With over 2.3 million views on Zhihu, this question touches on military strategy, political philosophy, and the ideological DNA of the Chinese Communist Party. The answers reveal a surprisingly coherent set of reasons — strategic, ideological, and historical.
The Top Agent Problem
The most fundamental obstacle is operational. Successfully assassinating an enemy commander requires an agent who has already infiltrated the highest levels of the opposing organization. Agents capable of getting close enough to a top general are, by definition, the most valuable assets in the intelligence network.
A historical example makes this vivid: Guo Ruguai, a CCP mole embedded so deeply in the Nationalist military that he reached the level of operational staff officer — with genuine access to Chiang Kai-shek's battle plans. Could he have assassinated Chiang? Possibly. But no rational intelligence chief would burn such an irreplaceable asset on a single kill. The strategic value of keeping him in place far outweighed any individual target.
Killing the Man Doesn't Kill the Cause
The more philosophically decisive argument is this: war between nations is not a personal dispute. It is a conflict between competing class interests, economic systems, and power structures. Removing one individual from that equation solves nothing, because the system that produced him will simply generate a replacement.
As the top-voted answer puts it bluntly — even if Chiang Kai-shek had been assassinated, would every landlord militia in China have voluntarily laid down arms and embraced socialist reform? The structural contradictions would have remained entirely intact. This reflects a deeply Marxist reading of history: individuals are expressions of systemic forces, not their cause. Targeting the person while leaving the system untouched is, in this view, a fundamental failure of political analysis.
An Ideological Commitment, Not Just a Tactic
This wasn't merely a strategic calculation — it was codified principle. When Premier Zhou Enlai established the Central Special Operations Section, he laid down two inviolable rules from the outset: no white terror tactics, and no use of women's bodies as intelligence currency. The deliberate rejection of assassination as a tool was part of building a movement that claimed moral authority over its opponents.
Even Xu Enze, the early director of the Nationalist secret service and no friend of the CCP, acknowledged this in his memoirs written in Taiwan: "The Communists opposed assassination. They held that what they were fighting was an entire social system, not specific individuals — and that overturning a social system required the power of the masses, not the blade of an assassin. Over thirty years, they largely held to this doctrine."
When Assassination Does Work — and When It Doesn't
History offers a cautionary tale on the other side. Liu Chong, a capable Han imperial relative during the Yellow Turban Rebellion, successfully defended his territory, governed well, and attracted a following of 100,000 people — a genuine force of stability in a chaotic era. Then he was assassinated by a subordinate of Yuan Shu. His entire power base collapsed almost instantly.
The lesson cuts both ways. Assassination can be devastatingly effective against a faction built around a single exceptional individual. But against a mature organizational structure with deep institutional roots — like the CCP — it reliably fails. The CCP understood this about itself, and by extension, applied the same logic to its enemies: don't target the figurehead, dismantle the foundation.
The Bigger Takeaway
China's restraint on political assassination — at least in the context of modern revolutionary and military history — was never naivety. It was the product of a clear-eyed analysis: that wars are won by dismantling systems, mobilizing masses, and outlasting opponents structurally, not by eliminating individuals. Whether one agrees with the ideology behind it or not, the strategic logic has proven remarkably coherent across decades of conflict.
