The Strategy of Saladin 1: The Takeover of Egypt (1164-1169)

The Strategy of Saladin 1 

The Takeover of Egypt (1164-1169)

  

Introduction

Yusuf ibn Ayyub: also known as Salah ad-Din or Saladin, meaning ‘Righteous of the Faith’. To Muslims, he was the Sultan who reclaimed their Holy City of Jerusalem from Christian European Crusaders. To those same Crusaders, he became a symbol of generosity and chivalrous rulership. Beyond them, his career was also one of the more dramatic in the medieval Middle East, rising from obscurity to ruler of Egypt and Syria, and founding a dynasty that would last for a hundred years.

Welcome to Strategy Stuff, and this is the story of how Saladin became the greatest prince in an age of great princes.

Background: Nur ad-Din

Saladin first appeared in history in the early 1160s. By that time, the Crusaders had already been in the Levant for over 60 years: combined, the Crusader states of Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem stretched down the entire Mediterranean coastline, their minority rule anchored by formidable castles, defended by the well-financed Military Orders, and supplied by the various Italian navies.

Above all, Crusader rule was sustained through the disunity of the Muslims who surrounded them. The split between the Shiite Arabs of Fatimid Egypt and the Sunni Turks of nominally-Abbasid Syria, which was responsible for the success of the First Crusade, was still going strong at this time. On top of this, both regions suffered from internal infighting that prevented any focus on external affairs.

Syria, in particular, had long been a land of competing warlords. In the 1130s, the Turkic emir Zengi finally united Northern Syria and Northern Iraq under one banner: using their combined forces, he practically extinguished the Crusader state of Edessa. But upon his assassination in 1146, his realm was split between his sons, and the region fell back into disunity.

But this time, any Crusader respite from Zengi’s death would be short-lived. A new cultural and religious atmosphere was taking root within the Syrian cities, spurred on by decades of conflict and Christian rule over Jerusalem. Muslim clerics were now preaching Holy War against the infidel, and were willing to transfer their support – and the support of their flock – to any ruler who dedicated himself to it.

Zengi’s second son, Nur ad-Din, recognized and acted on this opportunity, fashioning himself as a pious ruler and heir to his father’s anti-Crusader legacy. He established a simple and austere court, funded only by taxes that were religiously allowed. He promoted Sunni Islam within the realm, subsidizing its imams and institutions while driving away those of other creeds. And finally, he promised to wage Holy War on behalf of the Sunni Abbasids: not just against the Crusaders, but also against the Shiite Fatimids of Egypt, and the Muslims who allied with them.

These initiatives greatly accelerated Nur ad-Din’s expansion across Syria. Rival Muslims couldn’t face him without being smeared as a ‘Crusader ally’, which came with the grave risk of urban riots or even wholesale defection. Instead, they were forced to become the vassals of Nur ad-Din, who used their forces to first beat back the Second Crusade and then conquer half of Antioch soon after. These achievements, in turn, boosted Nur ad-Din’s religious credentials, and granted him the policy freedom needed to stabilize his new conquests, with the clergy explaining away his many deals with the Crusaders as being incremental steps towards the final recovery of Jerusalem.

By the early 1160s, Nur ad-Din was master of most of Syria, with his realm nearly enveloping the Crusader Levant. Despite this, the resources of Syria alone were not enough to overcome the Crusaders’ advantages, and in any case, Nur ad-Din also had other regional rivals to worry about: the Turkish Sultanate of Rum, and a re-emerging Byzantine Empire. Under these circumstances, Nur ad-Din had to be satisfied with piecemeal strikes against the Crusaders, alternating them with periods of truce where he could focus on other fronts instead.

This was a strategic stalemate. But then came a golden opportunity, in the form of a political refugee from Egypt.

 

Fatimid Egypt’s Decline and Shirkuh’s First Expedition, 1164

Egypt had always been a land of plenty, and it had often used its wealth to conquer both the Levant and Syria. By the 1150s, however, Egypt could no longer exert power beyond its borders. While the ruling Fatimid Caliphate employed a large bureaucracy to manage Egypt’s resources, by the 1130s their control over the government had been usurped by their Viziers. These Viziers, in turn, were soon challenged by provincial governors in charge of the country’s trade ports, leading to an endless cycle of civil war and usurpation.

In 1163, the latest cycle of this political instability played out, as the Vizier Shawar was overthrown by his lieutenant Dirgham. Unlike his predecessors, Shawar survived the coup and fled Egypt, eventually ending up in Nur ad-Din’s court at Damascus. There, for the first time since the start of Egypt’s instability, Shawar asked for foreign help in recovering the Vizierate, promising to become a vassal of Nur ad-Din and to pay him a third of Egypt’s revenues as tribute.

