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Mountain Warriors: The Importance of

Mountains in Mao’s People’s War
Benjamin R. Young*

ABSTRACT

The globalization of Mao Zedong Thought has recently received

increased attention from historians and political scientists. Within
this growing scholarship, ideology and state repression have been
emphasized. However, the military aspect of Mao’s revolutionary
schemata has received less attention, and it was precisely in the
mountains of China where the Maoist concept of people’s war took
root. With its focus on political persuasion and irregular warfare,
people’s war was an effective strategy for anti-colonial rebels to wage
armed struggle against stronger conventional militaries. Using mul-
tinational archival documents, state media sources, leader’s
speeches, as well as secondary sources, this paper looks at the impor-
tance of mountains in Maoist people’s war and the ways this military
strategy influenced armed conflicts in China, Korea, the Philippines,
Vietnam, and Peru. As a strategy that stressed mobile warfare, agit-
prop, and the rebellious potential of the peasantry, Mao rewrote the
guidebook of revolutionary war theory for Marxism-Leninism. As a
military strategy that reverberated with national liberation move-
ments in the rural margins of the Global South, the military aspects
of people’s war and more specifically the role of mountains in
Maoist-influenced guerilla warfare should be taken into greater ac-
count by scholars of global Maoism.

Keywords: Maoism; revolutionary war, guerilla warfare, Marxism-Leninism,

People’s War

In his book On War, 19th century Prussian general and military theorist
Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “The influence of mountains on the conduct of
war is very great; the subject, therefore, is very important for theory.”1 Moun-
tains allowed weaker and smaller units to combat larger conventional militar-
ies. The remote inaccessibility and rugged terrain of mountainous landscapes
allowed small mobile units to wage ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, and sabo-
tage on larger opposing forces. Historically, mountains have provided impor-
tant refuges and hideouts for revolutionaries. From the American
Revolutionary War to Irish rebellions, insurgents have used the strategic ad-

* Assistant Professor of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Wilder School

of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University. Email:
youngb9@vcu.edu.
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 352.

301
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302 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

vantages of mountains to attack stronger armies. For example, at Valley

Forge, George Washington’s Continental Army endured a brutal winter en-
campment from 1777-1778 but used this strategic position in the uplands of
Pennsylvania for defensive purposes and to rally his troops.2 Nonetheless, it
was Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong, a reader of Clausewitz’s writings,
who understood the importance of mountains in protracted asymmetric war-
fare and paired Marxist revolutionary theory with mountain warfare.3 It was
in the mountains during the Chinese Civil War where Mao Zedong first ar-
ticulated his revolutionary theory of “people’s war.” The rugged landscape in
which Mao articulated his vision of armed struggle was not a mere geographi-
cal backdrop but a vital element of people’s war, which would later have far-
reaching effects on insurgencies around the decolonizing world.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Mao’s communist forces fought the Japanese
military and the Chinese Nationalists via asymmetric warfare. By retreating to
mountain valleys and caves, Mao continued his protracted warfare tech-
niques against stronger militaries. In his book On Guerilla Warfare, Mao said,
“Guerrilla bases may be classified according to their location as: first, moun-
tain bases; second, plains bases; and last, river, lake, and bay bases. The ad-
vantages of bases in mountainous areas are evident.”4 Mao’s adaptation of
mountain warfare was one of the most important military contributions to
Marxist revolutionary theory and more broadly to modern insurgency. The
anti-colonial militancy and political agitprop advocated by people’s war al-
igned with the party-building programs of many national liberation move-
ments. Mao’s promotion of protracted mobile warfare was well suited for the
rugged terrain of rural mountainous regions. Several Maoist-inspired rebel
groups and revolutionary movements developed in the rural margins of the
Global South during the 1960s and took up people’s war as their military
strategy. Unsurprisingly, most of them took to the mountains as their base of
operations.
One of the biggest worries for the CIA during the Cold War era was the
global dissemination of Maoist-style militancy. In 1964, the CIA released a
special report on Maoist China’s military doctrine, which stated, “The Chi-
nese point to their own successful revolution as an example for revolutionar-
ies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and believe that in conflicts that have
taken place in Indochina, Cuba, and Algeria, and in the one now under way
in South Vietnam, Maoist revolutionary doctrine has considerable applicabil-
ity.” Due to Mao’s emphasis on mountain areas as vital military bases and his
positioning of the peasantry as the vanguard of the revolution, the CIA con-
cluded that the guerilla concepts from the Chinese leader “will continue to
be stressed by the Chinese as a guide to be used by revolutionaries in ‘na-
tional liberation’ wars.”5 The Chinese experiences of revolutionary war influ-
enced partisans all over the world. For example, Yugoslav leader Josip Tito
based his anti-fascist partisan activity during World War II on a study of the
Chinese revolutionary movement, “transferring the Central Committee and

2 Wayne Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (University Park: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 2002).
3 Zhang Yuanlin, “Mao Zedong und Carl von Clausewitz: Theorien des Krieges, Beziehung,
Darstellung und Vergleich,” PhD Dissertation, Universität Mannheim, 1995.
4 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX (1937), <https://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/ch07.htm> (Accessed November 23, 2019).
5 CIA Special Report, “Chinese Communist Military Doctrine,” January 17, 1964, https://
www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000413519.pdf <(Accessed December 25,
2019)>.
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 303

the largest possible number of urban cadres to the mountains and using the
latter as soon as possible to form ‘proletarian brigades’ in order to achieve
mobility.”6 The rural character of Mao’s people’s war and the encirclement
of cities by guerillas in mountainous terrain were military ideas that reso-
nated with anti-colonial rebels across the Global South, especially in rugged
impoverished countries.
Historians of Maoism, namely Arif Dirlik, Matthew Galway, and Stuart
Schram, have previously described the application of Marxist theory to Chi-
nese conditions.7 As Dirlik explains, Mao localized Marxism for the Chinese
nation and also integrated Marxism “into the language of the masses.” How-
ever, building on Dirlik’s explanation that Mao localized Marxism within the
nation at the level of everyday life, I contend that Mao also localized Marxism
within a particular geographical setting: the mountains.8 Prior to the Chinese
revolution, Marxism was traditionally centered on the revolutionary potential
of the urban industrial worker. The Soviet Union, under Lenin, viewed the
urban working class as the vanguard of the proletarian revolution and the
city as the setting of the revolution.9 However, Mao’s sinification of Marxism
oriented the revolution towards the rural peasantry and more specifically
those in the mountainous regions. It was precisely in China’s mountainous
backwoods where the concept of people’s war first took root and developed
into a military strategy for insurgents all over the decolonizing world. It was
the utopian aspirations, egalitarian discourse, and rugged populism of Mao’s
vernacularization of Marxism that initially appealed to mountain villagers
and upland peasants in rural China. Moreover, Mao’s three-phased military
strategy for seizing power, which would advance from the defensive to stale-
mate to offensive, was the essence of people’s war that would bring forth
victory on the battlefield for the oppressed masses.
Recently, the global dimensions of Mao Zedong Thought (better known
as Maoism internationally) have been come under increased focus from his-
torians. In her general public-oriented book, Julia Lovell examined the
global influence of Maoist ideology and its malleability.10 From the Black
Panther Party in Oakland selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book to Indian
Naxalites upholding Mao Zedong as their Chairman, Lovell highlighted the
ways in which Maoism was a flexible ideology for radicals all over the world.
Meanwhile, Matthew Galway’s important work on the Khmer Rouge’s in-
digenization of Maoism opens a new way of looking at the internationaliza-
tion of Chinese revolutionary thought.11 There is also a recent edited volume
on the global embrace of Mao’s iconic Little Red Book as well as a history of

