In China In its original formulation by
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, people's war exploits the few advantages that a small revolutionary movement has—broad-based popular support can be one of them—against a
state's
power with a large, professional, well-equipped and well-funded army. People's war strategically avoids decisive battles, since a tiny force of a few dozen soldiers would easily be routed in an all-out confrontation with the state. Instead, it favours a three-phase strategy of protracted
warfare, with carefully chosen battles that can realistically be won. In phase one, the revolutionary force conducting people's war starts in a remote area with mountainous or forested terrain in which its enemy is weak. It attempts to establish a local stronghold known as a
revolutionary base area. As it grows in power, it enters phase two, establishes other revolutionary base areas and spreads its influence through the surrounding countryside, where it may become the governing power and gain popular support through such programmes as
land reform. Eventually in phase three, the movement has enough strength to encircle and capture small cities, then larger ones, until finally it seizes power in the entire country. Within the
Chinese Red Army, the concept of people's war was the basis of strategy against the Japanese, and against a hypothetical Soviet invasion of China. The concept of people's war became less important with the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the increasing possibility of conflict with the
United States over
Taiwan. In the 1980s and 1990s the concept of people's war was changed to include more high-technology weaponry. Historian
David Priestland dates the beginning of the policy of people's war to the publication of a "General Outline for Military Work" in May 1928, by Chinese Central Committee. This document established official military strategies to the
Chinese Red Army during the
Chinese Civil War. The strategy of people's war has political dimensions in addition to its military dimensions. In China, the early
People's Liberation Army was composed of peasants who had previously lacked political significance and control over their place in the social order. Its internal organization was egalitarian between soldiers and officers, and its external relationship with rural civilians was egalitarian. Military success against an adversaries with major material advantages (in Mao's experience, the Nationalist forces and the invading Japanese army), required weakening the adversary through attrition and strengthening one's own forces through accumulation, a method which could only succeed if the guerilla army had the people's support. As sociologist Alessandro Russo summarizes, the political existence of peasants via the PLA was a radical exception to the rules of Chinese society and "overturned the strict traditional hierarchies in unprecedented forms of egalitarianism."
Other usage in Chinese rhetoric In China, the generalized use of military terminology to other aspects of society is influenced by factors including the use of military terms in political struggles and media as well as the longstanding respect for the People's Liberation Army.''''''
Chen Boda's 1960 strategy of "electrocentrism", through which the
electronics industry should develop technological advancements and become embedded at all levels of China's economy, incorporated the philosophy of fighting a people's war to "smash electronic mysticism" and rapidly develop in the age of electronics. This included small-scale enterprises (not just large enterprises) producing electronics to spur development. In February 2020, the
Chinese Communist Party launched an aggressive campaign described by
General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping as a "people's war" to contain the
spread of the
coronavirus.
Outside China Mao's doctrine of people's war influenced various Third World revolutionary movements including the
Naxalites and the
Shining Path. From 1965 to 1971, China held yearly military training for
Palestinian fedayeen, including instruction in Mao Zedong Thought on guerilla warfare and people's war. From 1966 to 1970,
Syria was indirectly ruled by the
neo-Ba'athist and
totalitarian regime of General
Salah Jadid, which actively promoted the ideas of
Marxism–Leninism and the Maoist concept of People's War against
Zionism, which was expressed in its huge support for
communist and
socialist Palestinian fedayeen groups, granting them considerable autonomy and allowing them to carry out attacks on Israel from Syrian territory. Just a few months after the
coming to power, Jadid's regime completed the formation of the
Palestinian paramilitary Ba'athist group called
al-Sa'iqa, which carried out attacks on Israel from
Jordanian and
Lebanese territory, but was completely under the control of the neo-Ba'athist regime in Syria. Mao-era China contended that the Arab defeat in the
Six-Day War demonstrated that only people's war, not other strategies or methods, could defeat imperialism in the Middle East. The
Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf's (PFLOAG) goal was to use people's war to establish a socialist Arab state in the Gulf region. In
Islamist states such as Iran, the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used the protracted people's war against
Ba'athist Iraq during the
Iran-Iraq war. ==List of people's wars==