The impact of Egyptian tribute would, of course, greatly enhance Nur ad-Din’s capabilities. But the risks of an Egyptian expedition were also high. Any force sent there would not only be facing the large Egyptian army in unfamiliar territory, they would also have to slip past several fortresses owned by Jerusalem on the way, making reinforcement and retreat difficult. And with regional foes poised to pounce upon any failure, Nur ad-Din was hardly going to gamble much on Shawar’s proposal. What he could do was dispatch a small elite force, which at best might provide a decisive edge for Shawar, and at worst return with some intelligence at relatively little cost.

To lead this distant expedition, Nur ad-Din needed a general he trusted, and for that, there was nobody else but Shirkuh, a Kurdish general who had served him since the beginning of his reign. But Shirkuh was a military man, and winning control of Egypt would require diplomacy as well as arms. Shirkuh’s brother Ayyub was the logical choice, having negotiated Nur ad-Din’s takeover of Damascus, but he was old. So the role fell to Ayyub’s son Yusuf – later known as Saladin – who had experience governing Damascus' population.

 

Shirkuh and Saladin were allowed to recruit a small band of Turkic and Kurdish cavalrymen, and in spring 1164, they set out towards Egypt with Shawar, bypassing Jerusalem’s fortresses and oasis-hopping across the Sinai. Upon hearing the news, Dirgham sent out Egypt’s infantry-heavy army to intercept, but they proved no match for the Syrian cavalry, and were defeated on the edge of the Nile Delta at the fortress of Bilbeis. There Shirkuh left Saladin with a garrison, while he proceeded with Shawar to the capital, Cairo, where Dirgham launched a last-ditch attack and was killed. So with limited resistance, Syrian cavalry had successfully re-installed Shawar back onto the Vizierate.

Shawar’s gratitude lasted less than a month. He had not returned to power just to be ruled by Syrians, so now he made a new proposal, one where Shirkuh would be paid for his work and then leave. Unsurprisingly, Shirkuh rejected this, so Shawar turned to a plan that the late Dirgham had been working on. Egyptian envoys were sent to King Amalric of Jerusalem, promising to pay him tribute if he would lead an army to Egypt and eject the Syrians.

The perils of letting Nur ad-Din seize the resources of Egypt were obvious enough to the Crusaders, and so in July, Amalric set out on the coastal road from Jerusalem to Egypt. Recognizing that his small Syrian force was about to be overwhelmed, Shirkuh fell back to rejoin Saladin at Bilbeis, followed by Amalric and Shawar who besieged the fortress. After three months, all sides saw that there was no profit in continuing the fight, so Shirkuh accepted Shawar’s new payment and everybody went home.

Saladin’s first campaign had ended rather ingloriously, though not before first achieving outsize success. Most importantly, the campaign had revealed the full weakness of the Fatimid state: it couldn’t resist the Syrian cavalry, and probably not the Crusaders either. By voluntarily inviting in foreign intervention, Shawar had set in motion a new phase of instability that he would find difficult to stop.

 

Shirkuh’s Second Expedition, 1167

Shirkuh returned to Syria not only with a greater appreciation of Egypt’s weakness, but also of Egypt’s wealth - which, if he could control it, would make him one of the richest people in the world. On the other hand, Nur ad-Din had obtained a greater appreciation of the difficulties of controlling wealthy Egypt from embattled Syria. It wouldn’t be easy to get him to authorize another expedition again.

Shirkuh did this by invoking the religious basis for Nur ad-Din’s rule. As mentioned, a Holy Warrior had to fight heretics as well as infidels, so Shirkuh wrote to the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad, pointing out that this was a golden opportunity to end the Fatimid Caliphate and bring Egypt back to Sunni Islam. The Abbasid Caliph reminded Nur ad-Din of his religious obligations, and accordingly Shirkuh and Saladin were authorized to outfit another expedition.

Shirkuh’s preparations were detected early. By the time he left for Egypt in January 1167, Jerusalem had already dispatched another royal army to rescue Shawar. Not wishing to fight this army head-on and perhaps recognizing the longstanding tensions between Cairo and the provinces, Shirkuh decided to try and instigate a rebellion against Shawar’s government.

For months, Syrians and Crusaders faced off across the Nile as Shirkuh tried to bring the local provincials and Bedouin to his side. Eventually, King Amalric bridged the river and the Syrians were forced to leave, though not before bloodying the Crusaders in a cavalry clash. Shirkuh now focused on Egypt’s main Mediterranean seaport, Alexandria, a longtime rival of Cairo as well as a bastion for the Sunni faith. The city opened its gates to him in May, and Saladin was again put in charge with orders to resist the inevitable siege.

