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Source: "Concentrate a Superior Force to Destroy the Enemy Forces One by One," Beijing Review 17, no. 52, 27 December 1974, 5-8.
Transcribed by an HC, April 20, 2005
December 27, 1974
[Transcriber's introduction (April 20, 2005): Certain revisionists in the enemy camp have been putting forth the line that there ought to be a revolutionary center coordinating simultaneous revolution in different countries. The below article deals with the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one.
It is clearly the case that the revolutionary struggle develops unevenly, and that revolutionary consciousness develops unevenly, even within countries. Revolution's successes are inevitably achieved in a piecemeal way even when the revolution advances in multiple countries. International center bureaucracies in denial of this "strike everywhere without enough strength anywhere, losing time and making it hard to get results." This is exacerbated by the bureaucracies' meddling with revolutionaries' activities in different countries without fully knowing these countries' conditions.]
by Kun Chun
From the outset, China's revolutionary war was fought in the face of a big and powerful enemy. This being the case, how should our army cope with the enemy and fight battles became an important question which had to be solved. Using the Marxist-Leninist stand, viewpoint and method, Chairman Mao decisively analysed the laws of China's revolutionary war and set forth a series of strategic and tactical principles and methods of fighting concerning this war. The principle of fighting known as concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one is an important component part of Chairman Mao's military thinking and the core of our army's strategic and tactical principles. It is also a scientific method of thinking and work which we must master in carrying out revolution and construction.
The emancipation of the proletariat, Engels pointed out, will also have a particular military expression and will create a special, new method of war. Concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one is precisely a special and new method of fighting for the people's army, a method which Chairman Mao created while leading the Chinese people in protracted revolutionary struggle. It correctly reflects the general laws of war and the specific laws of China's revolutionary war and graphically embodies Marxist materialism and dialectics in strategic and tactical principles.
Marxism holds that war is a motion of matter. Victory or defeat in a war is determined by the military, political, economic and natural conditions of both sides as well as by each side's subjective ability in directing the war. In our efforts to win a war, we cannot overstep the limitations imposed by material conditions; within these limitations, however, we can and should give full play to the dynamic role of subjective ability in directing the war and strive for victory. Both sides in a war do all they can to gain the initiative so as to seize victory. However, "the initiative is not something imaginary but is concrete and material. Here the most important thing is to conserve and mass an armed force that is as large as possible and full of fighting spirit." (Mao Tsetung: Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War .)
Concentrating a superior force is the chief material condition for destroying the enemy forces and gaining the initiative. Since all reactionaries are paper tigers, we had every assurance and confidence in defeating the attacks of all reactionaries at home and abroad in China's protracted revolutionary war. But since it was a phenomenon of objective reality that the enemy was strong and we were weak, we could only win victory by taking the enemy seriously, paying special attention to the art of struggle and concentrating all our efforts in fighting battles as regards each specific struggle. This called for applying the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one not only to troop disposition for a campaign but also to troop disposition for a battle. Chairman Mao pointed out: "Our strategy is 'pit one against ten' and our tactics are 'pit ten against one' -- this is one of our fundamental principles for gaining mastery over the enemy." ( Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War .) In every battle, we must concentrate an absolutely superior force using several divisions to deal with an enemy division, several tens of thousands of men to deal with ten thousand enemy troops and several detachments to deal with one enemy detachment, so as to encircle the enemy forces completely, strive to wipe them out thoroughly and not let any escape from the net. In this way, victory in war was built on a solid and reliable material basis.
The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. There is at once unity and struggle between the opposites in a contradiction, and it is this that impels things to move and change. The principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one is a concrete application of this law in directing a revolutionary war. It tells us how to size up and deal with the enemy by using the materialist-dialectical theory that things are infinitely divisible, how to correctly assess the situation in which the enemy was strong while we were weak and effect its transformation and how to fundamentally change the position between the enemy and ourselves and seize victory in war according to the laws governing quantitative and qualitative changes.