6 Richard Lowenthal, “Three Roads to Power,” Problems of Communism 5, no. 4 (July-August

1956), 13.
7 Arif Dirlik, “Mao Zedong and ‘Chinese Marxism,’ ” in Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese
Revolution (Lanham, MD,, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 75?104; Matthew Galway, The Emergence of
Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 2022); Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New
York: Praeger, 1971).
8 Arif Dirlik, “Mao Zedong Thought and the Third World/Global South,” Interventions 16,
no. 2 (2014), 244.
9 Diane Koenker, “Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil
War,” The Journal of Modern History 57, no. 3 (1985), 424–50.
10 Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (New York, NY: Knopf, 2019).
11 Matthew Galway, “From Revolutionary Culture to Original Culture and Back: ‘On New
Democracy’ and the Kampucheanization of Marxism-Leninism, 1940-1965,” Cross Currents: East
Asian History and Culture Review, no. 24 (September 2017), 132-158.
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304 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

Chinese revolutionary linkages to the Latin American Left.12 Thus, the

global exportation and admiration of Mao Zedong Thought has become a
popular topic amongst historians of Maoist China.
However, within this growing body of scholarship on global Maoism, the
mountain warfare component of Mao Zedong Thought has been overlooked.
As Julia Lovell explains in her book, Maoism was not only about revolution-
ary zeal but also an aesthetic. One of the reasons I contend as to why Maoism
took off in disparate places was due to the romanticized image of leftist guer-
illas fighting in the mountainous backwoods. The rugged terrain of moun-
tains was not only effective for revolutionary war but also provided an ideal
backdrop for the romanticization of guerilla warfare and the revolutionary
fighter. For example, Edgar Snow’s account of Mao was fundamental to
building up the international status and prestige of the nascent Chinese revo-
lutionary leader.13 Militarily, Mao’s theory of people’s war upheld the moun-
tain as the most effective landscape for protracted asymmetric warfare. Mao
was obviously not the first military theorist to view mountains as important
spaces for mobile warfare, but he was the first Marxist revolutionary leader to
reframe the rural countryside as the ideal place to wage armed struggle and
build popular support amongst the peasantry.
The two-pronged military and political strategy of Mao’s people’s war,
which envisioned the mountains as the ideal terrain to wage an armed strug-
gle, allured rebels and insurgents both in China and around the developing
world. By building a base of peasant support within rural mountain bases,
rebel forces could slowly demoralize enemy troops and destroy the supply
lines of the opposing regime. Unified around a strong central leadership,
Maoist rebels waged a protracted armed struggle for the sake of national lib-
eration and began to form a counter-state against the state. This article be-
gins with a discussion of Mao’s armed struggle in China’s mountains during
the Chinese Civil War. Mao’s experiences and writings during this period
became his revolutionary literature portfolio, which became the de-facto
guidebooks for people’s war militants all over the decolonizing world. I then
turn to an investigation of mountain-forged people’s war in four different
contexts: Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Peru.
I use these four case studies, in particular, as they are geographically dis-
tant from one another and thus demonstrates the global dissemination of
Mao’s revolutionary war theory to Latin America, Southeast Asia, and North-
east Asia. However, these are by no means the only places where Maoist-in-
spired mountain insurgency took off. Maoist-inspired mountain warfare was
also present in the guerilla struggles of Malaysian communists and Indone-
sian leftists.14 Ibu Astuti, a female member of a Communist Party of Indone-
sia (PKI)-aligned organization in Sumatra, recalled how Indonesian leftists
ran “right up into the mountains, into the mountains, and we weren’t just in
twos or threes, but thousands.”15 Both communist insurgencies failed due to

12 Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014); Matthew Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Chinese Revolution in
Latin America (London: Routledge, 2013).
13 S. Bernard Thomas, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996).
14 John Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960
(West View Press, 1984); Annie Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of
1965-66 (Routledge: New York and London, 2015).
15 Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-66, 29-30.
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 305

an inability to gain the support of rural peasantry and the brutal violence
unleashed by the Western-backed security forces in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Based primarily on multinational archival documents, leader’s speeches, state
media sources from the Communist Bloc, and a diversity of secondary
sources, I conclude that global Maoism cannot be understood without taking
into account the mountain warfare strategy that Mao built his guerilla legacy
on.

TAKING TO THE MOUNTAINS

The Jinggang Mountains in the Jiangxi and Hunan provinces are fa-
mously known as “the cradle of the revolution” within China. Building the
first soviet in this region, Jinggang became the first base for China’s Red
Army.16 During the Chinese Civil War and anti-Japanese resistance struggle
in the 1920s and 1930s, Mao acknowledged the tactical benefits of mountain-
ous areas. In 1928, he noted, “It is essential for an independent Red regime
encircled by the White regime to make use of the strategic advantages of-
fered by mountains.”17 Ten years later, mountains retained an important role
in Mao’s strategy of protracted asymmetric warfare, and he wrote that moun-
tains “are all places where anti-Japanese guerrilla warfare can be maintained
for the longest time and are important strongholds for the War of Resistance.
We must develop guerrilla warfare and set up base areas in all the mountain-
ous regions behind the enemy lines.”18 After the failed Autumn Harvest Up-
rising in Hunan, Mao’s forces retreated to the Jinggang Mountains in
October 1927 and formed his first revolutionary base there. In April 1928,
former warlord Zhu De’s peasant troops from southern Hunan joined Mao
in the Jinggang Mountains. This amalgamation of communist guerillas in the
Jinggang Mountains gave birth to China’s Red Army, the predecessor to the
modern-day People’s Liberation Army.19
The Jinggang Mountains (literally meaning “wells and ridges”) were par-
ticularly ideal for a revolutionary base as they were distant from urban cen-
ters, major roads, and industrial areas. Mao considered Jinggang to be “an
excellent base for a mobile army.”20 As Alexander Pentsov explains, “The
distinguishing feature of this place was the fantastic combination of moun-
tain peaks jutting into the sky and deep precipices plunging sharply down-
ward, which made it an ideal refuge.”21 From an asymmetric warfare
standpoint, the Jinggang Mountains allowed the Red Army to conduct am-
bushes and sabotage on the Nationalists. As Wilbur Hsu explains, “For its
remoteness, the area also had some strategic advantages. It stood midpoint
between Changsha, Nanchang, and Guangdong, which allowed the Red
Army flexibility to return to the sites of the failed insurrections.” Hsu contin-

