Warfare (Spanish for “Little War”) however the conceptual dimension of People’s War is broader than that of Guerrilla Warfare. The Maoist theory of People’s War” directly contributed to, and helped make possible the communist victories in Southeast Asia against non-Communist Western-Allied regimes. The Communist victories in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were achieved through effective implementation of the principles of People’s War”. For this essay, I have two main goals. The first goal is to support my thesis that Mao’s People’s War is a military strategic theory which had major influences on the course of three conflicts throughout southeast Asia (the Vietnam War, the Cambodian Civil War, and the Malayan Emergency). The second goal is to elaborate in detail the main principles of Mao Zedong’s “People’s War”, and explain its distinctiveness from the theory of Guerrilla Warfare which predates it and which it was based upon. In implementing the second goal of this essay, I will also include instances from various communist revolutionary
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