Marc Opper's volume represents the latest exercise in the scholarly tradition of Alexander George, who first proposed and popularized the method of structured, focused comparison to study historical experience in ways that yield useful generic knowledge about important foreign policy issues and problems. In People's Wars in China, Malaya, and Vietnam, Opper uses the cases of the Chinese Communist Revolution (1927–49), the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), and the Vietnam War (1960–75) to identify and explain the factors that determine the outcome of people's wars.
On the question of why some insurgencies fail after a military defeat while other insurgents are able, ultimately, to triumph over the government, Opper convincingly argues that success in insurgencies depends on the size of the coalition that each side establishes during the conflict. When rebels create broad united fronts, they can survive even after battlefield setbacks because they enjoy the support of civilian populations, which will not turn their loyalty to the government. By contrast, when rebels fail to put together broad coalitions, they rely on coercion to secure popular support, which is not sustainable. As a result, where insurgents execute these strategies, military setbacks will translate into political defeats, leading to the collapse of the insurgency because of civilian defection to the government side.
Opper's discussion of the policies and performances of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War deepens and enriches our understanding of the origins, process, and results of that event. He effectively addresses the question of why the CCP's political institutions were able to survive despite that fact that it had adopted coercive measures against nonpoor peasant groups in its land reform program. According to Opper, the “KMT coalition was so narrow and its policies so far removed from the preferences of civilians in the countryside that even the CCP's radical program was more attractive to civilians than the KMT's” (p. 167).
In accounting for the British victory in the Malayan Emergency, Opper highlights the failure of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) to create a broad coalition and prevent civilian defection. He usefully reminds the reader that “the coalition established by the MCP was extremely narrow and did not include even a majority of the rural Chinese who should have been its natural allies. The MCP's political program for Malaya was almost entirely focused on urban areas and its leadership never took the concerns of the rural Chinese seriously” (p. 195).
Opper is persuasive in his explanation of the failure of the Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (GVN) and the United States in the Vietnam War—namely, they failed “to address the issues that animated the insurgency: a fundamentally exclusionary rural political economy in which a small group of rural elites used the power of the GVN state to dominate the Vietnamese peasantry” (p. 232).
Opper has set a well-defined research objective and employed an appropriate research strategy to achieve that objective. His cases are carefully selected, not because they are “interesting” or ample data are available for studying them, but because they are all instances of only one phenomenon: people's war (antigovernment insurgency) or crisis management from the perspective of the incumbent (government). His findings and conclusions on the underlying dynamics of insurgent governance and on the interactions of insurgents and incumbents with civilian populations are highly revealing and instructive. They shed light on the importance of conceptualizing civil wars as fundamentally competitive environments in which both insurgents and incumbents face the challenge of fighting for their survival against an opponent, as well as governing civilian population. They underscore the point that exclusionary regimes are more vulnerable to defeat by an insurgent movement and that the establishment of a diverse, broad-based, cross-class coalition can lead to the toppling of such a regime.
Opper's study yields rich policy implications. A key policy-relevant lesson from his account is that insurgent movements are, first and foremost, political projects and conflicts. Therefore, policy makers, in their management of conflicts, should bear in mind that the solutions to the conflicts are fundamentally political, not military, and that a focus on local political dynamics and coalition building is the key to terminating the conflicts in ways that serve the interests of the incumbent.
In sum, this book is well researched, written, and argued. It deserves a wide audience and should be useful, informative, and stimulating to those interested in the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, the Malaya insurgency in particular, and comparative politics and Cold War history in general.
