——1928——

Report to the Jiangxi Provincial Party
Committee and to the Party Central Committee

(May 2, 1928)

To the Central Committee:

Here we present the report by Comrade Mao Zedong forwarded from Ji'an:

Dear Elder Brother Yulin:¹

Enclosed is Comrade Zedong's letter to you people, and to the Central Committee. It is important that you forward the letter to the Central Committee after you
read it. Comrade Zedong's report is as follows:
1) After the defeat,² we retreated from southern Hunan to the Jiangxi border
(our troops did not suffer heavy losses, but the organs of political power in
southern Hunan and Chaling were destroyed). What is outrageous is that the xian
Party Committees and xian governments of Hunan brought a large group of
peasant troops along with us.³ Now there are eighteen thousand troops here.
2) We have occupied the three xian of Yongxin, Ninggang, and Suichuan,
and we will soon be able to expand our territories.
3) Yang Ruxuan's division, which had pursued Mao's troops, ended up being
driven away by Mao's troops to the border of Jiangxi. Its Eighty-first Regiment
was put to flight at Wudoujiang in Suichuan. One battalion of the Seventy-ninth
Regiment was previously disarmed by Mao's troops. Now this regiment has also

We have translated this document from Jinggangshande wuzhuang geju (The Armed
Independent Régime on the Jinggangshan) (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1979),
pp. 120-21 (hereafter, The Jinggangshan Régime). The text is conveniently reproduced
from this source in Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 2, pp. 301-03.
been put to flight by Zhu's troops at Yongxin. The Thirty-first Regiment of Mao's
troops is now coming from Ninggang, and the enemy troops from Yongxin have
retreated to Ji'an. This time, we have captured three hundred rifles.
4) The reason we did not go directly to Ji'an is that we have adopted a
strategy of deepening our work both internally and externally. By keeping
Yongxin as the center, and by organizing insurrections in the nearby xian, internally we can establish a Party army, raise money, and make clothes. Externally,
we can help the localities launch worker and peasant uprisings, establish the
political power of the workers and peasants, and distribute the land. We have,
therefore, decided that it will be much more significant to devote our efforts to
this work than to launch an attack on Ji'an.
5) The Hunan Special Committee decided previously that the troops of Zhu
and Mao should be combined into the Fourth Red Army, with Zhu De as military
commander and Mao Zedong as Party representative. Zhu's troops have been
organized as the Tenth Division, and Mao's troops as the Eleventh Division. The
peasant troops from the xian of southern Hunan were incorporated into these two
divisions. Zhu is concurrently commander of the Tenth Division, with Wan
Xixian as Party representative. Mao is concurrently commander of the Eleventh
Division (a post which was originally held by Zhang Ziqing, but because he has
been wounded, Mao acts as commander concurrently), with He Tingying as
ordered to go to Hunan in March by the Southern Hunan Special Committee.
Regarding He Long, see above, the relevant note to the report of September 1927. Ye Ting
(1896-1946), zi Xiyi, was a native of Guangdong. He joined the Guomindang in 1919, and
thereafter held various military commands. In August 1927, he played a leading role in the
Nanchang Uprising in his capacity as commander of the Eleventh Army. After the retreat to
Shantou, and a brief sojourn in Hong Kong, he was sent by the Party to Guangzhou to exercise
military leadership during the Canton Commune. After that uprising was defeated, he left China
for Europe, returning only in 1937 at the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War.
Party representative. We also have a training corps, commanded by Chen Yi.5
We are equipped with a few machine guns. The Twenty-eighth Regiment of
Zhu's division, and the Thirty-first Regiment of Mao's division, have relatively
high combat capability and can beat off some relatively mediocre enemy troops.
6) A mass of ten thousand messy people with very poor discipline (except
for a certain portion of them) are quite a burden. Now we are trying hard to
strengthen discipline, and the situation is improving daily.
7) The Party is improving daily, as the army, divisional, and regimental
Party Committees and each Party branch have started Party training classes.
8) Feeding the troops is a big and difficult problem. In the past month, most
people received only three cents a day for rice and nothing else. These days in
Yongxin, however, we have been able to raise some money.
9) The border area between the two provinces covers about ten xian. In the
past, the two Provincial Party Committees had always been unable to control
them. Thanks to the efforts of our comrades, the organizational activities of the
Party in these xian are growing every day. But since Comrade Zhou Lu (representative of the South Hunan Special Committee) came to Ninggang in March to
abolish the Front Committee, the Party organizations in the xian have suddenly
lost their center and become independent régimes. Certain unhealthy tendencies
are developing among them. Already at the meeting of the Front Committee last
December, it was suggested that a Border Area Special Committee be established. The Hunan Provincial Committee and the Central Committee had best
send another capable comrade here to be Party secretary. Comrade Mao is responsible for work in the army and finds it very difficult to do both concurrently.
10) Our permanent mailing address is as follows:
Mr. Yuan Wencai
Ninggang
Mr. Wang Zuo7
The Five Big and Small Wells
Jinzhu Mountain, Suining Border

