Word: mao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the world could see that Red China, with Red Russia, had gone ahunting after the tiger of freedom. And Mao had even voiced his scorn for the quarry -"a paper tiger...
...Weapon. A hunter needs a weapon. The formidable one that Mao bore, the Chinese Red army, had been forged with Russian connivance in a manner that the West did not yet widely comprehend...
...tested comrades to lead 50,000 armed peasants). At that time the Reds were still accepted in the Kuomintang (Nationalist) revolution, which Chiang Kai-shek had led up from the south to subjugate the warlords and unify the nation. A Red army had already been urged by Mao, then one of the Communist Party's lesser figures and often berated by his less realistic comrades as a starry-eyed opportunist dreaming of "romantic Soviet republics in the mountainous wilderness." The Stalin-Mao decision to form an army, was, in effect, an undeclared war on Chiang Kai-shek...
While Chiang fought the northern warlords, Mao became a warlord in his own right. On Chingkan Shan, celebrated bandit mountain lair, he joined forces with the local outlaws, soon merged them in his new Red army.* It was a guerrilla force, highly mobile, terroristic, levying an ever-expanding countryside for recruits and supplies, fighting not for the ordinary warlord's booty but for a Red revolution within the Nationalist revolution...
Through Defeat. All of Mao's cunning in guerrilla tactics could not save the first Chinese Red army. By 1930 it had grown to 60,000 men. Then Chiang, advised by a German, General Alexander von Falken-hausen, closed in with overwhelming numbers. Five years of dark and bloody Nationalist "annihilation" campaigns against the Reds finally drove Mao's remnant into the retreat now famous as the Long March, an epic ordeal of one year and 6,000 miles. Less than 20,000 Red army survivors reached their chosen base around Yenan, in remote northwest China, as near...