Bowen Ying
This article comparatively studies Mao Zedong’s and Che Guevara’s guerrilla warfare theories from the dual perspectives of theoretical origin and historical context, focusing on communication philosophy, narrative ideological construc tion and the transnational dissemination of guerrilla thought. Both grounded their theories in anti-colonialism and anti-autocracy, but their theoretical developments diverged sharply. Mao’s guerrilla theory was rooted in China’s semi-colonial and semi-feudal social conditions. Forged through the Agrarian Revolutionary War, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the Liberation War, he dialectically integrated traditional Chinese military thought with Marxist-Leninist people’s war principles, formulating the ‘sixteen-character formula’ and the three-stage guerrilla warfare theory. His approach emphasized the dialectical unity of concentrating superior forces and the mass line as a mobilizational communication strategy. In contrast, Guevara’s ‘foco theory’ emerged from Latin America’s national liberation movements. Building on Mao’s theory and his Cuban Revolution experience, he advocated armed vanguard actions to proactively create revolutionary conditions. His theory merged Marxist class analysis with Latin American anti-imperialist sentiments, realizing the ideological translation and transnational circulation of Maoist guerrilla thought, but overemphasized subjective initiative and neglected the objective social foundations of revolution. This study shows that both made creative contributions to Marxist military theory as practical wisdom formed under distinct historical logics, with different theoretical reference value for contemporary anti-imperialist and anti-hegemonic struggles. It breaks through the limitations of existing doctrine-only comparative research and reveals the communicative mechanisms behind the transnational spread of revolutionary guerrilla thought.