• India’s Mohandas Gandhi and China’s Mao Zedong successfully led two of the largest and most populous nations to independence in the late 1940s. Both drew much of their support from the peasant masses, among whom they both lived and worked, following very simple lifestyles, as their political power and influence grew. Gandhi’s and Mao’s political philosophies could not have been more different. Gandhi believed that active nonviolent disobedience to British rule was the only way Indians could break free of British rule and gain independence. He explained his views in the following excerpts from articles that he wrote for the journal Young India in 1921 and 1931. As shown in the second document from Mao’s Little Red Book, Mao took the exact opposite view. He believed that “power flows from the barrel of a gun” and that violence was the only means by which the Chinese masses could rid themselves of corrupt warlords, cruel landowners, imperialist occupiers, and ruling elites.

Mohandas Gandhi

“Complete civil disobedience is rebellion without the element of violence in it. An out-and-out resister simply ignores the authority of the State. He becomes an outlaw claiming to disregard every unmoral State law. Thus, for instance, he may refuse to pay taxes, he may refuse to recognize the authority in his daily intercourse. . . . In doing all this he never uses force and never resists force when it is used against him. In fact, he invites imprisonment and other uses of force against himself. This he does because and when he finds the bodily freedom he seemingly enjoys to be an intolerable burden. He argues to himself that a State allows personal freedom only in so far as the citizen submits to its regulations. Submission to the State law is the price a citizen pays for his personal liberty. Submission, therefore, to a State wholly or largely unjust is an immoral barter for liberty. . . .

A body of civil resisters is, therefore, like an army subject to all the discipline of a soldier. . . . And as a civil resistance army is or ought to be free from passion because free from the spirit of retaliation, it requires the fewest number of soldiers. Indeed, one perfect civil resister is enough to win the battle of Right against Wrong. [1921]

You might of course say that there can be no nonviolent rebellion and there has been none known to history. Well, it is my ambition to provide an instance, and it is my dream that my country may win its freedom through nonviolence. And, I would like to repeat to the world times without number, that I will not purchase my country’s freedom at the cost of nonviolence. My marriage to nonviolence is such an absolute thing that I would rather commit suicide than be deflected from my position. I have not mentioned truth in this connection, simply because truth cannot be expressed except by nonviolence. [1931]”

Mao Zedong

“War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain state, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes.

The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds good universally, for China and for all other countries.

According to the Marxist theory of the state, . . . whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war.” Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the laboring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed.”

Sources: Mahatma Gandhi, “Young India, November 10, 1921” and “Young India, November 12, 1931,” in All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Krishna Kripalani (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. 81, 135–136. Reprinted by permission of the Navajivan Trust; Mao Tsetung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), pp. 58, 61–63.

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