On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation)/A Further Note
A FURTHER NOTE
THE PRECEDING NOTE was written twenty-one years ago, but I see no need to amplify it.
Yu Chi Chan (1937) is frequently confused with one of Mao's later (1938) essays entitled K'ang Jih Yu Chi Chan Cheng Ti Chan Lueh Wen T'i (Strategic Problems in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War), which was issued in an English version in 1952 hy the People's Publishing House, Peking. There are some similarities in these two works.
I had hoped to locate a copy of Yu Chi Chan in the Chinese to check my translation but have been unable to do so. Some improvement is always possible in any rendering from the Chinese. I have not been able to identify with standard English titles all the works cited by Mao.
Mao wrote Yu Chi Chan during China's struggle against Japan; consequently there are, naturally, numerous references to the strategy to be used against the Japanese. These in no way invalidate Mao’s fundamental thesis. For instance, when Mao writes, "The moment that this war of resistance dissociates itself from the masses of the people is the precise moment that it dissociates itself from hope of ultimate victory over the Japanese," he might have added, "and from hope of ultimate victory over the forces of Chiang Kai-shek." However, he did not do so, because at that time both sides were attempting to preserve the illusion of a "united front." "Our basic policy," he said, "is the creation of a national united anti-Japanese front." This was, of course, not the basic policy of the Chinese Communist Party then, or at any other time. Its basic policy was to seize state power; the type of revolutionary guerrilla war described by Mao was the basic weapon in the protracted and ultimately successful process of doing so.
Samuel B. Griffith
Brigadier General, USMC (Ret.)
]uly, 1961