Clifton Barnhart
Mao Paper: Thesis String
“Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change.” – Milton Friedman
Thesis: The weak central-government features of Colonial America and early-20th Century China created revolutionary movements which, after being ejected from the center (cities), faced a crisis of survival in the periphery (countryside). The twin crises of The Long March and the Winter at Valley Forge forced the alignment of political and military power within the rebel camps. This alignment represents (1) a competition fought and won by George Washington and Mao Zedong against their political rivals and (2) the first time Washington and Mao can be identified as “peerless” leaders.
Naturally interest in the origins of a nation’s founding lead to questions of how it was accomplished and by whom. Partly for convenience, and partly because it makes sense to do so, historians and general public, tend to compartmentalize these questions and their associated historical answers under the heading “revolution.” Further compartmentalization of revolutions into national, ideological, structural, or theoretical categories – such as, “Russian”, “Communist”, “post-colonial” and “reactive” – allows researchers to compare revolutions according to criteria unrelated to time-period, geography, and political system. The lines of comparison should be made with care, however. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910, for example, might not provide a logical comparison related to the question of how revolution transforms monarchies into republics. But they may have striking similarities regarding whether or not holding the capital is a significant factor in a rebellion’s victory or defeat. Similarities which, once explored, answer questions inadequately addressed by the study of revolution within the context of a single polity.
The benefit to the study of founding fathers is obvious when we consider that analysis of a nation’s founding father, solely in the context of his own revolution, ultimately becomes a comparison between “the winner” and “the loser(s).” An unsatisfying comparison for the large number of history fans interested in, “what made great leaders great?” This paper seeks to expand on the explanations already offered in narrative histories tracking when and how Mao Zedong defeated his political and military rivals by treating the rivalry itself as unit of comparison.
This would be simple enough if our only criterion for identifying a “rivalry unit” is the presence of a “winners” and “losers.” The need to cast those comparisons in a logical framework, however, demands that the rivalry unit exist in an environment that is (1) similar enough that we are able to reinforce conclusions on why historical factor “X” causes revolutionary result “Y” – by citing multiple, independent examples – and (2), different enough that useful examples of revolutionary result “Y” occurring despite the absence of historical factor “X” – allow us to filter out some of the “inert ingredients” of revolution. Assuming that differences between revolutions can be more easily found than similarities (a safe assumption given the apparentness of regional, cultural and time-period differences), the search for a useful comparison of Mao’s rivalry should center around the question of which revolutions present power-dynamics similar to those which created “the rise of Mao.”
This presents a problem when addressing the Chinese Communist Revolution and the rise of its leader because the centers of power of the time – hereafter referred to as “power-centers” – were situated in such a way that is rare among revolutions of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Desperately Seeking Similarity
When setting out to make broad comparisons between the 19th Century revolutions of Europe and the 20th Century revolutions of Asia, Charles Tilly was struck by difficulty of comparing their power-distributions in terms of power-centers. Here ‘power-center’ is loosely defined as a leader, body of leaders, or, a location where the causes and objectives which the leaders represent have broad support. An additional distinction between two types of power-center will help us get at questions related to a revolutionary leader’s rise: the political-power-center and the regional-power-center.
For our purposes; political-power-centers are made of up leaders or bodies of leaders – Chairmen, Presidents, Congresses and Committees – who control the governmental apparatus of a revolutionary cause. Regional-power-centers are represented by the areas (rural or urban) where concentrations of support distinguish them from areas where competing powers enjoy support. The military is a major factor in tracking regional-power-centers not only because the movement of troops shift large amounts of human and material resources from one region to another, but also because locals have a tendency to support the cause of the army in residence. The degree to which the military helps define political-power-centers will be discussed later in this paper but suffice it to say, it matters. When plotted in the context of a revolution the arraignment of regional and political power-centers form a power-distribution.
Tilly largely attributes the difference between European and Asian power-distributions to the effects of 19th Century nation-state building in Europe, noting that nation-states tend to create an ever growing gravitational pull toward more centralized power (Tilly 278&290). This created revolutions with political centers that tended to be stationary, or that could only be moved at great cost to political power. Consequently the European revolutions of the 19th and early 20th Centuries – Paris, Christiansburg, Moscow, Berlin – occurred in such a way that the key to victory, or defeat, lie in controlling the of apparatus of government – radio stations, air traffic control, railway conjunctions, the police, etc… – by taking the capital. After which the new government projected its authority from the center (capital) to the periphery (countryside).
This is contrasted by a power dynamic in China – and more broadly Asia – where competition between, colonial, provincial, and nationalist actors created a patchwork of power-centers which were both the product of and the reason for China’s lack of a strong central authority. As we will see, power-centers in this environment tend to be mobile and change location and personnel with greater ease than their stationary European counterparts. In fact up until post-World War II decolonization sped-up the formation of nation-states; revolutions in Asia had a “wandering” quality with territory swapping between competing powers and the relocation of the seat-of-government occurring several times over.
There is a certain logic to searching for revolutionary comparisons among China’s regional neighbors, where the effects of colonialism, feudalism, and (to the extent that such a thing exists) “Sinicism” provide commonality. Yet these effects obscure fundamental questions on where and how power is organized. While the central-power of China’s neighboring states at their founding is accurately described as weak, the “gravitational pull” of the nation-state does seems to have affected Asian revolutions in much the same way it affects revolution in Europe.
The post-1949 Asian revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Korea exhibit many of the rural-urban cleavages which form the basis of the guerilla-warfare so important to periphery-in revolutions. Yet they are also examples of political power-transfers – from the country-side to an urban-capital – occurring long before the outcome of the revolution was decided. Hanoi & Saigon, Phnom Pehn, Jakarta and (as of this writing) Pyongyang & Seoul, are all examples of cities that were established as strong political-power-centers during the revolution, and for which the prolonged possession of tended to decide the outcome of the conflict. In marked contrast, the liberation of Beijing (and for the Continentals, New York), held relatively minor significance in determining the outcome of China’s revolution. The difference implies that despite the commonality of periphery-in guerilla-revolutions, the transformation of Asian-colonies into sovereign nations strengthened hegemonic, power-centers located in a “traditional” capital.
Sitting at the crux of the rise of the nation-state, and the resurgence of guerilla warfare; revolutions which approximate the power-dynamics of the Chinese Communist Revolution are in short supply. If guerilla-doctrine is a symptom of the periphery-in revolutions in Asia, and the formation of nation-states frustrates comparisons between revolutions concluding after 1949, then it makes sense to seek similarity in revolutions with a notable guerilla-warfare aspect occurring prior to the “discovery” of the nation-state.
The founding of republics in France and America at the end of the 18th Century seems like a good place to look because while some may argue over which country truly achieved sovereign nationhood first, both revolutions clearly preceded the creation of the nation-state. When we remember that Louis XIV took great pains to centralize French monarchal-authority, however, and that the revolutionary overthrow of French monarchal-authority proceeded in and around Paris (and its governmental satellite Versailles), the French Revolution loses its attractiveness as “weak central-authority” model for comparison. In contrast the conglomeration of colonies of Continental America, representing regional interests, with a sovereign-head located across the Atlantic, more closely approximates the patch-work power dynamic found in pre-1949 China. That the American Revolution has often been called the first “guerilla war” and Washington a “guerilla chieftain” is also encouraging but only if the American Revolution fits within the frame-work of a revolution which survived and was strengthened in the periphery before pacifying the center. To answer that question, we begin by examining the movements of competing power-centers in colonial-America and revolutionary-China.