16 Brian DeMare, Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2019).
17 Mao Zedong, “The Struggle In The Chingkang Mountains,” November 25, 1928, Marx-
ists.org < https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/
mswv1_4.htm > (Accessed October 28, 2019).
18 Mao Zedong, “Problems of Strategy in Guerilla Warfare Against Japan,” May 1938,
Marxists.org, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/
mswv2_08.htm> (Accessed November 29, 2019).
19 Chunhou Zhang and C. Edwin Vaughan, Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Leader:
Social and Historical Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 36.
20 Alexander V. Pentsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2012), 202.
21 Pentsov and Levine, Mao, 202.
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306 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

ues, “Additionally, the revolutionary movement was more mature and devel-
oped in the Hunan area, and the Red Army could find greater local support
for their operations.”22 In this area, the Red Army conducted surprise attacks
on counter-revolutionaries in neighboring areas. After a successful ambush,
Mao wrote a lyrical poem, known as a ci in Chinese, about the Jinggang
Mountains:
Banners and flags below the hills are in sight all around,
And on the hilltops drums and horns mutually resound.
The enemy beleaguers us ring upon ring,
Yet steadfastly we hold our ground.
Already our fortifications are well guarded,
Furthermore, the unity of our will forms an impregnable stronghold.
On the Huangyang Boundary the cannons are rumbling,
And the foe is reported to have fled at night.23
With its rugged terrain and isolation, the Jinggang Mountains was a logical
base of operations for the nascent Red Army.24
While mountains provided a natural refuge for revolutionaries, and their
rugged terrain often made fighters into legends, high altitudes were not ideal
for physical wellbeing or medical care. For example, nearly eighteen thou-
sand soldiers joined Mao in the mountains of Jinggang, and daily life in the
mountains was extremely difficult. Medicine was scare, and food was difficult
to obtain. Mao remarked, “Also many officers and men have fallen ill from
malnutrition, exposure to cold or other causes. Our hospitals up in the
mountains give both Chinese and Western treatment, but are short of doc-
tors and medicines. At present they have over eight hundred patients.”25 In
order to sustain some sort of nutrition, some of Mao’s guerillas earned
money from the opium trade, which was considered a counter-revolutionary
activity.26
Despite the less than desirable revolutionary conditions in the Jinggang
Mountains, Mao initiated land reform in the base area. For example, the Red
Army confiscated land from landlords and redistributed it to peasants and
local supporters of the communists. The land reform program angered some
wealthy locals, anger which was only heightened after the Red Army shot
dissenters to their “agrarian revolution.” Local peasants and less loyal ele-
ments of the Red Army started to flee the Jinggang Mountains after the disas-
trous land reform initiative. By January 1929, only 3600 soldiers remained in
the Red Army. The Jinggang base was a failed experiment in building local

22 Wilbur Hsu, “Survival Through Adaptation: The Chinese Red Army and The Extermina-
tion Campaigns, 1927-1936,” Thesis at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, <
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/
ArtOfWar_SurvivalThroughAdaptation.pdf > (Accessed October 31, 2019).
23 Zhang and Vaughan, Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Leader, 35-36.
24 There is also a famous poem about Valley Forge by Thomas Buchanan Read that bears
resemblance to Mao’s poem about the Jinggang Mountains. Mao supposedly wrote an essay on
the revolutionary nature of the American war of independence. Thus, it is probable that Mao
knew about this poem and took inspiration from it for his own. I’d like to thank the anonymous
peer reviewer for this suggestion. See Thomas Buchanan Read, “Valley Forge,” in Henry Wad-
sworth Longfellow, ed., Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. America: Vols. XXV–XXIX,
https://www.bartleby.com/270/13/396.html. Also see Mao Zedong, “On Correcting Mistaken
Ideas on the American Revolution,” Translation from National Defense University, 1998, https:/
/apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA441442.
25 Mao’s Selected Works, “The Struggle in the Chingkang Mountains,” November 25,
1928. < https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/
mswv1_4.htm (Accessed November 6, 2019) >.
26 Pentsov and Levine, Mao, 211.
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 307

communism, but Chinese propagandists would later celebrate this period as

one in which communist forces strengthened their resolve and elevated their
revolutionary consciousness. Due to this failure to build a grassroots Marxist
movement in Jinggang and amidst incursions from Nationalist troops, Mao
and Zhu decided to move their base to the Jiangxi-Fujian border in early
1929, which was more densely populated but still distant from the National-
ist-controlled urban centers.27
Mao later evoked his time in the Jinggang Mountains as a period in which
sacrifice and hardship became interwoven into the fabric of Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP). In 1969 at the First Plenary Session of the CCP’s Ninth
Central Committee, Mao recalled his armed struggle of late 1920s, “. . ..the
wars resulted in tremendous sacrifices. Not many old comrades survived. This
is what we call ‘first we should not be scared by hard work; second we should
not be scared by death.’”28 The Jinggang Mountains period symbolized the
CCP’s collective spirit and unity during the Cold War. As this period was
discussed heavily in Mao’s own writings, other communists around the world
later recognized this period in a similar radical fashion. For example, in
1975, Khmer Rouge’s murderous leader Pol Pot told Mao, “I studied many of
Chairman Mao’s works from a young age, particularly your work on the peo-
ple’s war. Chairman Mao’s works guided our entire party while we were en-
gaged in the political and military struggles.” Pol Pot continued, “We made
use of it in our actual struggle and achieved results. When our struggles en-
tered the most difficult stage, we studied the work The Struggle in the Jinggang
Mountains, and it steeled our resolve.”29 The Jinggang period was memorial-
ized as a milestone in China’s communist revolution and a historic achieve-
ment in the international proletarian movement.

EDGAR SNOW, THE LONG MARCH, AND THE MOUNTAIN MYTHOLOGY OF MAO
After Nationalist advances, China’s Red Army fled the Jinggang Moun-
tains and moved their base to southern Jiangxi province. At this base, Mao
subsequently formed the Jiangxi Soviet and the foundations of Chinese com-
munism. In the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao further developed his theory of people’s
war and guerilla warfare. However, as Gregg Brazinsky explains, Mao’s prior-
ity remained survival during the early 1930s.30 Encircled by Nationalist forces
and an encroaching Japanese colonialist presence in China, the Red Army
was on the ropes during this precarious phase. In autumn 1933, the National-
ists dealt a heavy blow to Red Army and divided the Communists in half. In
an effort to save the CCP from total annihilation, Mao’s forces embarked
upon what is now known as the Long March.31

27 Pentsov and Levine, Mao, 211-215.

28 “Mao Zedong’s Speech at the First Plenary Session of the CCP’s Ninth Central Commit-
tee,” April 28, 1969, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Jianguo yilai Mao
Zedong wengao, vol. 13, pp. 35-41. Translated for CWIHP by Chen Jian. https://dig-
italarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117145.
29 “Conversation Record of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Meeting with Pol Pot, Secretary of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” June 21, 1975, History and
Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Song Yongyi, ed., Zhongguo wenhua dageming wenku
(Chinese Cultural Revolution Database), 3rd ed. (Hong Kong: Universities Service Centre for
Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013). Translated by Caixia Lu, https://
digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/122052.
30 Gregg Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War
(Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2017), 22.
31 Brazinsky, Winning the Third World, 25-28.
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308 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