For the next three months, Shirkuh tried fruitlessly to raise the banner of revolt in southern and northern Egypt, while Saladin tried to govern Alexandria as it suffered under a joint blockade by the forces of Shawar, Jerusalem, and the Italian Republic of Pisa. The experience left a bad taste in Saladin’s mouth, and at times the Syrians seemed to be more like the prisoners of the unruly Alexandrians. So when Shawar and Shirkuh finally struck another deal in August to have everybody evacuate Egypt, Saladin was only too happy to oblige.

Saladin fully expected – and wanted – this failed Second Expedition to be the end of his time with Egypt. Shawar’s government had the support of Jerusalem, and their combined force would surely outmatch whatever Shirkuh was allowed to bring on his expedition. Nur ad-Din’s commitment to Holy War made him the most dangerous threat to both Crusader and Fatimid alike, and so long as that situation held, the Syrians could have no place in Egypt.

 

Crusader Invasion of Egypt and Shirkuh’s 3^rd Expedition, 1168-9

Luckily for Saladin’s future career, the international situation was rapidly changing, driven by events far beyond Egypt and possibly already in motion even before Shirkuh’s First Expedition.

The main driver for this change was the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos: by 1160, he had decided to oppose the other Empire in Europe, the Holy Roman Empire of Friedrich ‘Barbarossa’. To this end, he aligned himself with many Christian Mediterranean states, including the Pope, Sicily, and the Crusader states. And while the focus of this diplomacy was to counter Friedrich’s expansion in Italy, it also offered opportunities to mutually support Christian expansion into the Muslim Middle East.

Soon after ejecting Shirkuh’s Second Expedition from Egypt, King Amalric decided to put his Byzantine alliance to the test. Like Nur ad-Din, the Crusaders clearly would gain much from the conquest of Egypt, but they had always been constrained by their scarce resources and the need to defend against Syria. Now, the King sent an embassy to Emperor Manuel, asking for Byzantine forces to help conquer Egypt.

But under Jerusalem’s feudal system, the King was not the only one with a say in strategy. He needed the cooperation of his lords and Military Orders as well, if only to obtain their forces for the proposed attack. And they were not happy about the appeal to Emperor Manuel, whose influence might well displace their own at court. Of the two Military Orders, only the Knights Hospitaller joined the expedition, while the High Court of the lords forced the King to adopt an alternative strategy: attack Egypt immediately, without waiting for the Emperor’s response.

So on October 1168, King Amalric’s army assembled and rapidly marched towards the Nile Delta, seizing the fortress of Bilbeis as Shirkuh had done four years ago. The Crusaders might have hoped to take Cairo by storm, but when they got there, they found that Shawar had already devastated the outskirts to deny war materiel to the invaders. The Vizier was still willing to pay the Crusaders to leave, however; lacking any better options, Amalric agreed to give Shawar time to collect the tribute.

Instead, Shawar did what he did best. He sent an urgent appeal to Damascus, asking Nur ad-Din to defend Egypt from the Crusaders. He again offered a third of Egypt’s revenues as tribute, and promised this time to let Shirkuh permanently stay in the country. Even accounting for Shawar’s unreliable character, it was clearly in Nur ad-Din’s interest to stop the Crusader takeover. So he quickly topped up Shirkuh’s expedition with some cavalry of his own, and sent them all to Shawar’s aid.

Shirkuh and Saladin arrived just in time to see the army of Jerusalem withdrawing before them, King Amalric having abandoned even the demand for Egypt to pay tribute. On January 1169, Shirkuh entered Cairo, and soon found an excuse to kill the duplicitous Shawar. Shirkuh now became the new Vizier, but he died shortly thereafter. As his closest relative in Egypt and with a fair bit of experience under his belt, Saladin was chosen by the Syrian cavalry to be their new leader. Still, the choice was not unanimous, and many dissenters decided to return home to Nur ad-Din instead.

The Fatimid Caliph now approved Saladin as the new Vizier, making him the 5^th person to hold the position within the past 6 years. One might have considered this promotion more of a curse than a blessing: not only was Saladin now the focus of the many plots festering within the Egyptian bureaucracy, he also had to tread a fine line between the demands of his Syrian master, the Sunni Holy Warrior Nur ad-Din, and the demands of the Shiite Fatimid Caliph, under whose authority he was Vizier. Beyond that, King Amalric might have withdrawn to Jerusalem empty-handed, but he did so in the knowledge that he would likely return to Egypt soon, and this time with a Byzantine fleet in support.

The next few years would be treacherous waters indeed, and to survive them, Saladin would need not just all of his skill, but perhaps all of his luck as well.

