Jiangsu–Zhejiang War and the Zhili–Fengtian War—were waged ‘in the style of
the First World War’. The wars comprised campaigns of coordinated operations
by infantry, cavalry, navy, and aircraft. There was considerable use of machine
guns, modern artillery, barbed wire, and mines. Whenever possible, commanders
made good use of railways to transport troops and equipment. 41
Contemporary China first fully faced up to the vastness of the technological
chasm in the 1950s in Korea. Here, large formations of well-trained and well-led,
battle-hardened infantry confronted the awesome power of the world’s most
technologically advanced armed forces. US air power, firepower, and the spectre
of atomic weaponry presented collectively a daunting and seemingly insur-
mountable hurdle to the Chinese forces.
Mao Zedong insisted:
[t]he so-called theory that ‘weapons decide everything’...[is] a subjective and one-sided
view. Our view is opposed to this; we see not only weapons but also people. Weapons are
an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are
decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but
also a contest of human power and morale. 42
He argued this in the late 1930s with reference to China facing the superior
capabilities of Japan, but the same logic steeled China as it prepared to confront
the far greater military might of the United States. Moreover, Chinese soldiers
could draw comfort from the fact that the Communist movement had always
faced Herculean challenges and vastly superior foes, and yet it had somehow
managed to triumph. General Liu Zhen, the first commander of the newly created
air arm of the CPV, on the eve of intervention in Korea felt overwhelmed by the
magnitude of his mission. While experienced in land warfare, he confessed that
air warfare was a complete ‘mystery’ and neither he nor any of his colleagues ‘had
any experience organizing or commanding air combat operations’. Moreover, Liu
stated the obvious: ‘...in our levels of tactics and technology we were way, way
below those of our enemy’. Nevertheless, what gave him inspiration was the
‘resolute thought running through my mind...[that] the revolution had all
along developed out of nothing, gone from small to big, developing as a brutal,
difficult, death-defying struggle’. 43
But the CPV grappled with the inescapable reality of US air-power dominance.
It made for a logistical nightmare as soldiers and civilian workers struggled to
maintain and repair roads and rail lines in the face of incessant bombing.
Ensuring the flow of supplies and reinforcements to the Korean front was a
constant struggle. 44 Chinese forces on the peninsula also operated under the
threat of nuclear attack. While Mao publicly scoffed at the impact of nuclear
weaponry, this masked a more serious concern. Although he was famously
dismissive of nuclear weapons, dubbing them ‘paper tigers’, this did not stop
him from later concluding that China must possess its own. After China had felt
itself to be the victim of bullying and nuclear blackmail by the United States in
Korea and the Taiwan Strait, Mao ordered the Chinese military, in 1955, to
initiate its own nuclear programme to develop the bomb as quickly as possible.
The Chinese Way of War 207