Mao's Innovations in Popular Warfare

From Gérard Chaliand's Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afghanistan:

"The campaign in China was based on a remarkable innovation. Until the Second World War, the military doctrine of both right and left treated guerrilla operations as purely secondary. The main concerns were, quite rightly, aviation and mechanical forces. Although they contain nothing new in terms of technique , Mao Tse-tung's writings, which deal with revolutionary war rather than guerrilla operations per se, constitute a major breakthrough. It is quite meaningless to isolate the strictly military element in his writing, as certain authors have been tempted to do, for what matters is the close link between the political and the military that characterizes Mao's thinking. The point is that guerrilla warfare is a military tactic aimed at harassing an adversary, whereas revolutionary war is a military means whereby to overthrow a political regime. (authors emphasis)

What was Mao saying that was new? Not unlike his predecessors, he considered guerrilla warfare more than a mere backup for the regular army, although Mao did not in fact write about guerrilla war. What he was concerned with was revolutionary war, in which regular army units employ the tactics of irregulars, partisan units fight in parellel to the regular forces (with their actions sometimes considered most important), and classical full frontal assaults are launched only when the situation demands them. Mao's real innovation lay elsewhere in the field of politics. His political insight was special, for he was a specific and unforeseen avatar of Leninism."