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The Chinese Communist Revolution I. Chinese Nationalism & Soviet Communism | Protest & Revolution 5

 

Strategy of Protest and Revolution 5

Mao Zedong & The Chinese Communist Revolution (1921-45)

Part I: Chinese Nationalism & Soviet Communism

 

Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is the 5^th entry in ‘The Strategy of Protest and Revolution’, where we examine how historical revolutionary and protest movements achieved success. In this series, we’ll focus on 3 key questions:

                 - How did activists turn public discontent into a coordinated movement?

                - What did successful movements do to achieve their goals? And

                - How have successful movement strategies changed over time?

 In this 6-part entry, we’ll explore the revolutionary history of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP from 1921 to 45, with a particular focus on the experiences of its eventual leader, Mao Zedong. Here in Part I, we’ll first do a brief introduction to social movement strategy, before diving deeply into the CCP’s rather-complex ideology combining Chinese nationalism with Soviet Communism.

 

1. Theory: ‘Ideological Mobilization’

First, let’s review what a social movement does. A ‘social movement’ seeks to harness the collective power of ordinary people to impose societal change. However, in this, it often faces resistance from an ‘establishment’ that represents existing interests, and can call on powerful institutions such as the state to defend those interests.

To counter establishment power, movements must generate power of their own, which they do through 2 primary ways: First, by raising ‘Issues’ that encourage the public to participate in the movement; and Second, by setting up ‘Organizations’ that convert participation into power. With sufficient power, a movement can either overpower the establishment or force it to negotiate, leading to victory and the desired societal change.

From this, we can identify 3 ‘Grand Strategies’ that serve as general templates for social movement success. First, there is the ‘Spontaneous Uprising’, which relies on Issues to generate power. Here, a movement identifies a popular Issue that drives the public to participate en masse, aiming to use sheer numbers to overpower the establishment. This approach is relatively straightforward, especially when anti-establishment sentiment is high; however, it also forces the movement to shift towards mainstream public opinion in order to succeed. This makes Spontaneous Uprisings less useful for radical movements whose Issues can generally only expect to have minority appeal, like Communism.

This brings us to the Second approach: ‘Mass Agitation’, which combines both Issues and Organizations to generate power. Usually, it begins with an Issue that draws some public participation, but not enough to overpower the establishment. If this was a Spontaneous Uprising, the movement would be out of luck here, but under a Mass Agitation, the movement now aims to build Organizations to amplify the power of its existing participation beyond what is normal.

For instance, under normal circumstances, the average participant will not sacrifice very much for a cause, which greatly limits the power that they can generate for the movement. But if the movement establishes Propaganda Organizations, it can manipulate these circumstances to either bring in more participants than normal, or encourage the average participant to sacrifice more than normal. Both result in the Mass Agitation, despite having fewer participants than a Spontaneous Uprising, to nevertheless generate the same amount of power required for success.

Mass Agitation is an appealing approach for Communist movements, because it offers a pathway to victory without having to compromise their ideological principles for the sake of public support. The power of this approach was demonstrated by Lenin and his Communist Party during the 1917 Russian Revolutions: initially, their radical Issue was not popular even amongst their core demographic of urban workers, but rather than pivot towards the mainstream, Lenin instead formed a ‘Vanguard Party’ Organization to manipulate the political environment, first through propaganda, then more effectively, through stoking societal chaos to heighten anti-establishment sentiment. Within months, not only were workers and solders flocking to the Communists, they were also much more willing to make huge sacrifices for the sake of Communist victory. This eventually let Lenin coup the Russian establishment and establish the world’s first Communist state, cementing Mass Agitation as the default approach for Communist movements around the world.

Third and finally, there is the grand strategy known as ‘Ideological Mobilization’, which relies on Organizations rather than Issues to generate power. This means that, rather than depending on participants to voluntarily sacrifice for them, Ideological Mobilizations instead construct an Organizational framework to involuntarily compel people to work for them, regardless of what said people believe.

An example would be hired work for an NGO, where the employee, unlike a pure volunteer, is not free to vary their output based on their passion or even approval of the cause. Instead, an Organizational framework in the form of an employee contract compels them to produce a set amount of work, with wage incentives and penalty disincentives as enforcement mechanisms. The same dynamics can also be seen with soldiers in armies and even people under governments, where laws, payments, and legitimacies are used to compel most individuals to act productively, regardless of regime popularit

With a strong enough Organizational framework, Ideological Mobilizations can overcome almost every self-limitation that normally limits the amount of power an individual will generate for a movement, allowing for some of the most self-sacrificial, complex, long-term and therefore powerful actions that humanity is capable of. At the extreme, such movements essentially become mini-armies or mini-states, rivalling the establishment-state in their ability to utilize, mobilize and develop resources for political competition.

