THE GREAT IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIES AND TACTICS

THE GREAT IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIES AND TACTICS*

January 11, 2022

Strategic issues are fundamental to a political party and a country. Accurate judgment and sensible planning help us gain the strategic initiative crucial to the success of the cause of the Party and the people. At every critical moment over the past hundred years, the Party has responded to issues of historic significance from a strategic perspective, making sound assessments and defining political strategies and tactics accordingly. This has ensured our success in dealing with numerous threats and challenges along the way.

The resolution adopted at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee summarizes how the Party has always attached great importance to strategies and tactics, and how it has conceived sound strategies and tactics in the century since its founding. The summary contains the following highlights:

During the New Democratic Revolution (1919-1949), the Party shifted its focus from big cities to rural areas, marking a new starting point of decisive importance in the Chinese revolution. It pushed for a national united front against Japanese aggression, and devised and executed the strategic guidelines for a protracted war as well as a complete set of strategies and tactics for a people’s war. When the Kuomintang reactionaries launched an all-out civil war, the Party led both military and civilians in a gradual shift from active defense to strategic offense.

During the socialist revolution and construction period (1949-1978), the Party laid out a series of political, economic and military strategies and policies to facilitate the transformation from new democracy to socialism. It set the general guideline for the transition period, adjusted its diplomatic strategies, and put forward the theory of the Three Worlds, so as to ensure continuous progress in socialist revolution and construction.

After the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, the Party led a strategic shift in the focus of the Party and the country, formulated a three-step development strategy for achieving basic socialist modernization by the mid-21st century, and proposed that peace and development are the underlying themes of our times.

Entering the new era, within a wider context of change on a scale unseen in a century, the Party implemented the national rejuvenation strategy and set forth a series of original strategies on national governance. These have since been clarified:

We must adhere to the Party’s underlying theories, basic guidelines, and fundamental principles, and coordinate efforts on our great struggle, great project, great cause, and great dream.

We must strengthen our commitment to the Four Consciousnesses, the Four-sphere Confidence, and the Two Upholds.

We must implement the Five-sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-pronged Comprehensive Strategy, and follow the general principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability.

One main focus of the resolution is a review of the Party’s endeavors in designing and leveraging strategies and tactics over the century since its founding. We therefore must study it earnestly and ensure we understand it fully.

Strategic thinking is about assessing the overall picture, long-term development, and general trends, and making decisions accordingly. Mao Zedong explained it vividly, “It is not leadership to see nothing from the commanding podium. It is not leadership to identify only common things coming in large numbers, either. Instead, it is true leadership to infer from something cropping up in small numbers that it will grow into a universal phenomenon, and to take good command of it.” This kind of leadership that Mao talked about is strategic leadership.

Japan’s full-scale invasion of China threw the nation into an unprecedented crisis. The Chinese people were desperate to know whether the war could be won and how it could be won. Mao Zedong answered this question in “On Protracted War”, an essay on the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression published in 1938. In the essay he made the following observations: Japan was strong while China was weak; Japan was losing momentum while China was gaining momentum; Japan was a small country with a small population while China was a large country with a large population; and Japan was losing help in this unjust war while China was gaining support for its resistance against aggression. He accurately predicted the three stages of the war — China on the defensive, the preparation for the counter-offensive, and the strategic counter-offensive — and described the forces, strategies and tactics required to win the war. He therefore gave a clear answer on the process and the future of the war, and in so doing he gave a significant boost to national confidence and the will to carry on to the end.

At the Seventh CPC National Congress in 1945, during a discussion on the Party’s future after winning the War Against Japanese Aggression, Mao said, “For our Party and for the nearest future of China’s revolution, the northeast is particularly important. Even if we lose all our base areas, as long as we take the northeast we will have a strong foundation for the revolution. Of course, the foundation will be rock solid if we are able to keep all our base areas and take hold of the northeast at the same time.” After winning the War Against Japanese Aggression, our Party quickly assembled 20,000 officials and 110,000 troops to take the northeast, sending to the region 20 of the 77 members and alternate members of the Party Central Committee newly elected at the Seventh CPC National Congress. What a farsighted strategy! Later developments also proved the critical role of this decision in winning the War of Liberation (1946-1950).

Ours is a major political party governing a large country and working for a great cause. We must not make strategic mistakes. We might overlook minor problems and make small mistakes — these are unavoidable. Such mistakes often have a limited impact as they concern isolated matters and are easier to correct. But a strategic misjudgment is always consequential and costly. Our Party learned a hard lesson early on. When the Kuomintang launched its fifth campaign of encirclement and suppression against our central revolutionary base, we made a strategic error in engaging with the enemy in open battle, failing to see the huge disparity in strength between the two sides. We paid a terrible price for this mistake. This is why I have always emphasized that officials must be strategic thinkers to make sound judgments.

An ancient Chinese thinker said, “Only with a sound strategy can we achieve success. Strategies cannot be made hastily, and success does not come by chance.” A sound strategy needs to be enforced through sound tactics. To win victory on all fronts, we must plan strategically, maintain high morale, and show wisdom in adopting the right tactics and methods. Tactics are guided by strategies and serve strategies in a dialectical unity. We should be firm in following overarching strategies while being flexible and pragmatic in applying tactics. This requires us to chart the right course, address issues of overall importance, and plan for the long term on the macro level, while knowing where to start and what to focus on at the micro level. Just like in accounting, it is important to keep a general ledger while paying attention to matters of detail. Without a firm strategy and robust tactics, we will hesitate, vacillate, or run aground, and easily miss opportunities to develop.

Towards the end of the War of Liberation, the Party launched land reform to win over the peasants. The implementation of this strategy called for policy measures suited to the actual situation. The reform did not go too well at the beginning, as some places veered too far to the left. Fortunately this tendency was quickly corrected. Mao Zedong suggested applying different policy measures in different areas. In the liberated areas established before Japan’s surrender, in general land had long been distributed to the peasants and only a part of distribution needed to be readjusted. In the areas liberated between Japan’s surrender and the start of the CPC’s general counter-offensive against the Kuomintang in August 1947, land would be distributed universally and thoroughly as the Land Law was perfectly applicable. In the areas newly liberated since the start of the general counter-offensive, the Land Law should not be enforced all at once but would be implemented in two stages, as the people there could not be expected to accept it overnight. These differentiated policy measures ensured the success of the land reform and won for the Party the wholehearted support of peasants in all liberated areas.

Local authorities and central departments should make sure that their work plans and policy measures conform with the Party’s theories, guidelines, principles and policies, and they must correct any deviation as soon as it appears. Strategic decisions made by the Party Central Committee must be enforced fully, faithfully and unconditionally. In implementing central strategies, they must develop plans and measures in the local context. It should be noted that some plans go in line with central strategies while some might not. Timely reviews and appraisals should therefore be made in order to correct any deviation.

* Part of the speech at a study session on implementing the decisions of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, attended by principal officials at the provincial and ministerial level.

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