Chairman Mao pointed out: "In society as in nature, every entity invariably breaks up into its different parts, only there are differences in content and form under different concrete conditions." ( Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work. ) Contradictions exist in all things and everything can be divided. Big and small form a unity of opposites. A big thing can be divided into [p. 6] many small parts which in turn can be divided into still smaller parts. A huge armed-to-the-teeth monster, the enemy in China's revolutionary war consisted of reactionaries with massive military power who received aid from the world's major imperialist countries. However huge, it was made up of small parts which could be broken up. Truculent and blustering, Chiang Kai-shek for some time boasted of having several million troops, but actually he was not so powerful. We could divide them into many small parts and wipe them out piecemeal. So long as we know how to look at the enemy from the viewpoint of breaking him up, we are able to deal with him by adopting the method of "divide and annihilate." As Chairman Mao said: "In war, battles can only be fought one by one and the enemy forces can only be destroyed one by one. Factories can only be built one by one. The peasants can only plough the land plot by plot. The same is even true of eating a meal. Strategically, we take the eating of a meal lightly -- we know we can finish it. But actually we eat it mouthful by mouthful. It is impossible to swallow an entire banquet in one gulp. This is known as a piecemeal solution. In military parlance, it is called wiping out the enemy forces one by one." (Speech at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, November 13, 1957.) It is impossible for us to destroy all the enemy forces at one go, but on the basis of concentrating a superior force we can finish them off by adopting the method of wiping them out one by one.
Just as there is nothing in the world without a dual nature, so both sides in a war have a dual nature. The enemy had both a strong and a weak aspect and we had both a weak and a strong aspect. Strong as he was, the enemy was on the decline and his strength would be transformed into weakness; weak as we were, we were developing and growing in strength and our weakness would be transformed into strength. But the enemy's strength and our weakness could be transformed into their opposites only under given conditions. The most important of these conditions was the correctness of our political and military lines. We were inferior in number and in strength, but we defeated the enemy who was strong and superior numerically; this, however, did not in any way mean that victory was won through "weakness," rather, we relied on our own subjective efforts to bring about a transformation in the balance of forces and make ourselves strong. "The method is to create local superiority and initiative in many campaigns, so depriving the enemy of local superiority and initiative and plunging him into inferiority and passivity." (Mao Tsetung: On Protracted War .) We must be adept at concentrating our troops to pick out the enemy's weaker units for attack one by one so a to ensure our absolute or relative superiority over the enemy troops locally and in each campaign or battle. In this way, the enemy forces which were in a strong position in terms of the situation as a whole would become weak locally while our army which was in a weak position on the whole would be in a strong position locally.
Pitting our local superiority and initiative against the enemy's local inferiority and passivity, we first inflicted one sharp defeat on him and then turned on the rest of his forces to smash them one by one, thus ensuring victory in each local campaign or battle. In China's revolutionary war, it was precisely because we used the law of the unity of opposites to correctly size up the situation in which the enemy was strong and we were weak [,] and adopted the method of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one to change such a situation [,] that we succeeded in turning the enemy's strong position on the whole into weakness in part and turning our weak position on the whole into strength in part, thereby changing the relationship between strength and weakness in the overall situation.
The movement of opposites in things involves a process of going from quantitative change to partial qualitative change and then to complete qualitative change. The accumulation of quantitative change to a certain extent inevitably gives rise to qualitative change. Concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one embodies the process of dialectical development from quantitative accumulation to qualitative leap in the balance of forces between the enemy and ourselves in the revolutionary war. Chairman Mao pointed out: "War is a contest of strength, but the original pattern of strength changes in the course of war." ( On Protracted War ) Being weak and small at the beginning, our army was strategically in a temporarily inferior and passive position. By correctly employing the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one, however, we aimed chiefly at annihilating the enemy's effective strength and as far as possible fought campaigns or battles of annihilation so that when we wiped out one regiment, the enemy would have one regiment less, and when we wiped out one division, he would have one division less, thereby effecting a decrease in the enemy's strength and increase in our own strength, which was a change favourable to us but unfavourable to him. Many big and small battles of annihilation would add up to a fundamental change in the balance of forces between the enemy and ourselves, thus enabling our strength to grow from small to big and rise to predominance and making the enemy's strength shrink from big to small until he is gradually destroyed completely. The implementation of the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one promoted the development of the balance of forces between the enemy and ourselves from quantitative to qualitative change and from local to total qualitative change. This was of great importance in directing the war as a whole.