Of course, such Organizational frameworks require enormous resources to establish and sustain, which is the main limitation that prevents most Ideological Mobilizations from reaching full potential. This is where the ‘Ideological’ part can come into play: while such movements don’t need participants to believe in the Issue, such belief can increase their willingness to voluntarily sacrifice for the cause and thereby reduce the need for Organizational compulsion. This may explain why many Ideological Mobilizations have insisted on ideological conformity, such as by promoting ‘official doctrines’ to distinguish true loyalists from closet dissenters, or by arranging demonstrations of enthusiasm that mimic the social pressures of a Spontaneous Uprising. Unlike the latter, however, loyalty in an Ideological Mobilization is rarely to the Issue, but instead to the Organization, with participants constantly shifting their beliefs as they seek to align themselves with movement policy.

Looking to the future, Ideological Mobilization will likely continue growing in importance as a social movement ‘Grand Strategy’, as technological progress enhances the effectiveness of Organizational compulsion. At a dystopian extreme, Organizations may eventually gain so much control over the public that the very idea of a ‘social movement’, fueled by the organic desires of ordinary people, becomes meaningless, with every collective thought or action being a subliminal compulsion originating from what would be the ultimate Ideological Mobilization.

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Way back in this series’ first video, I named the Chinese Communist Revolution as the prime example of Ideological Mobilization. But this label comes with a big caveat: the Chinese Communist Party did not intend to do things this way. Rather, like most Communist movements of its time, it initially embraced Mass Agitation, and arguably only fully adopted Ideological Mobilization in the 1940s, over two decades after it began revolutionary activity.

The transition was far from smooth. Marked by repeated bouts of factional strife, policy chaos, external pressures, and complete collapse, the CCP painfully learnt to depend less on mass Issue enthusiasm and more on Organizational control, becoming almost the inverse of what it set out to be. In the process, the Party developed from being essentially a political club into a warlord coalition and finally a fully-fledged state, exercising a level of political control far ahead of anyone else in China at the time. It was this institutional edge that fueled the ultimate Communist triumph during the revolutionary Civil War of 1946 to 49, the details of which are beyond the scope of this video.

This transformation wasn’t preordained, and for a long time, it wasn’t even wanted. Much of it can be attributed to the unique insight of eventual leader Mao Zedong, with the rest being the outcome of a brutal Darwinian process of adapt-or-die. Throughout this grueling process, the Party found itself battling not just external enemies, but all too often, internal dissent as well: such anarchy reflects not only the turmoil of early 20^th Century China, but also the ambiguities that lay at the heart of early Chinese Communism. These will be the subject of the following 3 chapters.

 

2. Issue A: Chinese Nationalism

One of the characteristics of ideology in the so-called ‘Third World’ is that it is almost inherently multidimensional. On the one hand, there is the familiar left-right political spectrum; but there also exists another spectrum of policies, often lumped together under the term ‘nationalism’. This rather crude label encompasses a whole slew of ideas aimed at answering a question that is unique to underdeveloped societies: how should they restructure – politically, culturally, or otherwise – to quote-unquote ‘catch up’ to the developed world?

For many Third World movements, what this video will call the ‘Nationalist Question’ eclipses left-right politics in significance, not just because of the urgent need for self-defense, but also out of a desire to reclaim the self-respect many indigenous peoples felt they had lost due to quote-unquote ‘falling behind’. Early 20^th Century China was no exception, with most of its social movements focused on ‘catching up’ to the industrial West and ending the quote-unquote ‘humiliation’ it suffered throughout the 19^th Century. If we go by this series’ definition of a social movement Issue, which is: a societal problem paired up with a proposed solution, then this Chinese ‘Nationalist Question’ was the core problem every movement had to have a solution for.

Let’s examine the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ in more detail. Starting in the late 19^th Century, the imperial Chinese state began to spiral into administrative decay, as local elites finally re-accumulated enough power to block the central government from fully accessing local resources. This weakened the central government’s ability to manage society adequately, resulting in rampant internal and external crises that encouraged local elites to further hoard resources and even start governing themselves. By the early 20^th Century, most of Southern and Eastern China had become de facto independent, with elites at every level acting autonomously without regard for any higher authority.

By itself, this was a standard tale of feudal collapse, common in both Chinese and global history. But this cycle would be overshadowed by the unprecedented intrusion of Western imperialism, whose industrial scale and reach reversed China’s historical tendency to assimilate its conquerors. Instead, China was now forced to conform to Western patterns, greatly disrupting all aspects of traditional life and sparking fears of permanent marginalization. Leaders and intellectuals of course worried about defeat and colonization, but peasants also resented the economic changes brought by Western technology and globalization. Even the Westernized urban merchant and industrial classes saw value in resisting further imperialism, if only out of a desire to exclude foreign competitors. Taken together, this meant that a broad and influential segment of Chinese society saw resolving their ‘Nationalist Question’ as a high priority, forming a potent base for any movement who promised to address this concern.

