The War Game
Mao on coalition management in difficult circumstances
Current Problems of Tactics in the Anti-Japanese United Front by Mao Zedong
Wars are difficult to fight and they feature many problems. The most pressing job, of course, is defeating the enemy, or holding the enemy at bay if the foe appears to be winning or getting the upper hand. Staving off defeat, rallying the irreconcilable, making irrational self-sacrifice in a losing cause seem reasonable: this can be the most difficult task of all. Perhaps second in difficultly, and not much easier, is managing a coalition.
And most wars are, taken in their sum, a question of coalitions — be they external coalitions (most wars these days are fought alongside allies, something that holds true historically) or internal, with differing factions of the same society doing their best to come out on top even if they win all together, happy to have taken the same side.
Think of the strikes that happen during wartime; the mutinies of the troops. These things take place and they do morale and materiel much harm. They must be suppressed if the state can suppress them. In the twentieth century, governments tried to get the newspapers to avoid reporting on them.
The damage of things like this could prove irrecoverable.
In a war that is also a civil war, in a conflict that takes in social conflict, the same is true; perhaps it is even more true. And in the situation in China before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, where various factions attempted to unite the country under their own banner while nonetheless trying — with differing levels of good faith — to expel the Japanese invaders, coalition dynamics, the rhythm of politics and not only battle rhythm, mattered more and more.
For Mao Zedong, of course, the coalition was not the primary vehicle. Mao had the party, and the party’s extensive and dedicated apparatus. He had those parts of society from which the party drew its spirit, its recruits, its vigour. And he had friends abroad: most notably in the Soviet Union but also further afield. He had, for what it was worth, the prevailing International at his back. What good it did.
All of this ranged against seemingly stronger opposition: the claimed national government of the republic, headed by the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek.
But when the Japanese imperial armed forces formally invaded China, after years of whittling parts of it away, some of the class conflict and civil conflict that predominated earlier sunk a little in importance. If national survival were in question, other things could be negotiated; they could be worked around.
We must united against the Japanese. Form a united front. Fight together, or at least no longer fight each other quite so earnestly, and with such an all-or-nothing spirit. At least, that is what the warring parties, the warring states, all said.
Managing this coalition, therefore, became of primary importance for the leaders of Chinese factions. Those who built and guarded their own power, who aided the other Chinese factions only when necessary and for effects that were certain and lever-like, magnified: they would win this internal discord. They would survive the war, likely, with their power intact, with more of their people equipped and under arms, with the admiration of the people, the very thing that, in Mao’s own telling, surely meant a better political position were the war to conclude without one force ruling China. With another civil war to fight.
But that was for the future. What mattered in the moment, at the time of this document being written, was to keep the coalition going. Mao, as he often was in his wartime writings, seemed at least on his surface remarkably pragmatic.
He notices, and states it openly, that the party’s own position is identical with the Kuomintang’s, at least on one or two important questions. Though that does not mean, Mao says, we share or condone the policies of the Kuomintang.
Look at what this essay says about class. It identifies many factions of all classes who might be worked with, who might come to the party as a liberator and as a collection of good fighting men and women, the necessary grouping, the necessary army, for victory in the anti-Japanese war.
Many of these are obvious: the party can, Mao notes, count on the support of the proletariat and the peasantry. But it may also approach those amenable elements within the petty bourgeoisie, and some of the bourgeois whose political knowledge and desire for what Mao calls democracy is sufficient. Intellectuals, too, can be part of our movement. If they know and accept the party line. There is even scope, he writes, more than once, to include the enlightened gentry. If it exists.
Even in deep, painful, agonising wars, there is some element of calculation. Those who commit their whole strength do so foolishly. They could be overturned and overtaken by events.
We must fight, Mao says, against the Japanese, against the Chinese diehards, against our internal enemies, only when we are sure of victory. And in between those episodes of violence, we must make use of truces. We wish to defeat our rivals. We wish to be the sole party within China whose seriousness in throwing out the Japanese is not in question. But we win nothing with constant, stupid struggle. We must be intelligent. We must be wise. And we must guard and manage our coalitions with great sagacity.