From 1934 to 1935, around one hundred thousand Red Army troops
marched northwest to China’s Shaanxi province. This eight-thousand-mile
journey, known as the Long March, caused tremendous damage to the CCP’s
ranks as four-fifths of the marchers never made it to their final destination.
From enduring dangerous mountainous terrain to internal purges, the Long
March was a transformative experience that consolidated the political power
of Mao Zedong. The CCP later mythologized the Long March and depicted
Mao as the hero of the journey. However, as Sun Shuyun explains, the Long
March was one of hardships, violence, and disregard for the welfare of ordi-
nary soldiers.32 This distinction between CCP mythology and historical facts
was heavily influenced by U.S journalist Edgar Snow’s Mao-centric book, Red
Star over China (1937). Snow’s overly sympathetic account of Mao Zedong
and the Red Army cemented the Long March as the foundational myth of
the CCP.33 Despite the Red Army’s retreat from the Nationalists and decline
in troop numbers, Snow’s book legitimized the CCP in the West as a powerful
political force in China’s internal affairs. Most of all, Snow’s book portrayed
Mao as a national hero and the supreme leader of this epic 12,500-kilometer
journey through snow-capped mountains. By using a Western journalist’s sta-
tus, the CCP created an international image that depicted the Red Army as
stronger and more unified than it really was at that time.
While mountains provided strategic advantages for the Red Army, they
also presented physical obstacles to the Chinese Communists during the
Long March. As Edgar Snow explained, “The journey took them across some
of the world’s most difficult trails, unfit for wheeled traffic, and across the
high snow mountains and great rivers of Asia.”34 According to Snow’s ac-
count, the CCP crossed eighteen mountain ranges, including five perennial
snow-capped ones.35 The Long March was not only a battle against the KMT
and the Japanese but also against nature itself. This trek across mountainous
ravines and steep slopes fortified a spirit of self-reliance in Mao, which would
become part of the moral fabric of the CCP after 1949. Snow’s hagiographic
illustration of Mao propelled his status around the world as a rugged wartime
leader that trekked dangerous mountainous terrain all for the glorious sake
of the revolution.
During the middle of the Chinese Civil War against the Nationalists, Mao
gave a now famous speech in Yan’an to his discouraged comrades. In this
speech, Mao referenced an ancient Chinese fable, titled, “The Foolish Old
Man Who Moved the Mountains (yugong yi shan).” Mao explained:
It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as
the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway
stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. He called his sons,
and hoe in hand they began to dig up these mountains with great determination. An-
other graybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of
you to do this! It is quite impossible for you few to dig up those two huge mountains.”
The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there
will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as
they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be
that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s
wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved
by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs.

32 Sun Shuyun, The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth (New
York: Doubleday, 2006).
33 Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937).
34 Snow, Red Star Over China, 190.
35 Snow, Red Star Over China, 205.
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Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperial-
ism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to
dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s
heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up
and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?36
Mao’s reinterpretation of this mountain-themed fable for his socialist vision
and statecraft was noteworthy as it expressed a core belief of people’s war
that through sheer willpower and psychological strength the masses could
establish a revolutionary society. After the CCP’s victory over the Nationalists
and Mao’s rise to power in 1949, this tale of the foolish old man who moved
the mountains would remain an important part of CCP ideology and Mao’s
legacy. The recitation and memorization of this fable began in elementary
school for many Maoist-era youth.37 The tale of the foolish old man who
moved mountains signified that the determination and self-reliance of the
revolutionary masses could transform the Chinese landscape and perhaps
even humanity itself.38 While mountains did not define Mao’s personality or
his worldview, they certainly played a metaphorical role in how he viewed
Chinese civilization and the communist revolution’s place within that grand
history.

CHINA, MOUNTAINS, AND THE KOREAN WAR

About a year after the founding of the PRC, China’s People’s Volunteer
Army (PVA) entered the Korean War October 19, 1950, in order to assist
their North Korean allies. Facing superior U.S. air power, the PVA, along
with the Korean People’s Army (KPA), used hills and mountains for hide-
outs. Using North Korean highlands as sanctuaries, the PVA launched artil-
lery attacks from mountaintops on advancing U.S. troops. As an October 31,
1950, article from New China News Agency put it, “The rugged mountains of
north Korea are an ideal graveyard for the imperialist invaders.”39 The en-
durance and physical conditioning of the PVA foot soldiers allowed them to
quickly traverse the high elevations and mountain passes of North Korea. It
also helped that North Korean leadership had fought alongside Chinese
communist forces in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s and understood
their peculiar mountain-forged style of guerilla warfare.40
Meanwhile, U.S. troops in Korea were daunted by the peninsula’s unre-
lenting topography. As U.S. Master Sergeant James Hart of the Second Battal-
ion recalls, “Korea is just one hill and mountain after the other, and since we
also carried about eighty pounds of equipment, soldiering in Korea was
pretty exhausting. Most of us required another six to eight weeks after arriv-

36 Mao Zedong, “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains,” June 11, 1945 [This
was Mao’s concluding speech at the CCP’s Seventh National Congress], Selected Works of Mao
Zedong vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965), https://www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_26.htm.
37 John Cleverley, In the Lap of Tigers: The Communist Labor University of Jiangxi Province
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 99.
38 Anna Lora-Wainwright, “Removing Mountains and Draining Seas,” in Christian Sorace,
Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from
Mao to Xi (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019), 222.
39 “Author Discounts U.S War Ability,” New China News Agency (NCNA), Oct. 31, 1950.
Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941-1996.
40 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, and
Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949–1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 15-18.
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310 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

ing to get in top condition.”41 After landing in Korea, Frank Abasciano of the
U.S. 8th Army Corps noted his first impression, “Everything was all moun-
tains and mountains and mountains. One mountain after another.”42 U.S.
troops were not trained or equipped to fight in this rugged terrain. This
proved to be an advantage for the PVA. Kim Sung Yong, President of North
Korea’s Central News Agency, declared in a November 1, 1950, article
printed by China’s People’s Daily, “Meanwhile, that the enemy has come deep
into the rugged, high mountains in north Korea is an advantage to the de-
fense of the Koreans. As the American officer who was captured by the Ko-
rean guerillas said, so long as the Korean mountains exist, the Korean people
cannot be conquered.”43 In addition, Mao’s theory that revolutionary fervor
and willpower mattered more on the battlefield than weaponry contributed
to the PVA’s insurgent style of mountain warfare. One of the preferred tactics
for the PVA was to launch surprise attacks on U.S. forces trekking through
mountain passes. In the early stages of the Korean War, the PVA’s style of
fighting closely paralleled Mao’s guerilla tactics.
Despite the PVA’s revolutionary zeal, objective conditions depleted their
confidence and willpower. The biting cold weather of Korea and the moun-
tainous terrain made winters miserable for PVA. Constant U.S. air bombard-
ment and motorized enemy forces also made PVA foot soldiers scurry into
mountainous ravines for cover. The PVA truck transport corps dug caves at
the foot of hills to hide transport vehicles from U.S. air bombers. In June
1951, the Second Secretary of the Polish Embassy in the DPRK, R. Deperasin-
ski, said, “Transportation is perhaps the hardest and most difficult task to
achieve. Putting transportation on a good level required the reconstruction
of hundreds of big and little bridges, with which mountainous Korea is cov-
ered.” R. Deperasinski continued, “Thousands of men’s hands and tons of
materials are needed for this. I can state from my own observations, as well as
on the basis of statements from Korean comrades, that it was the Chinese
volunteers who rebuilt the bridges.”44 However, a month later in July 1951,
floods devastated the rural infrastructure of North Korea. Mountain torrents
wiped out bridges and roads, and the PVA struggled to get food and supplies
to the frontlines. North Korea’s rugged terrain and harsh winters made com-
bat life extremely difficult for PVA foot soldiers.45
As in a December 21, 1953, conversation with United Nations representa-
tives, U.S. ambassador Arthur Dean noted that the Chinese and North Kore-
ans were “building a huge system of tunnels through the mountains, by
which they could transport men and materials, and heavy concrete bunkers,
thus showing that they apparently expect to remain in their present positions