Spurred by this incentive, many movements arose proposing solutions to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’, with a few even gaining significant power. But all of them would eventually fall afoul of two key obstacles.

The first was objective reality. As the previous historical narrative showed, China’s weakness was less the result of bad policy as it was an unprecedented challenge of world-historical proportions, which the country’s feudal system was ill-equipped to solve. As such, the ‘Nationalist Question’ was hardly going to be addressed through superficial tweaks to traditional politics, but that was exactly what many movements tried to do. One of the earlier attempts, for example, sought merely to redirect central government funds towards a modernization program: and while this solution scored some successes, it ignored the continued drain of power towards local elites, which ultimately left the government too resource-starved to avoid defeat to Japan in the 1^st Sino-Japanese War.

Another similarly-superficial solution was proposed by the liberal-nationalist Sun Yat-Sen, whose movement overthrew the imperial state in favor of a parliamentary ‘Republic of China’. Sun expected that this new system would now have the representative legitimacy to mobilize China for development; but again, without addressing the problem of increasing local autonomy, regime change only let local elites advance their own power, which quickly plunged the newborn Republic into an extensive anarchy known as the ‘Warlord Era’.

The failures of these superficial solutions paved the way for more radical proposals. A key influence in this regard would be the May Fourth Movement, which blamed China’s weakness on its feudalistic elite, and demanded the dismantling of the traditional political, economic and cultural systems that propped it up. As the May Fourth activists saw it, a more egalitarian society would unleash the potential of China’s masses and allow them to contribute meaningfully to societal modernization.

While the May Fourth activists correctly saw the need for fundamental social reform, their attempts to implement it ran straight into the second obstacle within the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’. Predictably, the existing feudalistic elites rejected any blame for the state of the country, emphasizing their role in preserving Chinese society as well as Chinese civilization. Still, with rural landlords – the most common subclass of elite – accounting for 5% of China’s population at best, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to form a mass movement capable of overpowering them.

That was what Sun Yat-Sen, by now a minor warlord himself, tried to do. Forming a new movement in the Chinese Nationalist Party – better known as the Kuomintang or KMT – Sun integrated May Fourth egalitarianism into his new solution to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’, with one of his core proposals being the promotion of peasant rights through restricting landlord power. In doing so, Sun aimed to swing the 90% of Chinese who were peasants at the time behind the KMT, thereby securing an ironclad mandate to lead the country. That was the plan, anyway: in reality, the KMT’s authority barely extended beyond the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou.

Why didn’t Sun’s egalitarian Issue translate into greater power? The reason lay in the organizational realities of Chinese politics, where centuries of elite consolidation, accelerated by the recent collapse of central authority, had given rural landlords a complete monopoly over local political power. Not only did they collectively control all the political institutions that disincentivized disobedience – like formal government rule, informal clan leadership, and physical militia violence – they also controlled all the socioeconomic resources that incentivized obedience – like access to farmland, debt capital, and traditional legitimacy. This meant that – just like in an Ideologically-Mobilized movement – rural landlords had an incentive framework in place to compel the peasants to follow their political lead, no matter what the latter actually believed. And the landlords did not want Sun Yat-Sen restricting their power.

Combined, the two obstacles within the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ – both the need for comprehensive social reform, and the sheer political impossibility of actually achieving it – made the Question almost unsolvable: politically viable solutions were objectively ineffective, while objectively effective solutions were politically unviable. Faced with this dilemma, most Chinese activists – most of whom were elites themselves – could only hope that the country would somehow muddle its way out of this Third World trap, with some even hopefully suggesting that the country’s anarchy might eventually evolve into the liberal federalism of the United States!

But for a select few, the answer to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ would come from a newer ideology and a newer state: the Leninist Communism of what would become the Soviet Union.

 

3. Issue B: Soviet Communism

In 1920, the soon-to-be Soviet Union, led by Lenin, was also facing a major problem, albeit one that was strategic in nature. Literally besieged on all sides by hostile Western powers – most notably chief boogeymen Britain and Japan – the Soviets urgently searched for allies to relieve its pressure. Initially, great hope had been placed on the leftist uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe, but after those fizzled out, Lenin was forced to look further afield. That led him to Asia, and naturally, to China.

While China lacked military strength and even full sovereignty, an alliance with it offered clear benefits to the Soviets. For starters, if Britain and Japan were to lose access to China’s lucrative market, their ability to threaten the Soviets would be much reduced. Moreover, access to Chinese territory would greatly strengthen the defensibility of the vulnerable Soviet Far East.

