Page:On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation).djvu/22

Introduction in the history of the Chinese Communist Party was taken; the ultimate responsibility for it rested equally on the shoulders of Mao and Chu Teh. These two agreed that the only hope for the movement was to abandon immediately the line laid down by Moscow in favor of one of Mao's own devising. Basically the conflict that split the Chinese Communist Party wide open and alienated the traditionalists in Moscow revolved about this question: Was the Chinese revolution to be based on the industrial proletariat—as Marxist dogma prescribed—or was it to be based on the peasant? Mao, who knew and trusted the peasants, and had correctly gauged their revolutionary potential, was convinced that the Chinese urban proletariat were too few in number and too apathetic to make a revolution. This decision, which drastically reoriented the policy of the Chinese Communist Party, was thereafter to be carried out with vigorous consistency. History has proved that Mao was right, Moscow wrong. And it is for this reason that the doctrine of Kremlin infallibility is so frequently challenged by Peking.

In October, 1930, the Generalissimo, in the misguided belief that he could crush the Communists with no difficulty, announced with great fanfare a "Bandit Suppression Campaign." This was launched in December. How weak the Nationalists really were was now to become apparent. The campaign was a complete flop. Government troops ran away or surrendered to the Communists by platoons, by companies, by battalions. Three more Suppression Campaigns, all failures, followed this fiasco. Fi-