Mao Zedong and the Issue of Military Power in the 1926 National Revolution.

In Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Benjamin Schwartz noted that although key elements of Mao Zedong's emerging revolutionary strategy can be found in his "Report on an Investigation of the Agrarian Movement in Hunan," "nowhere in this 'Report' do we find any discussion of the question of military power." This observation feeds a broader assumption about China's 1926 National Revolution that the Communist Party's failure was largely a result of its single-minded focus on the organization of mass organizations at the expense of any attempt to create a revolutionary military force--in effect yielding the military realm to the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang's later use of military force to suppress mass organizations is generally seen as leading to Mao's realization that "political power comes from the barrel of a gun," with a new stress on the need for the CCP to develop its own military power. This article argues that Mao was in fact not so oblivious to the importance of military power in 1926, but--as clearly noted in his "Report"--he saw greater potential for the development of military power in mass militia than in regular army units. In the end, such mass militia were still no match for Chiang's armies, but many militia forces survived to form the foundation for later Communist military forces. This article, then, seeks to better illuminate early stress on the importance of militia as a revolutionary military force in the National Revolution and the struggles that resulted from this assumption over how militia should be organized and who should control them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]