Kuo Hua-jo (1907-), Chinese Communist military commentator, political officer, and military historian known for his studies of the Sun-tzu ping-fa [Sun-tzu on the art of war] .

Little is known about Kuo Hua-jo's background or early years except that he was a native of Fukien and a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy. He reportedly joined the Chinese Communist party at the time of the Kuomintang-Communist schism in 1927 and was a staff officer in the headquarters of the Red Army in Kiangsi in 1931.

Kuo Hua-jo first attracted notice as a military commentator during the Sino-Japanese war. He published an article on tactics in the 1 1 January 1938 issue o£ Chieh-fang [liberation] at Yenan. On 7 July, the Society for the Study of the Anti-Japanese War at Yenan published K'ang-Jih yu-chi chati-cheng ti i-pan wen-fi [on all the problems of the anti-Japanese guerrilla war] . In addition to Mao Tse-tung's "Questions of Strategy in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War," the book contained six chapters that were written jointly by Kuo Hua-jo, Ch'en Ch'ang-hao, Hsiao Ching-kuang, and Liu Yalou. Later in 1938, Kuo went to the Shansi- Chahar-Hopei (Chin-ch'a-chi) base area, which had been establishjed by Nieh Jung-chen (q.v.). Kuo's "Experiences and Lessons of the Ch'inch'a-chi Border Region in Smashing the Japanese Bandit Large-scale Encirclement Attack" appeared in the 25 December 1938 issue oi Chieh-fang. He also wrote articles for the Chün-cheng tsa-chih [military-political magazine] of the Communist Eighth Route Army. Information about Kuo's career as a Communist political officer during the decade after 1938 is sparse. He reportedly served under Ch'en Yi (1901-; q.v.) in the New Fourth Army, and he was identified as the political commissar of an army group in accounts of the Communist campaign that culminated in the capture of Shanghai in the spring of 1949. He served on the Shanghai Military Control Commission and became political commissar of the Woosung-Shanghai garrison headquarters in May and commander of the Woosung- Shanghai garrison area in October.

After the Central People's Government was established, Kuo served until 1953 as a member of the East China Military and Administrative Commission, the regional authority for the important coastal provinces of east China. He published Ch un-shih pien-cheng fa [military dialectics] in 1950 and wrote an article for the Jen-min jih-pao [people's daily] of 3 June 1953 on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversay of Mao Tse-tung's "On the Protracted War," a series of lectures which Mao had delivered between 26 May and 3 June 1938 before the Society for the Study of the Anti-Japanese War and had published in Chieh-fang in July 1938. In 1955 Kuo was appointed to the Shanghai Municipal People's Council and was given the rank of lieutenant general of the People's Liberation Army. Two years later, he became a deputy commander of the Nanking military district, which included the provinces of Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhwei, and a member of the National Defense Council. He served as a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and in April 1959 he was elected to the National Committee and the Standing Committee of that body. He was reelected to those committees in December 1964. mm Kuo Hua-jo is best known for his work on the venerable Chinese military text Sun-tzu ping-fa [Sun-tzu on the art of war]. The Chinese Communists began to take great interest in the maxims of Sun Tzu (fl. 500 B.C.) in th'e 1930's, and Mao Tse-tung became an admirer of his thought. Kuo was the author of one of the earliest Communist articles on Sun Tzu, the "Sun-tzu ping-fa ch'u-pu yen-chiu" [preliminary research on the Sun-tzu ping-fa], which appeared in the Ch ün-cheng tsa-chih of the Eighth Route Army in 1939. He continued to study the text for almost 20 years, and in 1957 he published Chin-i hsin-pien Su?i-tzu ping-fa [modern translation and new edition of Sun-tzu ping-fa] , which contained a rendering of the classical text into modern Chinese and an introduction which dealt with some textual and interpretive problems.

Kuo Hua-jo was selected to write the introduction to a handsome reprint of the Sung edition of commentaries on Sun Tzu which was published at Shanghai in 1961 by the Chunghua Book Company. His introduction provides a useful summary of official Chinese Communist attitudes toward the "oldest and greatest book on the art of war in ancient China." He subscribed to the view that the work was written by Sun Tzu (Sun Wu) and that it was based on the wars of the Spring and Autumn period (722481 B.C.) and on Sun's own military experience. The work later was revised by Sun Pin, a direct descendant of Sun Tzu. By the time of the Han dynasty, much of the original text had been lost. During the Three Kingdoms period, however, Ts'ao Ts'ao (155-200) collated and edited the available texts and produced a 13-chapter edition of the Sun-tzu ping-fa. (This edition, with notes by Ts'ao Ts'ao and ten other commentators, is the one that was photographically reproduced in 1961.) According to Kuo Hua-jo, the essence of Sun Tzu's philosophy is to be found in his materialist view of war and his military dialectics, which are similar to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. He asserted that Sun Tzu pioneered in pointing out that military operations are governed by definite laws and in perceiving that if one can control the laws governing war, he may be certain of ultimate victory. However, Sun Tzu's outlook was limited by the social environment of the age in which he lived. Because he was related by blood to a ruling class which used war as a means of economic exploitation, he made no distinction between just and unjust wars. He advocated offensive strategy designed to end a war quickly rather than the indirect approach of protracted war. Finally, he emphasized the importance of command decision, but neglected the matters of military education and study programs for the troops. Kuo concluded that the strategic thought of Mao Tse-tung was superior to that of Sun Tzu because Mao's thought eliminated these feudal elements.