CHARACTERISTICS OF CHINA'S REVOLUTIONARY WAR

This chapter discusses the characteristics of China's revolutionary war. In many of its aspects, China's revolutionary war has characteristics distinguishing it from the civil war in the Soviet Union. Tt is wrong to take no account of these characteristics or deny their existence. This point has been fully borne out in our ten years of war. There are four principal characteristics of China's revolutionary war. The first is that China is a vast, semi-colonial country that is unevenly developed politically and economically and that has gone through the revolution of 1924–27. This characteristic indicates that it is possible for China's revolutionary war to develop and attain victory. The second characteristic is that the enemy is big and powerful. The third characteristic is that the Red Army is small and weak. The Chinese Red Army, starting as guerrilla units, came into being after the defeat of the first great revolution. The fourth characteristic is Communist Party leadership and the agrarian revolution. This characteristic is the inevitable consequence of the first one.