--- Notes

1. Once again, the term "elder brother" is used to address a hierarchical superior in the
Party. Yulin ("Jade forest") is probably a code name for the Jiangxi Provincial Committee.

2. The reference is to the defeat of March 1928 in southern Hunan, where Mao had been
ordered to go by the Southern Hunan Special Committee, after the Front Committee which
constituted the basis of his own power had been abolished. See the Introduction to this volume.

3. Presumably Mao's objection was that these peasant troops were, as indicated under
point (6) of this report, "messy" and undisciplined. By their requirements for food, they
also placed a heavy logistic burden on his army, and they were in any case ill-trained and
ill-armed. Subsequently, as indicated in the report of November 25, 1928, translated below,
they further disrupted operations because of their desire to return home to southern Hunan.


4. The reference is to Zhu De (1886–1976), zi Yujie, a native of Sichuan. In 1909 Zhu
had entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined both the Guomindang and the
secret society known as the Gelaohui. After participating in the 1911 revolution under the
command of Cai Ao and receiving important commands, he drifted into warlord ways, and
became addicted to opium. In 1922, he made a clean break with this past, putting himself
under medical care to overcome the opium habit and going to Germany to study. In Berlin,
he met Zhou Enlai, who sponsored him for membership in the Chinese Communist Party,
and also joined the Guomindang. Expelled from Germany in July 1925 for his revolutionary activities, he spent a period in the Soviet Union studying military affairs. After returning to China at the end of 1926, he renewed his friendship with Zhu Peide, who had been
his student at the Yunnan Military Academy (see above, the relevant note to the Declaration dated August 1, 1927), and thus became chief public security officer in Nanchang. In
this capacity, he played a significant, though not dominant role in the Nanchang Uprising.
In the course of the retreat from Nanchang toward Shantou, his troops, which constituted the
rear guard, were far less severely mauled by the enemy than the main force under Ye Ting and
He Long, and he was thus able to maintain their existence as a small but effective fighting unit.
In January 1928, Zhu De set up a short-lived soviet in Yichang in southern Hunan. From there
he made his way to the Jinggangshan, meeting up on the way with Mao Zedong, who had been

5. Chen Yi (1901-1972) was a native of Sichuan. In 1919-1921, he visited France on the
work-study program, but was expelled because of his participation in the student occupation of
the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyon. In 1926, he joined the staff of his former comrade in Paris,
Zhou Enlai, at the Huangpu Academy. After participating in the Nanchang Uprising of August
1927, he made his way to the Jinggangshan as the second in command of Zhu De's forces.

6. The Chinese here is fen, which was originally the name for the copper cent created
in the currency reforms of 1914. By this time, these coins had depreciated by approximately one-half in terms of the silver dollar or yuan, and the term fen was commonly used
for a unit of account corresponding to one-hundredth of a dollar, rather than to the actual
coin. Because the meaning is vague in any case, we have translated simply "cent" in this
and other texts of 1928 referring to the soldiers' pay.

7. Wang Zuo (1898-1930), hao Nanshan, and Yuan Wencai (1898-1930) were natives
of Jiangxi. They were the two chieftains of the bandit forces which Mao had found