How did Mao Zedong’s experience in China shape his theory of protracted revolutionary war?

Mao Zedong’s theory of protracted revolutionary war was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in the Chinese countryside, where he shifted the focus of the Chinese Communist Party away from urban centers toward peasant mobilization.12

After the 1927 purge of communists by Chiang Kai-shek, Mao and Zhu De retreated to rural bases, such as the Jiangxi Soviet. There, they developed guerrilla warfare tactics—including mobile infiltration—to successfully repel Nationalist encirclement campaigns. Mao learned that the revolution could survive and expand by encircling cities from the countryside, provided the movement secured the support of the peasantry through land reform and nationalist appeals.3214

These experiences taught Mao that conventional, fixed positional warfare was disastrous against better-armed forces, a lesson reinforced when the party leadership abandoned his guerrilla strategy during the fifth Nationalist campaign, leading to heavy losses. Consequently, his writings, such as On Protracted War, synthesized these lessons, advocating for a long-term struggle that utilized the vast rural landscape to wear down enemies while building grassroots political and military strength.324