As such, Lenin eagerly began diplomatic overtures with the key Chinese warlords, particularly with the revolutionary movement of… Sun Yat-Sen’s KMT. But this outreach posed an ideological dilemma, one that doubtlessly irritated the ideologically-purist Lenin: while Sun Yat-Sen did champion egalitarianism, neither he nor the KMT identified as Communists or even Marxists, so how could the Soviets, as leaders of global Communist revolution, partner with them?

Lenin answered this by returning to his pre-Russian Revolution thought, specifically the idea of the ‘worker-peasant alliance’. This concept had been used to justify fighting for Communism in Tsarist Russia, where only 2% of the population were in the ideological demographic of proletarian factory workers; China was even less favorable, with only 0.5% of its population being proletariat. While Lenin admitted that Communism could not immediately take root within such underdeveloped societies, he nevertheless argued that there was still a role for Communists to play in these places, namely by promoting the socio-economic-political conditions that would lead to the eventual proletarian triumph.

Lenin’s thinking was derived from Marx’s assertion that socioeconomic development is the driver of political and ideological change. In extremely simplified terms, as society advances from primitive agriculture to mercantile capitalism and finally mass industrialization, its politico-ideological systems will also transition from feudal warlordism to bourgeois liberal-nationalism and finally proletarian Communism.

And as usual, rather than waiting for this process to evolve naturally, Lenin believed that Communists could and should artificially hasten it, which in an agrarian society like China meant tearing down the institutions of feudal warlordism and replacing them with a liberal-nationalist regime that would push the economy towards capitalism. Chief amongst the feudal institutions to be destroyed was the traditional rural system headed by the landlords; and in the fight against them, the Communists’ natural allies would not only be the liberal-nationalists, but also the peasants who were the actual victims of landlord abuse.

Lenin condensed all this into a strategic template for Communist revolution in China and other similarly-underdeveloped societies. First, the Communists would ally with the liberal-nationalists – represented in 1920s China by the KMT – by promoting a joint Issue based around their shared values of anti-feudalism, anti-warlordism, and anti-imperialism. Then, this ‘United Front’ or UF would use Leninist Mass Agitation to rally their followers – namely the urban workers and bourgeoisie – to capture the cities and establish their first foothold on power. Finally, the UF would mobilize urban resources to extend the revolution into the countryside, implementing comprehensive social reform and freeing the peasants from the organizational grip of the landlords. The end-result of all this would not only see China ruled by a liberal-nationalist regime ready to push society into capitalism, industrialization and inevitably Communism, but it would also see Communists obtain key positions and influence within said regime, which they could eventually use to oust or convert their former allies and thereby achieve the final victory.

Lenin’s revolutionary template, with its proposals for a ‘worker-peasant alliance’ and a ‘United Front’ between Communism and liberal-nationalism, was an ingeniously potent solution to the ‘Nationalist Questions’ faced by China and others across the Third World. Not only did it provide a practical roadmap for bringing society out from feudalism and into industrial modernity, its apparent success in the Soviet Union also reinforced its credibility.

At the same time, Lenin’s ability to interpret Communism freely and authoritatively was also a latent concern for these Third World movements. Remember that Lenin’s original purpose in formulating the Communist revolutionary template was not to perfect the ideology, but instead to justify an alliance with the KMT that appeared to put Soviet interests before the global Communist cause. But if Communism could be so re-interpreted to always align with the Soviet interest, then could any Third World Communist movement truly maintain its nationalist integrity? What would happen if the Soviets interpreted Communism in a way that undermined national interests?

 

4. Issue A+B: Chinese Nationalism & Soviet Communism

Finally, we turn to the actual Chinese Communist Party, founded in mid-1921 in Shanghai, China’s largest metropolis. And while a representative from the Soviet-dominated Communist International or Comintern did oversee its creation, it would be wrong to claim that the Party was simply a product of Soviet strategy that represented no-one in China. Rather, like the KMT and many other movements before it, the CCP emerged as yet another response to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ of becoming a modern society.

This can be seen in the inspiration behind the CCP’s creation, which was not actually the 1917 Russian Revolution, but instead the Soviet Union’s success in repelling the subsequent Western intervention. In particular, the withdrawal of British and Japanese forces from Soviet territory was a great encouragement to the Chinese Communists, who also viewed these countries as their chief imperialist boogeymen. So it was only natural to copy what the Soviets were doing, and from this arose what this video will term the CCP’s ‘Dual Issue’, which it would maintain throughout the revolutionary period. The concept was superficially simple: the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’ would only be solved through adopting Soviet Communism.

