ABSTRACT
“Guerrilla warfare,” in the Asian Communist context, is an element of a concrete revolutionary strategy — that is, of a plan of coordinated behavior intended to bring a revolutionary association to power in a given social system. This chapter is concerned neither with the sources of social disequilibrium that may have mobilized Asian revolutionaries nor with the particular ideological “future cultures” that Asian Communist revolutionaries hope to create. Mao Tse-tung has been the primary strategic innovator in the Asian Communist revolutionary tradition. Mao’s first axiom became that, in order to make a revolution in China, the Communist Party had to build an army and use it to defeat its enemies in military combat. Probably the single, most lasting contribution that Mao Tse-tung has made to the Asian Communist revolutionary tradition is his definition of revolution as revolutionary war.
