Report on Arrival at Anyuan¹
(September 1927)
Xinyuan³ will make a detailed report on the situation of the armies, and
meetings will be held to discuss the work related to the dispositions for the
uprisings in all areas of Ping[jiang], Liu[yang], Li[ling], and An[yuan].4
As soon as he arrived at Anyuan, Comrade Mao immediately called together
the comrades and reported on the proceedings of the August 7 meeting, and
the changes in the new policies, such as the reorganization of the Hunan
Provincial Committee, his return to Hunan, and the decision to launch the
Autumn Harvest Uprising. He said the decision to launch an Autumn Harvest
Uprising in Hunan and Hubei was made while I was at the Central Committee
[meeting]. The commanding organ of the Hunan uprising is divided into two
parts. One is the Front Committee, with Mao Zedong as secretary and various
responsible military persons as members. The other is the Action Committee,
with Comrade Yi Lirong as secretary and responsible comrades from the
various xian as members. The uprising at Changsha should use rickshaw
workers and the peasants of the suburbs as the main force and may also
organize about five hundred wounded soldiers. Every xian has already prepared to launch peasant uprisings, and preparations have already been made
to cut the electric lines and railroads in all areas. I have also brought with me
a letter of introduction from the Central Committee which requires He and
Nie² to deploy two regiments of their armies to serve as the military force of
the uprising. They are now taking a roundabout route along the border of
Fujian. If they can come, it will be all the better. I hope that Comrade Pan
This text is translated from Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 9, p. 323, which reproduces it
from Qiushou qiyi.
1. This is an extract from the report of Pan Xinyuan (mentioned in the last sentence of
the text) to the Central Committee, dated July 2, 1929.
2. The reference is to He Long (1896-1969), original name Wenchang, a native of
Hunan, and Nie Rongzhen (1899-), a native of Sichuan, who had been respectively
commander-in-chief and secretary of the Front Committee during the Nanchang Uprising
of August 1, 1927. After the retreat to Shantou in August and September 1927, both of
them fled to Hong Kong. He Long returned to China in November, and by March 1928 he
was engaged in guerrilla warfare in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area. Nie Rongzhen had
gone to France and Belgium on the work-study program. He later studied at the Red Army
Academy in Moscow and, on his return to China in 1925, served as a political instructor at
the Huangpu Academy. From Hong Kong, he went to Guangzhou, where he participated
in the uprising of December 1927. Thereafter, he worked underground in Hong Kong,
Tianjin, and Shanghai until 1931.
3. Pan Xinyuan (1903-1931), alias Pan Qingquan, a native of Liuyang, Hunan, joined
the Chinese Communist Party in 1923. In 1927, he was Party representative in the Second
Regiment of the First Division of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army, and in
this capacity participated in the Autumn Harvest Uprising. In 1930 he was a political
commissar in the Fourth Red Army during its assault on Changsha; in August 1931, he
was captured and executed.
4. This brief and optimistic document represents the last contemporary word from
Mao himself about the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan, but on September 16 and 17,
the Soviet consul and emissary of the International, Meyer, under the pseudonym of Ma
Kefu, produced two letters and a report to the Central Committee containing savage
criticism of Mao and Peng Gongda. These materials, which helped prepare the ground for
Mao's disgrace in November 1927, first appeared in the internal Party organ Zhongyang
tongxin, no. 6, September 30, 1927. For a translation, see Hyobom Pak, Documents of the
Chinese Communist Party 1927-1930 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1971), pp.
103-11. Meyer denounced the decision to postpone the attack on Changsha, originally
scheduled for September 15, as "extremely shameful treachery and cowardice," and "an
evil instance of Chinese-style philistinism," and demanded that the Central Committee
send a plenipotentiary to reorganize the Hunan Provincial Committee.
```

——1928——