The Transnational Origins of “Revolutionary War”: A Sino-Vietnamese Experiment in War Communism?

Since Mao Zedong first expounded on “revolutionary war” in 1936, circulation of the idea from China and Vietnam to colonies in Algeria and the Middle East and onward to metropoles in France, Britain, and the United States has stretched the concept to mean anything from “guerilla warfare” to “unconventional war” to “insurgency.” I return “revolutionary warfare” to its origins in the transnational communist politics of China and Vietnam.

In doing so, I make four arguments about revolutionary war’s meaning and character. First, Mao Zedong’s concept and application of “revolutionary warfare” was a specifically communist project designed to use war to build a revolutionary state. Second, “revolutionary warfare” was a transnational model known to Vietnamese communists since the 1930s. Third, nationalism was as important to the Vietnamese and Chinese as it had been to French revolutionaries and their wartime state-building in the 19^th century. However, Sino-Vietnamese revolutionary warfare was conceived as a shortcut to creating a communist state through methods like mass mobilization campaigns, land reform, intensive rectification, emulation campaigns, hero worship, and more. It also included the creation of a professional army, not just a guerrilla one. Lastly, the methods the Chinese and Vietnamese communists devised and put into practice through this new type of warfare was of a political kind different from those we find in the history of revolutionary warfare in Europe starting in the 18^th century. This last argument suggests that Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties were practicing a form of “War Communism” made famous by the Soviets during the Russian Civil War, but they rewired the model so that it would work from the countryside, among the peasants, and not from the cities, but against them.