How to interpret the Marxist re-indoctrination of Chinese society in the 21st century?
Igor Parra
This commentary could occupy several chapters of a political-military essay, however we will limit it to the essential and the concise, the practical and the urgent. At some point, some of the kind readers, who read me in different countries, will realize what this hypothesis I am presenting below means in the short and medium term.
First of all, the stage has been set by Chinese President Xi Jinping himself and has been reported in the international press. Indeed the president declared the reintroduction of Marxism in the national education plans at different levels and grades. In some Western press it has been interpreted as a step towards the arteriosclerosis of the regime of the eighty-year-old leaders of the Asian country.
However, in the Asian press, in the countries neighboring China, there have been no excessively negative comments. What is most interesting from my point of view is that it is in the Vietnamese press where there is no trace of negative commentary, only a relative vacuum since they limit themselves to reproducing summaries of press agencies. At least in the newspapers and journals that we can access from the West via the web.
From a purely Asian, and especially Vietnamese, military strategy point of view, this reindoctrination could only mean that the Chinese leaders are deeply convinced that they will be attacked by a US-led alliance in the not too distant future. Perhaps no more than 5 years (the latter is a derivative of the main hypothesis).
Indeed, when the functioning of the communist armies is known, an aspect that has never been well understood in the West is the utmost importance of the political indoctrination of the troops at all levels of the military echelon. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain the Soviet Russian triumph not only in the Second World War but also in the civil war against the interventionism of all its near and remote neighbors. It would be equally difficult to understand the Vietnamese triumph over the Americans, and along the same logical line, that of the Vietnamese against the French and Japanese colonial power. Likewise, it would not be possible to understand the triumph of the Chinese communists over the Japanese invaders and the direct and frontal confrontation against the Americans in Korea.
The communist ideological component goes far beyond the classic indoctrination and morale of troops typical of Western armies, which has been practiced for several centuries, especially as a moral religious component, for example the text engraved in metal on the belts of German soldiers in various wars: Got mit Uns (God with us).
Who has written best about this in depth is the Vietnamese strategist Vo Nguyen Giap. The titles of his works clearly indicate the fundamental role given to Marxist ideology in the organization of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare, whether Japanese, French or American. These texts on the one hand summarize the military writings of Marx himself, as well as those of other revolutionary thinkers, but they contribute a very characteristic vision of the relationship not only of the corps or combat echelon, whichever it may be, with coordination and strategic movement, something that Mao succeeds in synthesizing and improving in a notable way, but he adds a particular accentuation to the political relationship between the military political cadre and its own instrument of defense and attack. It is perhaps the best operational compilation of the enormous importance of the political education of a military cadre; its conclusion is that without deeply assimilated ideological content the enormous difficulty of modern warfare from the revolutionary camp cannot be executed in spite of any technologically superior military instrument or complex. Only political superiority operationally projects sufficient willpower to the body of combatants armed no longer with material weapons, but with conceptual weapons.
Having said the above, which is known to scholars of the political indoctrination of modern armies, it is worth proposing that we can interpret as a clear sign of readiness for war the fact that Chinese society activates its Marxist political indoctrination in a transversal way. This has several operational implications far greater than incorporating this or that aircraft carrier, or developing this or that super sonic missile system.
If we read Mao and his best pupil Vo Nguyen Giap carefully, the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China is preparing for a new kind of revolutionary war. We will continue to comment on this in future posts. In the meantime, readers who lack a Vietnamese revolutionary military education would do well to start reading Vo Nguyen Giap very carefully.