41 Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li, Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American,
Korean, and Chinese Soldiers (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 236.
42 Oral History Interview, Frank Abasciano, Korean War Legacy Foundation, https://kore-
anwarlegacy.org/interviews/frank-abasciano/ (Accessed July 23, 2022).
43 “Kim Sung Yong Predicts Korean Victory,” Peking, Chinese International Service, 04 No-
vember 1950. FBIS.
44 “Report from the Embassy of the Polish Republic in Korea,” June 30, 1951, History and
Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Polish Foreign Ministry Archive. Obtained by Jakub
Poprocki and translated by Maya Latynski. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/
114931.
45 Shu Guang Zhan, Mao’s Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War 1950–1953 (Law-
rence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 311

for some time.”46 In February 1953, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung told
the Hungarian legation, “We already gave strict orders to the population to
move out from the cities, other dangerous locations, and their immediate
vicinity (like railroad stations and unloading locations) to the mountains,
and the peasants should build their houses on their land, 150 to 200 meters
from each other.”47 Based on their experiences in the Chinese Civil War and
the anti-Japanese struggle, the PRC leadership understood the strategic ad-
vantages of mountains during combat against stronger conventional militar-
ies and advised their North Korean comrades to make use of their natural
terrain.
In the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, Chinese and North Korean troops
used mountains in the DPRK as refuges from U.S. air bombing. Since the
DPRK’s infrastructure was being bombed to oblivion during the latter years
of the Korean War, taking to the mountains became a means of survival for
the communist forces and the North Korean people. Kim Il Sung viewed
mountains as the primary terrain in which the war could be won. In a Febru-
ary 7, 1952, speech to regimental cadres in the KPA, Kim said, “You should
be skilled at mountain warfare and night battles. We can say that battles in
our country which is mountainous are a fierce struggle for the occupation of
hills which lie between friends and enemies.” He added, “Therefore, you
should wage skillful mountain warfare to wrest away the enemy-occupied hills
one by one and move forward step by step.”48 During the Korean War, moun-
tain warfare became vital to North Korea’s military strategy.
North Korea’s topography became synonymous with hardships and popu-
lar resistance that defined everyday life during the war. A North Korea war-
time poem, entitled “My Hill,” reveals the regime’s sentiment towards its
rugged terrain:
Hills stretch across our land, like blood veins,
These chains of high, and low hills,
Our hills!
Climb them, O, noble heart devoted to our Fatherland,
And note the sacred blood stains,
Which every stone mark, and every crevice fill!
Climb them and you will understand the heroism
And of free Korea the undefeated will,
Of life and death, you’ll understand the meaning,
If our Korean hills you climb. Our hills!49
As adherents to people’s war focus on using all means to achieve a desirable
outcome, North Koreans used their mountainous terrain as cover for indus-
trial production and road construction during the war. In June 1951, Polish
diplomat Deperasinski visited a North Korean tool factory embedded in a
mountain. He said, “The factory was built high up in the mountains. A huge
piece of the mountain was cut out, the wooden hall is again covered up with

46 “Memorandum of Conversation, by Elizabeth A. Brown of the Office of United Nations

Political and Security Affairs,” December 21, 1953, FRUS, 1952–1954, Korea, Volume XV, Part 2,
Document 823.
47 “Report, Legation of Hungary in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry,”
March 04, 1953, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, MOL, XIX-J-1-j-Korea-11/f-
00828/1953 8.d.Translated by József Litkei. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/
113203.
48 Kim Il Sung, “Some Tasks Confronting the People’s Army in Winning the Final Victory
in the Fatherland Liberation War,” Speech at a Short Course for Regimental Cadres of the Ko-
rean People’s Army, February 7, 1952, in Kim Il Sung Works June 7, January 1952-July 1953 (Py-
ongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981), 48.
49 Te Gi Chun, “My Hill,” June 1951, New Korea, 58.
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312 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

soil, and the slope of the mountain is the roof.” He added, “Naturally such a
factory is dark, stuffy and without ventilation. The workers are working there
with great eagerness, fully understanding the importance of their effort to
the victory.”50 However, nothing compared to the hardships related to war-
time road construction in North Korea. Deperasinski explained, “Work in
transportation in Korea is the most difficult and demands the greatest sacri-
fices. There are few roads, and the ones that are there are in the mountains,
bad and dangerous. Practically the whole population is engaged in assisting
the families whose men have gone to the front.” It was in mountainous re-
gions where mass mobilization and collectivism were on full display during
the Korean War.
During the Cold War era, mountain warfare in the Global South became
synonymous with Maoist-style insurrection. Mao had planted the seed of
revolution in the mountains of China and North Korea. As Lin Biao said in
his 1965 essay on people’s war, “The victory of the Chinese people’s revolu-
tionary war breached the imperialist front in the East, wrought a great
change in the world balance of forces, and accelerated the revolutionary
movement among the people of all countries.” He continued, “From then
on, the national liberation movement in Asia, Africa, and Latin America en-
tered a new historical period.”51 Mao’s military ideas and theories would
spread far beyond East Asia as many anti-colonial insurgents adopted his par-
ticular brand of irregular warfare.