During the War of Liberation (1946-49), Chairman Mao took firm hold of the crucial link of changing the relative strength of effectives between the enemy and ourselves and gave a series of clear instructions to our army concerning its tasks of annihilating the enemy forces at each stage, thereby propelling the development of the war situation throughout the coun-¬try [p. 7] and hastening the victorious advance of the War of Liberation. In the first eight months of the war, our army put 710,000 enemy troops out of action, forcing the enemy to switch from an all-out offensive to attacks on key points, and began going over to a strategic counter-offensive in some areas. With 1.12 million enemy troops wiped out after a year's fighting, Chairman Mao, basing himself on the new balance of forces, put forward the task of launching a country-wide counter-offensive, that is, using our main forces to fight our way to exterior lines and carrying the war into the Kuomintang-controlled areas and wiping out large numbers of the enemy forces on the exterior lines. By the third year of the War of Liberation, the state of numerical inferiority long undergone by our army had changed as a result of the enemy forces falling from 4.3 million in the early period of the war to about 2.9 million and our army increasing from 1.2 million to more than 3 million. This was a momentous change in the military situation in China's War of Liberation. In such a situation, Chairman Mao put forward the principle of fighting strategically decisive battles against the enemy. He personally made the decision and directed the three great campaigns -- the Liaohsi-Shenyang, the Huai-Hai and the Peiping-Tientsin campaigns* [ 1 ] -- in which the crack troops on which Chiang Kai-shek relied for waging the counter-revolutionary civil war were virtually annihilated.
Concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one is based on people's war; it is a principle of fighting for the people's army. With a clear-cut class nature, it can be mastered and applied only by an army of the proletariat and its tremendous power can be brought into play only in people's war. Though the enemy was well acquainted with this method of fighting of ours, his idealist and metaphysical world outlook and the anti-popular nature of his war determined that he could never understand and use this method. No matter how hard he tried, he just could not succeed in preventing us from winning victory and in averting his own defeat.
"The concentration of troops seems easy but is quite hard in practice. Everybody knows that the best way is to use a large force to defeat a small one, and yet many people fail to do so and on the contrary often divide their forces up." (Mao Tsetung: Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War .) In the final analysis, this is a question of ideological and political line. The principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one formulated by Chairman Mao stems from the dialectical-materialist world outlook and methodology. Whether or not we should uphold this principle of fighting is, at roots, a question of whether or not we should adhere to Marxist materialism and dialectics. "Epistemologically speaking, the source of all erroneous views on war lies in idealist and mechanistic tendencies on the question." (Mao Tsetung: On Protracted War .)
The chieftains of the opportunist lines within the Party were idealists characterized by the breach between the subjective and the objective and the separation of knowledge from practice. Proceeding from their idealist and metaphysical world outlook, they spared no effort to push an opportunist line politically and in military affairs and, with regard to the guiding thought in directing operations, they did everything possible to oppose Chairman Mao's principle of fighting. They either totally disregarded the objective reality that the enemy was strong and we were weak, took the enemy lightly and engaged in blind action, attacking him in all directions and "striking with two 'fists,' " or regarded the enemy as monolithic, fearing him as if he were a tiger and not daring to make attacks. They had one thing in common which was looking at problems in an isolated, one-sided and rigid manner, and they were advocates of idealist and mechanistic approaches to the question of war.
The renegade and traitor Lin Piao consistently took the Right opportunist stand, energetically carried out military equalitarianism and opposed Chairman Mao's correct principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one. As early as the Second Revolutionary Civil War period (1927-37), Lin Piao worked overtime to trumpet the idea that it was impossible for us to operate with concentrated forces and that all we could do was to divide them up for defence and go in for what he called "short swift thrusts." During the War of Liberation and after nationwide victory, he openly peddled the so-called "six tactical principles" fabricated by his subjective imagination in opposition to Chairman Mao's ten major principles of operation* [ 2 ] and he used what he called the "tactic of one point and two directions" to oppose the principle of concentrating troops, encircling the enemy forces from all directions and destroying them one by one. Lin Piao's so-called tactical principles are a hotchpotch of idealism and mechanism and a typical example of metaphysics and scholasticism.
