Mobile Warfare

Mobile warfare is a military strategy of the People’s Republic of China employing conventional forces on fluid fronts with units maneuvering to exploit opportunities for tactical surprise, or where a local superiority of forces can be realized. One of early CCP leader Mao Zedong's three forms of warfare, mobile warfare was the primary form of warfare used by Chinese communist forces from the early 1930s to the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War. The other two forms of warfare that Mao defined in On Protracted War, guerrilla warfare and positional warfare, were less frequently employed.

The most notable example of Chinese mobile warfare was the Long March, a massive military retreat in which Mao marched in circles in Guizhou until he had confused the vastly larger armies pursuing him, and was then able to slip through Yunnan and Sichuan, although the retreat was completed by only one-tenth of the force that left for the Long March at Jiangxi.

The Chinese People's Volunteer Army's first five campaigns in the Korean War were characterized by a strategy of mobile warfare, in which the PVA encircled the enemy through maneuvers and sought to annihilate the enemy. Then it entered a stage of positional warfare, when both the PVA and UN forces fought to a stalemate along the 38th parallel north.