victory was complete for Mao to proclaim the formal creation of the PRC. Chiang
Kai-shek and a significant portion of his military forces abandoned the Chinese
mainland and retreated to the island of Taiwan. By late 1949, the CCP controlled
most of mainland China, with the exception of Tibet and other remote areas.
From people’s war to local war
Following victory in the civil war, the CCP became focused on holding and
consolidating state power. As a result, its strategy changed from that of an
insurgent group intent on seizing power to one protecting itself against threats
both foreign and domestic. People’s war thus became a strategy of national
defence. Beijing expected that war was likely to break out in the near future, and
it would most probably be an all-out conflagration in which nuclear weapons
would be used. During the 1950s, China assumed its adversary in such a war would
be the United States, but, by the late 1960s, China anticipated that its enemy would
be the Soviet Union. Playing to China’s relative strengths in order to counter the
country’s significant weaknesses, the new Communist party-state adopted a strat-
egy of luring the enemy deep in the event of war rather than trying to hold the
enemy at the border. This sought to exploit China’s strategic depth and large
population. The country’s vast size and substantial people power could be used to
counteract the superior military power of any invading forces. In a protracted war,
stubborn Chinese resistance would gradually wear down the attacker.
Despite the formal doctrine, the record of actual Chinese combat in the 1950s
and 1960s was at odds with people’s war. Campaigns by the PLA were all waged at
or just beyond China’s borders—notably the Korean War (1950–3), the Sino-
Indian War (1962), and the Sino-Soviet border war (1969). Chinese forces did
not practise ‘protracted war’ or attempt to ‘lure the enemy deep’. Nevertheless, the
spectre of China waging an all-out people’s war against an invading army was
sobering enough to serve as an effective deterrent to any would-be aggressor.
Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China’s military doctrine was in
flux. Recognizing that the existing people’s war doctrine did not suit China’s
changing security requirements, military leaders attempted to update their mili-
tary strategy. Labelling the adaptation ‘people’s war under modern conditions’,
the PLA was prepared to fight a positional war seeking to hold an attacking army
(expected to be the Soviet Red Army) at or near its borders and, if necessary,
mobilizing the entire population in a guerrilla struggle to wear down the invader
through a protracted war of defence in depth.
By the end of the 1970s, Beijing no longer expected a worldwide war was
imminent; instead, smaller, more contained conflicts were expected to flare up; by
the mid-1980s, Chinese strategists had concluded that their armed forces should
be prepared for what they dubbed ‘local wars’. Following the stunning success of
the US-led coalition forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the suffix ‘under high-
tech conditions’ was added. Such conflicts would be waged against a technologi-
cally superior foe. While China had to do its utmost to modernize its military to
200 The Evolution of Operational Art