(Translator's Preface: This is taken from Vol 46 of Chairman Mao's Collected Works on the bannedthought website: Adobe Photoshop PDF (bannedthought.net) )
Some Experiences of Armed Struggle[1]
5 December 1963
（1）
Revolution is always about creating your own experience. In
the past, none of us knew how to fight and we were not prepared to go to the
mountains to fight as guerrillas. I was in the workers' and peasants' movement,
and I was a primary school teacher by profession. But the enemy wanted to
capture us and kill us, so we were forced to go to the mountains to fight. No
matter how we fought or how we didn't, we never studied. We learned from Chiang
Kai-shek and from the enemy and fought for ten years. Later, when the Japanese
came in, we learned to fight with them again. I have fought in wars all my
life, for 22 years in total. From not having the will to fight to having the
will to fight, from not knowing how to fight to learning how to fight.
In armed struggle, we must learn to destroy the enemy. If
you can't destroy a hundred of them, you have to destroy fifty of them. As long
as their guns and bullets are surrendered, you will not lose money. If you just
drive them away, and not destroy them, then it won't work. If we can cut off
one finger, we will only have nine fingers left, and if we cut off one more
finger, we will only have eight fingers left, and if we cut off one more finger,
we will only have seven fingers left. In this way, the enemy will be afraid of
us. It is possible to wipe out the enemy one by one and cut off the fingers one
by one. This is basically the way to fight a war. To fight a war of
annihilation, we have to choose the time and place.
Another point is that armed struggle requires base areas.
Without a base area, you cannot even cut off a finger. First of all, we should
fight the most loathsome ones, starting with the worst ones, that is, those in
power. Those who do not have deep hatred for the peasants can be left untouched
for the time being. We can also not distribute land immediately, but first
reduce rents and interest rates. Once the base areas are established, we can
establish power, peasant associations, youth and women's organisations,
production co-operatives and militias. For quite some time, some comrades did
not understand this issue and left after the fight, which is called rogueism.
They ran around, ate all the pigs and chickens and then left.
（2）
Because cities are the strongholds of imperialist
aggression, they are not easy to take over at once. Small towns might have been
possible, but often the enemy forced us to withdraw even after we had arrived,
and this was repeated many times. The main thing is to destroy the enemy's
power, without which the place cannot be defended.
In addition, there must be a separate political and economic
programme for the countryside, because it is impossible to be very specific in
the general programme. Once a base area is established, rents and interest
rates can be reduced, but land is not confiscated immediately. If the enemy was
too strong to be destroyed at once, or if the guerrillas left, the enemy would
kill people and the peasants would not dare to ask for the land. In Cuba,
before the victory of the revolution, there was no land distribution in the
base areas because they had only been fighting for three years. Our country was
so big and the war was so long that we fought for 20 years, so during the war
we carried out land reform. This was also after we had won some big battles and
had a base of millions of people. You have to do it on a case-by-case basis,
combining Marxism-Leninism with your situation.
You must mingle with the people, speak the same language and
dress like them, so that they feel that you are a trusted friend. One shortcoming
of urban intellectuals, and I myself am no different, is that I am not familiar
with the situation in the countryside. At first the peasants did not trust us
because they were oppressed by those who were rich. If we did not win the war,
they did not trust us either. After we had won the war and treated them as
equals, they trusted us.
（3）
There is also the
rule of self-reliance, supplemented by international aid. With international
aid or without, we have to rely on ourselves. Like in ancient times, they had
no foreign support for their armed struggle, and where did they get their
weapons? They took them from the enemy. We fought the war with the enemy, we
got our guns from the enemy, and we captured many of them and added them to our
troops. The enemy's soldiers were trained to fight. Our soldiers were
untrained, and if we took some captives, they would have fought. The base area
was a school for training cadres. Many of our leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou
Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and many other marshals and generals, did not know how to
fight at first, but learnt during the war.
In the past, there were no marshals, generals, colonels or
lieutenants, but only commanders, military commanders, divisional commanders,
regimental commanders, battalion commanders, company commanders, platoon
commanders and squad commanders. Officers were the same as soldiers. But then
there were many titles and better clothes than soldiers. I don't think that's
good. It's better to be the same as a soldier. I don't live by the title of
marshal or general. I am not a marshal or a general, but the Chairman of the
Central Committee of the Party, and I should not live on that title. The masses
do not care what kind of wealth you have, nor what clothes you wear, but only
what policies you have. They don't care what party you are, whether it is the
Communist Party or the Guomindang, but if the Communist Party's policies are
wrong, they will still scold you. Where does knowledge come from? We are all
very stupid. Knowledge comes from the masses. If we don't do research, we don't
know anything. This is some of our experience.
[1]
Sections 1 to 3 are part of Mao Zedong's conversation with a study delegation
from the Colombian "Workers, Students and Peasants Movement".
