Revisiting Mao’s ‘Protracted War’

Strangely enough, Capitalist China is seeking help from communist Mao to fight their global rival, capitalist America.

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.

Beijing Daily said Mao’s essay, a commentary on China’s war against Japanese aggression, would encourage people to remain confident of eventual victory in the tariff war unleashed by American President Donald Trump.

The call to throw off attitudes of a defeatist mindset as well as the illusions of a quick win came nearly a month after the Donald Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff plan, which triggered an escalating tit-for-tat trade battle between China and the US.

Washington has imposed tariffs totalling 145 percent on goods from China so far this year, bringing the effective tariff rate to about 156 percent. Beijing has responded with a rise to 125 percent 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 Communist 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.

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 cadres to relearn Mao’s works, especially “On Protracted War”, to find enlightenment and confidence on the way forward.

In the context of the current situation, recalling Mao's thesis meant that China should unite its entire 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 is now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. Mao is now a tool in the hands of Xi Jinpings to develop capitalism, not socialism, in China. If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war the Chinese look ready to fight till the end.

For one thing China is now encircled by a staggering 10,000 US military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the US west coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China and the rest of the world along with it. Super power rivalry is now between China and America, not between Russia and America.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 48, May 25 - 31, 2025