We apply the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one in fight-¬ing [p. 8] battles, and we should do the same in all other work. In a sense, the cause of socialist revolution and construction is more profound, complicated and arduous than fighting battles. We must be daring in waging struggles and be good at it. Much work has to be done; many difficulties have to be overcome and many problems have to be solved. Though there are lots of work, difficulties and problems, we must, like fighting battles, grasp the principal contradiction, determine the direction of our main attack, correctly organize and use our forces and concentrate them to achieve a piecemeal solution. It is imperative to grasp the typical examples well and make a breakthrough at one point so as to further our work as a whole, and "as regards the work as a whole, it is first necessary to grasp one-third of it well." It is essential to take firm hold of those key points which are the most necessary and weakest but which have great influence on others, and concentrate our efforts to fight a war of annihilation and solve problems one by one or by groups, so as to achieve the aim of "first, complete annihilation, and second, quick decision." ( Mao Tsetung: Concentrate a Superior Force to Destroy the Enemy Forces One by One .)
If, on the contrary, we divide up our forces and move ahead simultaneously, the result is bound to be "strike everywhere without enough strength anywhere, losing time and making it hard to get results." ( Concentrate a Superior Force to Destroy the Enemy Forces One by One. ) Over the years we have made great achievements in socialist construction by implementing Chairman Mao's principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one. It is by relying on the masses, concentrating our efforts, pooling the support from all quarters and adopting the method of working in close co-operation and co-ordination that we have built many giant construction projects and produced many products of advanced levels. This is of paramount important to speeding up the cause of our socialist construction and seizing new victories in grasping revolution, promoting production and other work and preparedness against war .
To carry out the principle of concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one, it is necessary to strengthen the Party's centralized and unified leadership. The fundamental guarantee for the thorough implementation of this principle lies in achieving unity in thinking, policy, plan, command and action on the basis of Chairman Mao's revolutionary line. Without centralization coordination and unity, concentrating troops to fight a war of annihilation is bound to become empty talk. Thus it is imperative for us to consciously strengthen the Party's centralized and unified leadership, closely rally around the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Mao, bring into play all positive factors, unite with all the forces that can be united and as far as possible turn negative factors into positive ones. Only thus can we put into practice the principle of concentrating our forces to fight battles of annihilation in all fields of work and advance in step to promote the still greater development of the cause of revolution and construction.
"The correctness or incorrectness of the ideological and political line decides everything." The victory in China's revolutionary war is a victory for Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line and the result of Chairman Mao's military line defeating the bourgeois military line pushed by Wang Ming, Lin Piao and their like.
(A slightly abridged translation of an article in "Hongqi," No. 12, 1974. Subheads are ours.)
[ 1 ] * These were the three greatest campaigns of decisive significance in the Chinese People's War of Liberation. The Liaohsi-Shenyang campaign was fought by the Northeast People's Liberation Army in the western part of Liaoning Province and in the Shenyang-Changchun area between September 12 and November 2, 1948. It resulted in the wiping out of more than 470,000 enemy troops and liberating the whole of northeast China. Fought between November 6, 1948 and January 10, 1949, the Huai-Hai campaign was carried out by the People's Liberation Army over a large territory centring on Hsuchow in northern Kiangsu Province and extending as far as Haichow in the east, Shangchiu in Honan Province in the west, Lincheng (now renamed Hsuehcheng) in southern Shantung Province in the north and the Huai River in the south, with 555,000 Kuomintang crack troops put out of action. The Peiping-Tientsin campaign began early in December 1948 and ended on January 31, 1949 when Peiping was peacefully liberated. Over 520,000 Kuomintang troops were put out of action or re-organized by us in the campaign.
[ 2 ] * See Part III of "The Present Situation and Our Tasks" in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung Vol. IV, or Peking Review , No. 50, 1974, p. 9.