ABSTRACT
In the 1920s both Chinese and Soviet leaders shared a common military theory, style or experience which laid great stress on ideological and revolutionary fervour. Lin Piao is denounced for pursuing a bourgeois military line by preaching "the fallacy that the gun commands the party," by undermining the Party's absolute leadership over the army and for asserting that the army should decide the character and fate of the Party and the state power. To Mao Tse-tung, the increasing influence of Soviet advisers during 1946-1960 and the upsurge of professionalism and modernization within the People's Liberation Army under Peng Teh-huai seemed to indicate a gradual erosion of Maoist military theory and a decline in his own personal power status both within the military and the Party. The Kremlin preferred to adopt more modern concepts of integral strategy and professionalism, massed firepower, the offensive defensive and a short war, fought with megaton nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
