44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST types of sources: first, the evidence of participants; second, the evidence of sympathetic observer-participants and observers; and third, the evidence of counter-insurgency "experts." In the first category we have the testimony of such experienced revolutionaries as Kirn San.8 In the secoad, we may turn to classic sources such as Jack Belden and Eqbal Ahmad.* In the third, and specifically relating to the Vietnam war, we may cite Douglas Pike. ° And a final area to which we can turn is to accounts of what has historically been the immediate sequence of successful revolutions achieved by peopled war. There is, I think, no need to paraphrase here the theoretical writings whose message is clear: guerrillas waging people's war cannot survive without the support, willingly given, of the people. However, a particularly interesting commentary on a specific instance of theory being put into practice and of the subsequent modification and refinement of theory is to be found in Mark Selden's The Tenan Way9 which documents the extreme sensitivity of the guerrilla to the feelings and needs of the peasantry. Strict Forbearance All three kinds of sources on the practice of people's war concur on the avoidance of violence against the people by the liberation forces. Indeed as Kim San points out, on many occasions the party ^ by restraining the mass movement, virtually pardoned their enemies who simply came back to annihilate them. Of the Canton Commune he records: ^Had the workers not kept discipline they could easily have eliminated their enemies, but they stood by their orders not to kill private individuals. Contrast such generosity and discipline with the orgy of brutality indulged in by the Reaction three days later, when nearly seven thousand were killed!'917 Talking of fury of unrestrained peasant vengeance, he observes: "the Kuomintang killed the best and bravest of China's people, the socially desirable, while the revolutionaries killed the degenerate and the" parasites, the socially harmful."8 The whole book testifies to the turmoil of emotions stirred up in a sensitive person dedicated to the advancement of the people's cause and to human and humane values by participation in such a human upheaval as a revolution. The experience of the revolutionary movement in Indonesia illustrates very clearly the choices—and the consequences— when contrasted with that of the revolutionary movement in Indochina: in the first, merciless decimation and subsequent fascist repression and indefinite perpetuation of rural poverty; in the second, successful land re-foirn and rising production with greater equality of distribution.® Jack Belden was with the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) at the height of their struggle with the Kuomintang and had ample opportunity to observe the conduct of the liberation forces. His testimony is consistent and unambiguous: extreme care was taken to ensure that there was no unnecessary or indiscriminate violence. Indeed, the operative principle was evidently that no man was beyond redemption, that even the deepest-dyed reactionary might one day reform and become useful to