Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare
at the mercy of rapacious soldiery and bandits, afflicted by blights, droughts, floods, and epidemics. His single stark problem was simply to survive. The tough ones did. The others slowly starved, died of disease, and in the fierce winters of North China and Manchuria, froze to death.
It is difficult for an American today to conceive tens of thousands of small communities in which no public services existed, in which there were no doctors, no schools, no running water, no electricity, no paved streets, and no sewage disposal. The inhabitants of these communities were with few exceptions illiterate; they lived in constant fear of army press gangs and of provincial officials who called them out summer and winter alike to work on military roads and dikes. The Chinese peasant, in his own expressive idiom, "ate bitterness" from the time he could walk until he was laid to rest in the burial plot beneath the cypress trees. This was feudal China. Dormant within this society were the ingredients that were soon to blow it to pieces.
An external factor had for almost a century contributed to the chaos of China: the unrelenting pressure and greed of foreign powers. French, British, Germans, and Russians vied with one another in exacting from a succession of corrupt and feeble governments commercial, juridical, and financial concessions that had, in fact, turned China into an international colony. (The American record in these respects was a reasonably good one.) Mao once described the China he knew in his youth as "semicolonial and feudal." He was right.