MAOISM IN SOUTHEAST ASIA’S HIGHLANDS

During the 1960s and 1970s, Southeast Asia was, in particular, a hotbed of
anti-colonial rebellion and drew on the militant legacies of Mao’s own anti-
colonial struggle. For example, the armed wing of the Communist Party of
the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA), was formed in the late
1960s and focused their efforts in rural areas. Although the original CPP was
founded in the early 1940s and fought against the Japanese colonialists, the
organization underwent an ideological makeover in the later 1960s with the
adoption of Maoism as its supreme ideology and focused on defeating the
U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship. In December 1968, the CPP leadership ex-
plained in one of their most important treatises, “Mao Zedong Thought is
the supreme guide in analyzing and summing up the experience of the Com-
munist Party of the Philippines.” In this same document, CPP explained their
identification with one of Mao’s most famous maxims, “It was in the course of
conducting a people’s war during the Japanese occupation that the Commu-
nist Party of the Philippines gained real political power in certain areas, thus
proving the great thesis of Comrade Mao Tsetung that ‘political power grows
out of the barrel of a gun.’”52 Maoist slogans, with their simplicity and mili-
tant tones, and the populist energy of Mao’s revolutionary charisma appealed

50 “Report from the Embassy of the Polish Republic in Korea,” June 30, 1951, History and
Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Polish Foreign Ministry Archive. Obtained by Jakub
Poprocki and translated by Maya Latynski. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/
114931.
51 Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War! (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/introduction.htm
(Accessed July 23, 2022).
52 “Rectify Errors, Rebuild the Party!”, ratified by the Congress of Reestablishment of the
Communist Party of the Philippines, Dec. 26, 1968, < http://www.bannedthought.net/Philip-
pines/CPP/1960s/RectifyErrors-RebuildParty-681226.pdf > (Accessed January 17, 2020).
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 313

to other small insurgencies in the Global South fighting against colonialist

forces.
The CPP and NPA established a stronghold in Philippine mountain vil-
lages and the cordillera region. In 1971, Jose Maria Sison under his nom de
guerre Amado Guerrero (“cherished warrior”), then the leader of the CPP/
NPA and an ardent supporter of Maoist-style insurrection, said the mountain-
ous terrain of the Philippines should be used to their advantage. In his mani-
festo Philippine Society and Revolution, Sison explained, “The mountain ranges
which crisscrossed the major islands could be turned into a great advantage
by converting them into bases from which guerrilla units could maintain po-
litical and military influence on a number of provinces bordering its range.”
He continued, “Especially when populated by sympathetic mountainfolk,
mountainous areas offered singularly difficult fighting terrain for regular en-
emy troops.”53 Meanwhile, in a 1974 essay labeled “Specific Characteristics of
our People’s War,” Sison wrote about the model of the Chinese revolutionary
experience for national liberation movements in the developing world. “The
impact of the Chinese Revolution in Asia alone terrified U.S. imperialism.
The oppressed peoples and nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America started
to look up to China for revolutionary inspiration.”54 Radical university stu-
dents who later joined the guerillas were colloquially referred to as
“namundok,” meaning people that go to the mountains.55 The Philippine
highlands continued to be the primary base of operations for the CPP/NPA
in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the Philippine mountains, the CPP and NPA wreaked havoc on wealthy
peasants and rural landlords. According to the U.S. State Department, “The
CPP/NPA has always placed a high premium on rural military operations
and control of rural peasantry, including the sometimes forced collection of
‘revolutionary taxes’ from both peasants and landowners.”56 A member of
the CPP told a TIME reporter in 1986, “The dominant factor of Philippine
Communism is flexibility, the ability to adapt to conditions.” The TIME arti-
cle on the Philippine communist insurgency further explained, “The N.P.A.
bases its plans on classic Maoist theory, which sees three stages in a pro-
tracted war: the ‘strategic defensive,’ during which a Communist base is built;
the ‘strategic stalemate,’ during which guerrilla forces achieve equal footing
with government troops; and the ‘strategic offensive,’ when rebels force gov-
ernment troops into a defensive posture.”57 Mao’s three stages of people’s
war was a strategic tool used by many national liberation movements in the
Global South. Mao’s adaptation of Marxism-Leninism for local conditions
and his anti-colonial rhetoric, combined with his fondness for mountain war-
fare, made the Chinese revolution into a model of rural insurrection in the
Global South.

53 Amado Guerrero [Jose Maria Sison], Philippine Society and Revolution, 4th ed. (Oakland,
California: International Association of Filipino Patriots, 1980), 10.
54 Jose Maria Sison, “Specific Characteristics of our People’s War,” December 1, 1974,
https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/riple/1975/specific-characteristics.htm (Ac-
cessed July 20, 2022).
55 Michael Beltran, “Red-Tagging the Philippines’ Young Activists,” New Naratif, December
6, 2019, < https://newnaratif.com/journalism/red-tagging-the-philippines-young-activists/share
/xuna/53c884f6c22fed309c0c3614f5669eaf/ > (Accessed January 17, 2020).
56 “Fact Sheet: Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army,” U.S.
Department of State Dispatch 2.45 (1991), 835.
57 Jill Smolowe, “Inside the Communist Insurgency,” TIME (1986), 36.
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314 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

In addition to the Philippines, the Vietnamese national liberation move-

ment used Maoist-style mountain warfare. For instance, the Vietnamese guer-
illas strategically used mountains to defeat the French and then the
Americans. In 1954, the Viet Minh decisively defeated the French colonialist
forces at Dien Bien Phu, a remote mountain outpost in northwestern Viet-
nam. Dien Bien Phu became immortalized in Vietnamese revolutionary cul-
ture as the pivotal battle that ended French colonial rule in Indochina.58
Moreover, the Viet Minh, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap, unleashed their
own type of people’s war against the French and Americans. Known in
Vietnamese as dau tranh, this asymmetric military strategy viewed the unity of
violence and politics as the ultimate instrument in warfare.59 For nationalistic
purposes, dau tranh was supposedly a uniquely Vietnamese invention, but va-
rious aspects of this revolutionary strategy, such as the importance of pro-
longed armed struggle and the mass mobilization of society, were borrowed
from Mao’s theory of guerilla warfare. For example, during a 1967 meeting
in Beijing with Mao and North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong,
General Giap told the Chinese leader, “In our fighting against the Ameri-
cans, we always remember your words: try to preserve and develop our forces,
steadfastly advancing forward.” Mao replied, “The US is afraid of your tactics.
They wish that you would order your regular forces to fight, so they can de-
stroy your main forces. But you were not deceived. Fighting a war of attrition
is like having meals: [it is best] not to have too big a bite.”60 Thus, it appears
that Mao’s theories of protracted asymmetric warfare had directly assisted the
Vietnamese liberation struggle.
The Vietnamese communist forces were also well known for their strate-
gic capabilities in mountainous areas and admiration of their “Red Hills.” As
a 1963 pamphlet from the Vietnam Workers’ Party states, “In case the enemy
expands the war to a larger scale, the mountainous area together with the
lowland will enable us to fight a protracted war against him. We should make
every effort to control the mountainous areas and have the determination to
build these areas into a solid base area.“61 As Ho Chi Minh said in his will,
“Our mountains will always be, our rivers will always be, our people will always
be, The American invaders defeated, we will rebuild our land ten times more
beautiful.”62 Meanwhile, the Vietnamese communists viewed “liberating”
mountain areas as one part of their military campaign to ultimately defeat
the Americans. Generals Giap and Van Tien Dung explained that “military
attacks by mobile strategic army columns as main striking forces, combining
military struggle with political struggle and agitation among enemy troops”
was their path to “completely liberating large strategic regions in the moun-
tains, rural and urban areas, and winning total victory by means of a general
offensive and uprising right in the ‘capital city’ of the puppet administra-

58 Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: –Dien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
59 Douglas Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986).
60 “Discussion between Mao Zedong, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap,” April 11,
1967, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, CWIHP Working Paper 22, “77 Conver-
sations.” https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/112154.
61 VNDRN, Document No. 96, “The Vietnam Worker’s Party’s 1963 Decision to Escalate
the War in the South,” p. 18 found in Martin G. Clemis, “The Control War: Communist Revolu-
tionary Warfare, Pacification, and the Struggle for South Vietnam, 1968-1975,” PhD dissertation
(Temple University, 2015), pg. 59.
62 Joseph Kraft, “Letter from Hanoi,” The New Yorker, August 12, 1972.
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October 2022] MOUNTAIN WARRIORS 315

tion.”63 Mountains played a pivotal role in Vietnamese military strategy

against the more powerful conventional armed forces of France and the
United States. By engaging in a protracted asymmetric war that regularly
used mountains for cover and ambush, the Vietnamese outlasted their West-
ern foes.

