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The Protracted Game
    Keywords: Culture & History, Books & Publications

The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy by Scott A. Boorman, Oxford University Press 1969

This book uses Go strategies to explain those used by Mao Zedong.


From pages 5 and 6:

It is safe to assume that, historically, there has probably been considerable interaction between the strategy of wei-ch'i and the strategy used in Chinese warfare. If indeed wei-ch'i and Chinese Communist Strategy are products of the same strategic tradition, wei-ch'i may be more realistically used as an analogic model of that strategy than any purely theoretical structure generated by a Western social scientist.

...

A more direct and positive factor contributing to the potential value of wei-ch'i as a strategic decision model of Chinese Communist insurgent strategy is to found in the presence of significant comparisons between the strategy of the game and that of the revolution in the writings of Mao Tse-tung. In May 1938, in his important essay Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, Mao wrote:

Thus there are two forms of encirclement by the enemy forces and two forms of encirclement by our own--rather like the game of weichi. Campaigns and battles fought by the two sides resemble the capturing of each other's pieces, and the establishment of strongholds by the enemy and of guerrilla base areas by us resembles moves to dominate spaces on the board. It is in the matter of "dominating the spaces" that the great strategic role of guerrilla base areas in the rear of the enemy is revealed.



This is a copy of the living page "The Protracted Game" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.