Poems of Mao

28. Militia Women : Inscription on a Photograph (February 1961)

Militia Women

[a shih in seven-word regular, Chi Chueh]

[translated by Nancy Lin]

Fresh as breeze,

They march on with five-foot rifles,

Fair and brave in the first glitter of the sun

That wakes the parade ground.

China’s daughters

Aspire high these days:

They take to the uniform

Rather than robe and gown.

Notes [by Nancy Lin]

“In the masses of the people resides the most deep-seated source of fighting power.”

Such was Mao’s basic thought, which gave birth to his grand strategy in the war of resistance against Japan and which led him to declare in 1938 that militia is the basis of victory. In 1958 he called for a nation-wide institution of militia.

“Besides having a regular army, we must go in for militia forces in a big way, so that the imperialists in invading this nation shall be rendered incapable of budging an inch!”

The present poem Militia Women should be read in conjunction with Chairman Mao’s theory of People’s War, which had gained an added practical urgency by early 1961. For on top of intensified U.S. attempts at oceanic encirclement of China, Soviet Russia had followed up its unilateral cancellation of contracts and withdrawal of expert aids with a full dressed attack on the CPC at the Moscow Conference in November 1960. Women, “half the heaven” as Mao elsewhere called them, are destined to play their due role.

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