In the first phase the revolutionaries are “building what Lenin called the ‘organisational weapon’ the political, military, logistics, intelligence and command infrastructure” (Schram 1996:347). According to Mao, the insurgents should organise where the state is weakest. In China, as in many other countries where the strategy has been attempted, such weak place of the state was rural areas. At this respect it is necessary to emphasise that this point is quite weak being applied to the late 1980-1990s because the end of the 20th century was characterised by a high degree of urbanisation even in developing countries.
Anyway, the first phase should be viewed as a preparation for the insurgency while the real action occurs in phase two when Maoist theory recommends “a strategy of avoiding direct confrontation with government forces” (Schram 1996:382). Instead, the insurgents should strike where the enemy is weak, notably remote police or army outposts, towns and villages beyond the government’s reach to occupy, rail and telephone lines, anything else that is military or politically significant, but incapable of being defended adequately. In such a way, the insurgent movements need to maintain the initiative at all times by turning weakness into strength.
However, the main point of the second phase is not military. Military action is “one prong of the attack on the regime; so, too, are efforts to organize an effective counter-government in liberated areas, maintain a flood of propaganda, subvert the government through infiltration, and take all other measures that erode the regime’s political foundations” (Schram 1996:422). Defeating the enemy army is not the point, destroying the confidence of the population in the government, and the confidence of the government in itself, is the ultimate goal. Military and political actions, therefore, is simply a tool to win allies in the population, or to convince an even larger audience that history is on the side of insurgents.
In such a situation, during the third phase, the insurgent movements carry out a final assault against the government, which should be destroyed and the regime completely changed.
Obviously, Maoist theory, effective it seems to be, cannot always be fully applied in the end of the 20th century and its role gradually became less and less important. Consequently, what is really important for the insurgent movements according to Maoist theory is to gain confidence of the population and attract possibly larger masses on the side of the revolutionaries, making the war against regime the People’s War.
On projecting Maoist theory and strategies on the insurgent movements of 1970-1990s, it is obvious that they turn to be less and less effective and eventually they have not been used as often as before. For instance, the traces of Maoist influence are obvious in the Vietnam War, when American and South Vietnamese units defeated North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces on the battlefield time after time, but a communist regime now rules Saigon. In such a way, the military success prove irrelevant because the war was lost politically.
Furthermore, the 1980s may be characterised as a transition period, when Maoist theory was still important. For instance, peaceful revolutions in Eastern described above were successful basically due to the effectiveness of the struggle for people’s ‘minds’, confidence of population in righteousness of ideas developed by insurgent movements in the context of total lost of confidence in the official governments. On the other hand, these movements did not use army force or attacks as suggested Maoist theory the confrontation was purely political and socio-economic but not military.
However, 1990 revealed new trends in the insurgent movements, which made the Maoist theory less effective. In fact in the situation when there is only one superpower and the world undergoes the process of globalisation the insurgent movements, which basically operate in developing countries, realised the ineffectiveness of both military or peaceful revolutions if they are not supported by the US, which actually could cope with any rebelling state since this country did not face any opposition from any other country in the whole world. In such a way the military conflict, even if it has a character of the People’s War, is doomed to defeat if the US take a decision to 代写essay 代写assignment 以及代写dissertation
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