Main Points:
Our strategy should be to employ our main forces to operate over an extended and fluid front. To achieve success, the Chinese troops must conduct their warfare with a high degree of mobility on extensive battlefields, making swift advances and withdrawals, swift concentrations and dispersals. (193)
In the early period of the war, we must avoid any major decisive battles, and must first employ mobile warfare gradually to break the morale and combat effectiveness of the enemy troops. (193)
China will be able to conduct positional warfare in the latter period of the war and make positional attacks on the Japanese-occupied areas. (194)
Japan’s advantage lies in her great capacity to wage war, and her disadvantages lie in the reactionary and barbarous nature of her war, in the inadequacy of her manpower and material resources, and in her meager international support. (197)
China, on the contrary, has les military, economic and political-organizational power, but she is in her era of progress, her war is progressive and just, she is moreover a big country, a factor which enables her to sustain a protracted war, and she will be supported by most countries. (198)
But the crisis soon passed, one reason being that the enemy everywhere pursued a barbarous policy and practiced naked plunder. (203)
The greater the political progress, the more we can persevere in the war, and the more we persevere in the war, the greater the political progress. (205)
3 stages: (210)
- Enemy’s strategic offensive and our strategic defensive
o Primarily mobile warfare, supplemented by guerrilla and positional warfare (211)
o Signs of exhaustion are beginning to appear in his finances, economy; war-weariness is beginning to set in among his people and troops; and within the clique at the helm of the war, “war frustrations” are beginning to manifest themselves in pessimism about the prospects of the war is growing. (212)
- Enemy’s strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive
o Primarily guerrilla warfare supplemented by mobile warfare (212)
o Enemy will be forced to fix terminal points and safeguard his occupied areas. (212)
o Fighting will be ruthless and the country will suffer serious devastation. (212)
- Our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy’s strategic retreat
o Primary form of fighting will still be mobile warfare, but positional warfare will rise in importance. (214)
Weapons are an important factor in war, but no the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. (217)
The enemy can actually only hold the big cities, the main lines of communication and some of the plains. (221)
Once man has eliminated capitalism, he will attain the era of perpetual peace, and there will be no more need for war. (223)
All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. (224)
Political Mobilization: telling the army and the people about the political aim of the war. It is necessary for every soldier and civilian to see why the war must be fought and how it concerns him. The political aim of the war is “to drive out Japanese imperialism and build a new China of freedom and equality”. Secondly, it is not enough merely to explain the aim to them; there must be a political program. (229)
The object of war is specifically to preserve oneself and destroy the enemy. (230)
These local successes will add up to strategic superiority and initiative for us and strategic inferiority and passivity for the enemy. (237)
3 crucial links: time, place, troops (241)
The outcome of the war depends mainly on regular warfare, especially in its mobile form, and that guerrilla warfare cannot shoulder the main responsibility in deciding the outcome… Thus the strategic role of guerrilla warfare is twofold, to support regular warfare and to transform itself into regular warfare. (246)
Mobile warfare performs the task of annihilation, positional warfare performs the task of attrition, and guerrilla warfare performs both simultaneously. (249)
…will eventually shake the morale of the enemy army whose weapons are not in the hands of politically conscious soldiers. (259)
The army must become one with the people so that they see it as their own army. Such an army will be invincible, and an imperialist power like Japan will be no match for it. (260)
There are of course many other conditions indispensible to victory, but political mobilization is the most fundamental. (261)