MOUNTAIN MAOISTS IN PERU

On May 18, 1980, villagers in the Andean mountain hamlet of Chuschi
took to the ballot box to vote for the Peruvian President. In the midst of the
election day, a newly organized group of Maoist-inspired insurgents with
homemade weapons and red banners burned the village’s ballot boxes. With
this brazen attack, this organization, known in English as The Communist
Party of Peru – Shining Path, but more commonly known as Shining Path
(Sendero Luminoso), stormed out on the national stage and unleashed a brutal
insurrection in the high Andes mountains of Peru.64 The date chosen by
Shining Path for its Chuschi attack was deeply symbolic. It marked the 199th
anniversary of the death of Incan revivalist and anti-colonial insurgent Tupac
Amaru, who led an indigenous resistance movement against the Spanish
crown in the Andes during the 18th century.65 Following Mao’s doctrine of
peasant-led rural rebellion, the Shining Path claimed “the mountain region
and the countryside are the powerful and natural support for any possible
revolutionary war in our country. Thus, this is a peasant war that is being led
by the Party.” Shining Path announced that their armed struggle “showed a
new world to win through the hammers and sickles that light the hills, and
through the unfading red flags that dominate the heights proclaiming: ‘It’s
right to rebel?’”66
Led by the bookish revolutionary Abimael Guzmán, Shining Path en-
gaged in bombings, kidnappings, and extortion in the Peruvian countryside
during the 1980s.67 With a base in the Andean provincial capital of Ayacu-
cho, Guzman adopted Mao’s theory of people’s war and promoted guerilla
warfare. Educated in one of China’s schools for foreign revolutionaries dur-
ing the 1960s, Guzman embraced Mao’s idea of a centralized political party
with strong discipline and a charismatic all-powerful leader.68 Ayacucho was
ideal territory for Mao’s (and by default, Guzman’s) brand of rural rebellion.
The region was deeply impoverished and rife with racial tensions as indige-
nous peoples faced deeply rooted discrimination in Peruvian society. As a
professor at Ayacucho’s regional university, Guzman’s ideological commit-
ment to Maoist agrarian reform attracted young idealists alienated from
mainstream Peruvian society. In his classes, Guzman assigned Mao’s Little
Red Book as required reading, and Guzman’s fanaticism spread to other uni-
versity professors, who later joined his revolutionary organization. Shining

63 Vo Nguyen Giap & Van Tien Dung, How We Won the War (Philadelphia: Recon Publica-
tions, 1976), 41.
64 William D. Montalbano, “Alive or Dead?: Guzman – Messiah of Peru Terror,” Los Angeles
Times, October 6, 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-06-mn-4472-
story.html.
65 Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru,” Cultural
Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1991), 63.
66 Central Committee, Communist Party of Peru, “Develop Guerrilla Warfare,” in Two Doc-
uments of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru (Berkeley, California: The Committee
to Support the Revolution in Peru), 1-2.
67 Montalbano, “Alive or Dead?”
68 Lovell, Maoism, 321.
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316 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

Path attracted “some of the brightest and the best” in Ayacucho, and many of
Guzman’s former students turned into his soldiers. These young radicals
“scattered in a proselytizing network across the sierra, plotting to use their
remote communities as springboards for the revolution.”69 Mao’s death in
1976 led Guzman to believe that it was his time to take up the mantle of
global revolutionary leadership and launch a people’s war in Peru.70
Much like his idol Mao, Guzman used mountain-themed metaphors to
theorize the international situation. Using Mao’s reinterpretation of the an-
cient tale and Andean-themed imagery, Guzman viewed Peruvian society as
being burdened by three mountains: the mountain of U.S. imperialism, the
mountain of semi-feudalism of the Peruvian nation in the international sys-
tem, and the mountain of bureaucratic capitalism within Peru. As Matthew
Galway explains, “The ‘three mountains’ metaphor shows the centrality of
Mao’s permanent revolution in Guzmán’s thinking: Mao’s April 1945 invoca-
tion of the fourth-century story of the ‘Foolish Old Man Who Moved the
Mountains,’ a tale about persistence and human will in removing a moun-
tain, had become one of the seminal essays of the Cultural Revolution.”71 In
order to move these mountains Mao-style, Guzman supported a peasant-led
protracted people’s war against the Peruvian government.72 As his loyal sup-
porters shouted in Peru’s prisons, “The masses roar, the Andes shake.”73
Due to its geographical remoteness and mountainous inaccessibility,
Shining Path used the Andean sierra as their military stronghold and base
area. By the end of 1981, Shining Path launched attacks in five provinces of
Ayacucho and controlled at least nine villages in the River Pampas region.
The Shining Path targeted police stations and instituted strict governance in
their “liberated zones.” For example, the group used public punishment,
such as whipping husbands who committed domestic abuse or villagers who
disobeyed the rules.74 The Peruvian state’s response to Shining Path waned
from gross incompetence to indiscriminate killing of suspected rebels. Guz-
man welcomed the Peruvian state’s viciousness as he warned his militants
that they would have to “cross rivers of blood” in forging their revolution.
The Shining Path’s political philosophy stressed single-minded unity. As one
of the group’s guerillas explained in 1986, “I do not think as a person any
longer. One feels the party as oneself, I am the party . . . and everything we
do and think is part of the party.”75 By spring of 1983, Shining Path essen-
tially became the de-facto government of Ayacucho, where schoolchildren
sang revolutionary songs instead of Peru’s national anthem. Despite being
better-armed and better-trained, the Peruvian military struggled to contain
the Shining Path’s growing guerilla insurgency, which was spreading beyond
Ayacucho to other mountainous regions in the mid to late 1980s.76

69 Lovell, Maoism, 323.

70 Lovell, Maoism, 313-325.
71 Matthew Galway, “Permanent Revolution,” in Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini,
Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (Can-
berra: ANU Press, 2019), 186.
72 Alexander C. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in Timothy Cheek, ed., A Critical Introduc-
tion to Mao (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 305.
73 Montalbano, “Alive or Dead?”
74 Olga M. Gonzalez, Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 42.
75 Carlos Iván Degregori, How Difficult It Is To Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru,
1980-1999 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 35.
76 Lovell, Maoism, 325-331.
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Ideologically, Shining Path viewed themselves as the true torchbearers of

