Mao’s protracted war insights offered as inspiration in US-China trade conflict
Beijing Daily commentary said the famous 1938 essay would encourage people to remain confident of eventual victory
China’s state media has urged the public to revisit Mao Zedong’s famous 1938 essay “On Protracted War”, saying that it offers “great inspiration for the international struggles of the new era” amid the protracted economic hostilities with the US.
Washington has imposed tariffs totalling 145 per cent on goods from China so far this year, bringing the effective tariff rate to about 156 per cent. Beijing has responded with a rise to 125 per cent in duties on its imports from the US.
“The situation has evolved far beyond what the US side anticipated,” the commentary said in Beijing Daily, mouthpiece for the ruling party’s municipal committee in the capital.
“Not only was the Chinese government the first to clearly state the firm stance of ‘fighting to the end’, but the voices from the international community opposing bullying have also grown louder.”
The newspaper said there were still “erroneous viewpoints”, including that China should find a way to quickly compromise and reach an agreement with the Trump administration.
With Washington showing signs of softening to avoid a painful and protracted strategic stalemate, there was also an over-optimistic belief that China was on the verge of achieving complete victory in the tariff war, it added.
Mao, one of the party’s founders, wrote his famous essay in May 1938, in the first year of the second Sino-Japanese war. China had suffered a string of defeats, including the loss of Shanghai and Xuzhou in the east.
In the essay, he opposed the too optimistic “quick-win” view that China would receive foreign help to defeat Japan, as well as its opposite, the pessimistic idea of “subjugation” – a presumption that the Japanese would overwhelm the country in a matter of months.
Instead, Mao argued that China would prevail in what he foresaw would be a protracted war with Japan, first with a difficult period of strategic defence to wear down the aggressors, followed by a strategic stalemate before the tide finally turned.
Since taking power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly called on the party to relearn Mao’s works, especially “On Protracted War”, to find enlightenment and confidence on the way forward.
“Many of the problems we face are medium- and long-term, and we must understand them from the perspective of a protracted war,” he told a Politburo meeting in July 2020, according to state news agency Xinhua.
Beijing Daily called the US global tariffs a “butcher’s knife”. While some countries “fantasised about feeding themselves to the wolves in exchange for a brief moment of precarious peace”, hoping for leniency through unilateral concessions was simply “not a viable path” for China, it said.
The article quoted Mao’s saying that “the soldiers and the people are the foundation of victory”.
In the context of the current situation, this meant that China should unite all of its people to concentrate on “doing our own work well”, to achieve its own development, improvement, progress and growth amid the protracted Sino-US competition, it said.
China had already anticipated the long-term nature of its rivalry with the US and laid out plans for future major power competition. The country was well prepared, from its national strategy, to industrial development and society’s resilience, the article continued.
Mainstream public opinion had shown “a high degree of unity and a strong sense of historical agency”, it added. “This national capacity for self-awakening, self-adjustment, self-pressure and self-optimisation is the core support for eventual victory in the protracted struggle.”
The article’s timing coincided with a hardening of Beijing’s public messaging against Trump’s tariffs – including the dismissal of speculation that any progress had been made in bilateral communications.
Brics – an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is an association of 10 leading emerging markets. The other member states are Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
Having long reaped enormous benefits from free trade, the US was now using tariffs as leverage to extort exorbitant demands from other nations, Wang told a meeting of the Brics foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro on Monday.
“If one chooses to stay silent and compromise, it will only embolden the bullies to push further,” Wang said, according to Xinhua.