Far from being a sign of weakness, retreating from a battle against an overwhelmingly strong opponent is a sign of intelligence and weakness. It is the same good sense martial artists are taught when faced with a knife-wielding opponent: run away.
By choosing to fight, you open the door to your own destruction. It is better to do nothing, buy time for recovery and better planning, so that you can fight another day.
Restrain your urge to act, and let your opponent overextend so that they can destroy themselves.
Moving Back To Go Forward – How Mao Won By Doing Nothing
Mao Zedong was a rising star during the early-1930s within the infant Chinese Communist Party. He had distinguished himself after the outbreak of civil war with the Nationalists; time and time again he had defeated much larger opponents using his guerrilla tactics.
This was also the time became known for his arresting treatises on strategy and philosophy, and was given with the post of chairman of the Communist government. Soon, however, a power struggle broke out within the Communist party: on the one side was Mao and other like-minded figures, on the other were a group of Soviet-educated intellectuals called the 28 Bolsheviks.
The 28B strongly disliked Mao and his policies. They saw his guerrilla strategy as timid and weak, and preferred frontal assaults on Nationalist-held cities and regions.
Also, his policy of focusing the revolution on the huge Chinese peasant population rather than the tiny industrial workers irked the 28B – as they saw it, both of these policies went against the Soviet experience of revolution. In time, they isolated Mao until they confined him to virtual house arrest at his farm in Hunan.
It seemed to everybody that Mao had suffered a dizzying fall from grace; but worse still was that Mao seemed to accept his fate. Maybe the 28B was right that Mao was a coward after all.
That same year the Nationalists launched an all-out attacked designed to destroy the Communists once and for all. They sought to snuff them out of their strongholds and kill every last soldier.
Though the Nationalists had tried before, this time they seemed poised to succeed. With better equipment and their German military advisors in tow, the Nationalists slowly but surely took control of the cities and regions under the 28B-controlled Communists.
Thousands died, and thousands more deserted the Communists. At one point the Nationalist even completed an encirclement which the Red Army, now numbering around 100,000, managed to break out of by the skin of their teeth. After this they headed northwest.
It was now that Mao joined them, and he seized the chance to throw doubt upon the 28B’s strategy. Among the things he complained about was that they were retreating slowly in a straight light which made it easy for the enemy to attack, and the fact that they were carrying unnecessary weight such as file cabinets and other office trappings which only held them down.
While the 28B saw this retreat as a mere setback in their attempts to challenge the Nationalists for every city and region directly, Mao saw the the Communists needed a rethinking but also this could be the start of something bigger.
Instead of copying the Bolshevik method, China needed to utilize the peasants that were the single largest Chinese population group. And in order to organize and act on this new strategy, they needed time and the freedom to attack – this meant retreating to the southwest to the furthest reaches of China were the enemy could not get at them.
Red Army officers began to listen to and adopt Mao’s ideas, for, after all, he had been successful using his guerrilla methods in the past, and the same could not be said of the 28B. So they threw off the excess weight, moved quickly and only during the night, shook off the Nationalists by feinting this way and that, and in the meantime rallied and recruited the peasants to their cause.
Despite being hugely outnumbered and facing low chances of success, they managed to escape the Nationalists and reached the remote parts of Shaanxi Province in October 1935. Finally, after crossing twenty-four rivers and eighteen mountain ranges, they had gained room to breathe.
This was the famous “Long March”: although now hugely reduced in number (about 6,000 left), Mao finally had what he wanted all along – a purified party, devoted to the principles of peasant revolution and guerrilla warfare, and ready to spread its ideology.
In 1949, the Communists finally defeated the Nationalists and took control of mainland China.
Analysis
As with most Chinese at the time, Mao was born and raised on a farm. The life of the farmer demanded patience and the ability to bend with the seasons.
It was in this same environment that the Taoist religion emerged thousands of years earlier. Its central concept, wu wei, is the idea of action through non-action. This is the belief that rather than attempting to control and fight against each circumstance, you can gain more control by letting go of control.
Sometimes, by struggling against everything, you’ll go backwards and create more difficulties. It is akin to moving against a river current.
Sometimes it is best to lie low, go with the flow, and do nothing. Not only will you travel further, conserve your strength, and find opportunity to strengthen further.
Mao internalized these ideas and constantly applied them throughout his life. He was more than happy to retreat when his enemies were stronger, even though he knew this could be interpreted as weakness.
He made time his ally and used his time away to reflect and gain perspective rather than lick his wounds in humiliation. This is exactly what happened in the run-up to the Long March – he understood that the only way to convince his party of his tactics was to give them the chance to see first-hand the folly of their mistaken ideas.
And once his enemies had succumbed to their weaknesses, he returned stronger than ever.
War is often deceiving – you may think that you are strong, but time can show you that you are actually marching right into the jaws of the tiger. The thing is you can never really know; all you can do is rid yourself of lazy thinking patterns that lead to disaster.
Advancing is not always a good thing, and retreating is not always a bad thing. If the opponent is in a position of overwhelming strength, refusing to fight is often the best strategy.
It will give you the opportunity to rethink your ideas, reflect, separate believers from the rest, and allow you to translate this into power when it is time to act.
Footnotes & Further Reading
Greene, Robert. The 33 Strategies of War. Millionaire, 2006