Despite its appeal, this Issue was neither immediately nor uncritically adopted by the CCP, with a few members briefly exploring German socialism as a less-authoritarian alternative. And even after choosing Soviet Communism, the CCP initially refused to follow Lenin’s revolutionary template, instead opposing all non-proletarians in China from the rural landlords to the KMT and the Western imperial powers: in fact, the first year of the CCP was spent arguing with the Comintern over this point, until the Soviets finally lost patience, reminded the Party of its ideological leadership, and just ordered the Communists to fall in line!

This early friction was a harbinger of a deeper conflict that we’ve already hinted at: should Soviet Communism ever be re-interpreted in a way that clashed with Chinese nationalism, which ideology would the Party choose? This was hardly a theoretical question: after all, Imperial Russia had been a major exploiter of China, the fruits of which were still held by the Soviets in Outer Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang and more. But even more important was the fundamental clash between the CCP’s self-understanding as the one true hope for China, and Soviet strategic priorities which often pushed the Party to support the established KMT instead, as seen in Lenin’s revolutionary template. The conflict would be greatly aggravated by the Soviets’ frequent re-interpreting of Communism as a way of demanding sacrifices from the CCP, leading to a growing sense amongst Party leaders that, for all the talk about proletarian brotherhood, the Soviets did not actually want them to succeed, perhaps rightly fearing that a Communist China would eventually become a geopolitical rival to themselves.

This was the danger that over-reliance on Soviet Communism posed to the CCP; at the same time, over-reliance on Chinese nationalism also came with its own challenges. For while the CCP saw Soviet Communism as the solution to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’, the vast majority of Chinese nationalists – who were mostly local elites and landlords – did not see things that way. And while most would become implacable foes of Communism, a few, especially in areas where the CCP had monopolized power, were willing to join the Party as China’s best hope for the moment. It was unrealistic to expect the CCP to reject these landlord activists, whose resources could greatly relieve what was oftentimes a desperately-poor movement; but as a result, the CCP often became Communist in name only, with many of its members not even knowing what Communism was!

Thanks to this lack of ideological connection, many of these landlord cadres, even as they worked under the CCP, simply continued to implement their preferred solutions to the ‘Chinese Nationalist Question’, which, given their class interest, typically meant superficial changes in governance that did not reform away their own power or privilege. And while the CCP would repeatedly condemn such thinking, the numerical and especially organizational dominance of these landlord cadres meant that they could often just ignore what Party leadership wanted. Indeed, occasionally a few cadres would even try to re-interpret Chinese nationalism in an attempt to seize ideological control of the Party: for example, by demanding an end to Communist social reform, on the grounds that it would cause chaos in China!

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From the above examples, we can start to see how the CCP’s seemingly-straightforward plan for China to adopt Soviet Communism could quickly devolve into a crippling ideological tug-of-war that would consume it for over 2 decades. The problem was not merely that Soviet Communism and Chinese nationalism could clash, but equally importantly, that both ideologies could be manipulated in ways that compelled the Chinese Communists to act against their own interests. By reinterpreting Communism, the Soviets could force the Party to sacrifice itself for their benefit; by reinterpreting Chinese nationalism, landlord cadres could prevent the Party from ever implementing social change. Neither outcome would leave the CCP in any condition to contest the leadership of China, especially against the KMT, whose liberal-turned-conservative nationalism, while increasingly ineffective over time, was a natural establishment fit for the Chinese elite.

To avoid succumbing to ideological control, the CCP needed to exercise ideological control itself, creating its own ‘official interpretations’ of Communism and Chinese nationalism and imposing them on Party cadres. But if the solution was that easy, the Party would not have spent 2 decades trying to solve it. The key obstacle here would be the early CCP’s organizational weakness, which left the Party utterly dependent on – and vulnerable to – the organized power of both the Soviets and the local elites. Further compounding this was the extreme inexperience of its young, naively intellectual activists, who despite demonstrating competence in practical work, often failed to resist or even recognize ideological manipulation. This led to multiple instances of shocking political naivete, leading to the complete destruction of everything they had built up.

It is with this context in mind that Mao Zedong emerges as a transformative figure within CCP, Chinese and social movement history. But while his superior understanding of the organizational and especially ideological dimensions of revolution was critical to the Party’s ultimate triumph, Mao’s insight was neither fully developed from the start, nor could he have achieved success without the prior work done by supporters and opponents alike. Both were the results of a bloody yet extraordinary revolutionary saga, one that would unfold across some of the darkest chapters of modern East Asian history.

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Thanks for watching the video, and please like, subscribe and hit the bell button! If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. This is Part I of a 6-Part series; Part II will cover the CCP’s first few years as a revolutionary movement, culminating in the 1^st United Front.