Maoism and Guzman as now the world’s only pure Marxist after Mao’s death
in 1976. Shining Path’s megalomaniac leader believed he was taking up the
“Fourth Sword” of the Marxist pantheon, in which he would be joining the
revolutionary lineage of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Guzman denounced Deng
Xiaoping’s reform policies in China and labeled him a “son of a bitch” on
propaganda signs.77 Shining Path evaluated Deng as a “sinister guardian of
revisionism, that notorious chum and accomplice of Yankee imperialism, and
vile traitor to the international communist movement and principally to
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.”78 Guzman rejected the historical legacy of Che
Guevara as a great guerilla fighter and referred to the Cuban revolutionary as
a “vedette (a chorus girl).”79 Shining Path scorned all of the communist gov-
ernments in the Eastern Bloc, including the hardline regime in North Ko-
rea.80 William Lenderking, the Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Embassy in
Lima from 1980 to 1983, recalled, “Parts of the countryside became no
longer safe, so it wasn’t just a group of university radicals. As soon became
clear, they were revolutionary extremists of the Maoist or Khmer Rouge vari-
ety, executing poor farmers in the countryside who took their produce to
market because in Sendero’s view they were abetting the evil capitalist sys-
tem.”81 Guzman’s puritanical approach to building socialism in Peru made
Shining Path few allies amongst the rural peasantry. However, brutality and
severe discipline was part of Maoist-style people war. Wayward peasants
needed to be re-educated and rectified in order to fit into the mold of a new
revolutionary man or woman.
Although professing to act for the betterment of peasant communities,
Shining Path’s brutality wreaked havoc in Andean mountain villages. The
group’s violent tactics earned the condemnation of local indigenous commu-
nities, which quickly grew tired of Shining Path’s malevolence. Shining Path
forced schoolchildren to become guerilla fighters and made young girls into
sex slaves. Public executions were common in Shining Path-controlled terri-
tory. By the early 1990s, mountain villages formed self-defense forces of their
own in order to repel Shining Path attacks. Andean peasants were now fight-
ing back against the supposedly pro-peasant revolutionary organization. The
Peruvian government provided free weapons and ammunition to these
mountain villagers as they “no longer regarded peasants as enemy collabora-
tors with the Shining Path, but rather as valued allies.”82
With the help of a newly formed counterinsurgency unit in the Peruvian
national police, government forces arrested Guzman on September 12, 1992.
He was holed up in a middle-class house in the capital city of Lima. Despite
promoting himself as a leader of the mountains and countryside, Guzman
was arrested in Peru’s urban center where he had been living quite comforta-
bly. After Guzman’s arrest, Shining Path collapsed quickly as much of its re-
maining leadership was thrown in jail. It was not known until 2003 how many

77 Montalbano, “Alive or Dead?”

78 Central Committee, Communist Party of Peru, “Develop Guerrilla Warfare,” in Two Doc-
uments of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Peru (Berkeley, California: The Committee
to Support the Revolution in Peru), 1-2.
79 Montalbano, “Alive or Dead?”
80 Galway, “Permanent Revolution,” 187.
81 William Lenderking, Interview on March 5, 2007, The Association for Diplomatic Studies
and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, https://adst.org/oral-history/oral-history-inter-
views/#gsc.tab=0 (Accessed July 20, 2022).
82 Lovell, Maoism, 330-342.
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318 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES [Vol. 29:301

people perished during Peru’s civil war, but the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission reported that nearly 70,000 people had died in the conflict.
Most of these casualties were members of the indigenous communities living
in the highlands.83

CONCLUSION
During the Cold War era, global debate on the proper course of anti-
colonial resistance stretched from the cordillera of the Philippines to the
rural villages of Peru and the mountains of North Korea. Amidst decoloniza-
tion, radical intellectuals and anti-colonial rebels in the Global South looked
for new military concepts and strategies. Even after the end of the Cold War,
Mao’s legacy as a world revolutionary leader continued to resonate amongst
the anti-imperialist Left. For instance, during a 2008 visit to China, Venezue-
lan leader Hugo Chavez proudly declared upon on his arrival at the Beijing
airport, “We are in the land of Mao Zedong and I pay tribute to him. I am a
Maoist.”84
The revolutionary war experiences of Maoist China, with its militancy and
anti-colonial fervor, appealed to many national liberation movements look-
ing for models abroad. As two Western political scientists wrote in 1955, “Mao
Tse-Tung has done for war what Lenin did for imperialism and Marx for
capitalism: he has given war ‘scientific’ schemata.”85 It was Mao’s China that
marked mountain warfare as the starting point of building a communist soci-
ety. Due to its emphasis on gaining popular support amongst the oppressed
rural masses, people’s war became a military strategy for leftist revolutionar-
ies around the decolonizing world. However, as seen in the cases of the Phil-
ippines and Peru, Maoist guerillas often failed to carry out Mao’s “serve the
people” creed. Despite this being the core concept in people’s war theory,
both insurgencies failed to gain the support of the same people for whom
they were supposedly fighting. For instance, due to their sheer brutality and
violence in rural villages, Shining Path rebels in Peru could not rely on local
peasants for intelligence, espionage, and other forms of logistical support
against government forces.86
Compared with the Soviet Union’s vision of an urban working-class revolt,
Mao’s people’s war was built on the rebellious zeal and passions of the peas-
antry. As Mao said, “The richest source of power to wage war lies in the
masses of the people.”87 Mao’s people’s war lives on today in the rural high-
lands of South Asia. Maoist insurgents are still active in eastern India. These
rebels, known as Naxalites, still maintain their bases in rural mountainous
areas away from central control and wage armed struggle against the Indian
state and multinational corporations.88 Carrying on the torch of Mao Zedong
Thought, the Naxalites advocate for overthrowing the three big mountains of

83 Lovell, Maoism, 330-343.

84 Emma Graham-Harrison, “’Maoist’ Chavez eyes closer China energy ties,” Reuters, Sept.
23, 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-venezuela-chavez/maoist-chavez-eyes-closer-
china-energy-ties-idUSTRE48M59V20080923.
85 Edward L. Katzenbach and Gene Z. Hanrahan, “The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-
Tung,” Political Science Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1955), 321–340.
86 Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the
Andes (Norton, 2019).
87 Mao Zedong, “On Protracted War“ (May 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, 186. https://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch08.htm.
88 Alpa Shah, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas (Hurst/University of Chi-
cago Press, 2018).
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imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism in the Indian revolution.

The Naxalite revolutionary strategy also states, “We have to first concentrate
on those areas where feudal exploitation is as its worst. . . where the geo-
graphical conditions (mountains, hills, forests, and other favorable terrain)
are more favorable for conducting the guerilla war.”89 Thus, the concept of
people’s war has outlived both Mao himself and the Communist Bloc. This
speaks to the resilience of the people’s war military strategy and its relative
success in an era of enhanced technological sophistication.

89 Central Committee CPI (Maoist), “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution,”
http://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/Founding/StrategyTactics-
pamphlet.pdf.
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