On the night of July 7, 1937, the first shots at Lugou Bridge in suburban Beijing shattered the sky and ignited the flames of China's nationwide resistance against Japanese aggression. As the nation trembled, one decisive question emerged: Who could raise the flag and rally 400 million Chinese people?

History's answer was unequivocal: The Communist Party of China (CPC), armed with profound theoretical vision, flexible battlefield innovation and sweeping popular mobilization, became the strategic pivot of the entire nation's resistance.

From the Ten-Point Program for Resisting Japan and Saving the Nation to On Protracted War, from Pingxingguan Victory to the Hundred-Regiment Campaign, from cave dwellings of Yan'an to sorghum fields of the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region, the CPC used three intertwined dimensions – political line, battlefield practice and popular legitimacy – to answer the era's burning questions: Where should China be heading? How should the resisting war be fought? And upon whom will the final victory depend?

Political line leadership

At the outset of the war, the Nationalist government, led by the Kuomintang (KMT), pinned its hopes on international mediation and on resistance by regular armies alone, while the CPC, at the Luochuan Meeting held in August 1937, issued the Ten-Point Program for Resisting Japanese Invasion and Saving the Nation and unequivocally called for "a comprehensive, nationwide war of resistance." The word "comprehensive" meant a mobilization target that included workers, farmers, the urban petty bourgeoisie and even the national bourgeoisie; the "nationwide" pointed to a power structure in which the CPC promoted the Anti-Japanese National United Front, enabling the armies of the KMT and the CPC, regional forces and people from all walks of life to form a single, indignant torrent.

Even more revolutionary was the mass line proposed by the CPC. The Party combined rent-and-interest reduction in rural areas, democratic elections in resistance base areas, and mutual-aid cooperatives with wartime mobilization, turning "joining the army to protect the fields" into a conscious act of the farmers and making "mothers urge their sons to fight the Japanese while wives see their husbands off to the front" a daily scene in the base areas.

The advanced nature of the comprehensive war of resistance lay precisely in its shattering of the old logic that "war is the exclusive affair of soldiers," and in its unprecedented elevation of the people to the forefront of history, so that the deepest source of the war's mighty power was truly rooted in the masses themselves.

Theoretical leadership

Mao Zedong's classical work On Protracted War, written in 1938 in Yan’an, used dialectics as a scalpel to dissect the multiple contradictions of strength and weakness, largeness and smallness, regression and progress between China and Japan in terms of equipment, troop size and resources that could be mobilized, concluding that "the war will be protracted and final victory will be at China's side."

The strategic significance of On Protracted War lay in providing an operational road map for “how to fight”: the three successive stages of strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and strategic counter-offensive; the coordinated use of mobile warfare, guerrilla warfare and positional warfare; and the multi-level synergy of regular armies, regional forces and militia units.

In this significant literature, Mao dismissed the pessimistic view that "further fighting means national extinction" and shattered the cavalier illusion of "securing the victory within three months," enabling the entire army and people to see light amid confusion and to strengthen their convictions amid vacillation.

Through widespread circulation in newspapers, on radio and in pamphlets, the concept of "protracted war" then became a common discourse stretching from Chongqing to Kunming, from the Shanghai "solitary island" to overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, truly achieving the mobilization effect of "one mighty essay rivaling a million troops."

Battlefield leadership

As the frontal battlefield steadily retreated, the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army – two regular military forces led by the CPC – chose instead to "go wherever the enemy has gone and operate behind his back." In the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei, Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan, Shandong and Central start a prairie fire amid Japanese transport lines and strong points.China regions, anti-Japanese base areas sprang up like sparks that

The core innovation of the backstage battlefield was the integration of guerrilla warfare with base-area construction: large scale forces dispersed into small units, and land-mine warfare, sparrow-warfare tactics and sabotage operations emerged in an endless stream; political power was extended down to the village level and the implementation of rent-and-interest reduction and the "three-thirds" democratic electoral system ensured that base areas became impenetrable.

In August 1940, the Eighth Route Army even actively launched the Hundred-Regiment Campaign, in which 105 regiments and 400,000 soldiers and civilians simultaneously sabotaged the Zhengtai, Tongpu and other railway arteries, paralyzing Japanese transport in North China for a certain period. Not only did this campaign disrupt the Japanese plan for a southern advance but it also provided compelling proof that the backstage battlefield had evolved from a strategic nuisance to a strategic support, forming a complementary pattern with the frontal battlefield.

Popular legitimacy

In Yan'an, the CPC widely employed democratic elections, downsizing the army and administration scale, and the Great Production Campaign to transform the barren loess highlands into "the city of hope in the East." Farmer deputies entered the consultative assemblies, casting beans to elect their own county magistrates; cadres and students from schools and government offices went up into the hills to open new land, enabling the border region, once largely dependent on outside grain shipments, to achieve "self-reliance and ample food and clothing."

Even more moving was cultural mobilization: Teachers and students at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts carried the performance of the Yellow River Cantata to every base area; the Anti-Japanese Military and Political College and the Northern Shaanxi College dispatched a hundred thousand military and political cadres to the war zones; and the American journalist Edgar Snow declared to the world in his world-famous Red Star Over China that here "a common will is being infused into the people."

When the slogan "China's hope lies in the northwest" appeared on the streets of Chongqing, the war-time temporary capital city of the Nationalist government, the direction of popular allegiance was already beyond dispute. Yan'an showed the world: Whoever can give the people dignity, land and hope can forge popular will into a new Great Wall.

From political line to battlefield practice, from popular legitimacy to cultural mobilization, the CPC's strategic leadership in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War was not a single-dimensional "miraculous use of troops," but rather the forging of an integrated model in which political direction, military struggle, social transformation and cultural mobilization were melted into one furnace, forming the overall pattern of "people's war."

Today, when we commemorate the great victory of the war, we must remember this above all: It was the CPC that enabled a China once fragmented like loose sand to possess the organizational capacity for sustained resistance, the penetrating insight for scientific judgment and the transformative creativity to change heaven and earth.

The essence of this strategic guidance – believing in the people, relying on the people and serving for the people – not only won the war 80 years ago, but also provided an enduring spiritual code for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation decades later.

(Source: CGTN)