Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

From Three Kingdoms to Korea: Plus Ca Change

Plus ca change, plus qui reste la meme.  The more things change, the more they stay the same. History does indeed repeat itself, because people by nature do not change.

I learned something yesterday that has always puzzled me about the Korean War. I have read in my Western-based history books that during the Korean War, the Chinese army (People’s Liberation Army, PLA) would send human wave attacks against UN (predominantly American) troops. They died in scores. On a purely body-count basis, the South was winning hands-down.

Why would the Chinese send human wave attacks like that? Why did they care so little about the lives of those soldiers?

I had long thought that this was simply the way the Chinese Communists were: the individual lives of commoners and soldiers were worth nothing. I still believe the Communist Party to be untrustworthy, but what I did not realize was that there was something much more calculating at work behind the way PLA troops were employed in Korea.

Mao Tse-Tung was an intelligent and capable man, but also cruel to a stark degree. Combine the two elements, and what he did makes absolute sense.

Let me first digress and tell you where this revelation came from. I was watching the movie Red Cliff (again) yesterday. It is a movie based, very loosely, on historical events and people from the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. In this movie, the antagonist Cao Cao is marching with his army of 100,000 men towards the protagonists’ position. One of the protagonists says to another, “Cao Cao has 100,000 men, but many of them are surrendered soldiers.  He cannot trust them.  He has only 30,000 whom he can trust.” One of my companions watching the movie told me something that his father had told him: “Mao Tse-Tung read and studied the history of the Three Kingdoms. When he took power of the country, he used what he learned.”

Thus, Mao found himself in the early 50′s with many troops surrendered and turned from the Kuomintang (KMT), the rival faction vying for power and control over China before, during, and following World War 2. These were troops he could not trust. They were, therefore, disposable.

The principle is thus: put your disposable troops up front to take the brunt of the casualties, and follow up with your loyal, quality troops. Thus, Mao sent waves of these troops whom he could not trust, and honestly would rather do without, on suicidal human wave attacks in Korea. They were cannon fodder in the truest sense.

It makes no sense what the PLA did with those attacks on a tactical military perspective. It also makes no sense from a purely ethical stance. However, it makes entire sense from the perspective of China’s internal politics, the dynamics of power, the character and inclinations of Mao, and the influence of China’s extensive recorded history.

What happened and what was true of men and armies in 200AD still held true in 1950 AD. Plus ca change, plus qui reste la meme.

There is great value in studying history, and I find myself increasingly interested in Chinese history. Not only is it because  I am Chinese by descent myself and yet know only what Western history books tell me of it, but also because I believe (a) there is  advantage to knowing lessons that many others in North America do not know, and (b) it is absolutely necessary in order to understand the adversary.