A Report on the Current Status of
the Red Army1
(June 16, 1928)

I) The struggle here now has been rather intense and widespread. The enemies, with ten regiments (Yang Ruxuan's four and Wu Shang's six²) are advancing toward us, not including, of course, the landlords' household militia.3 The
broad peasant masses from the two xian of Chaling and Lingxian have been
suppressed. The cleanup in the countryside by the Whites has totally crushed our
party organization to the point that many of our brave comrades working in
Chaling have been killed, as was the leader of the Lingxian Xian Committee.
The Eighth Army has fought against us four times, losing once and winning
three times. But because of the enemy's stubborn resistance, we were obliged to
withdraw completely from the two xian, Chaling and Youxian, which we had
previously occupied. We no longer have even have one inch of land in southern
Hunan. Recently, however, there has been a military victory.4 In May, Yang
Ruxuan's Seventy-ninth Regiment and one battalion of the Twenty-seventh Regiment, their engineer and artillery units, the machine-gun company, the medical
unit of their division headquarters, and their transportation unit were all wiped
out and most of them captured. Yang escaped to Ji'an (some said that he had
been wounded), and the commander of the Twenty-seventh Regiment, Liu, was
killed. We have captured seven mortars, two mountain cannons, and over twenty
Dan of silver yuan. But since the enemy's two crack regiments were still in the
vicinity of Yongxin xian, we decided not to pursue any further. The military
dispositions here are that we assume a defensive posture toward Hunan and an
offensive posture toward Jiangxi. But we have not yet made any move in the last

Our source for this document is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, Vol. 1, pp. 8-10, where it is
reproduced from a copy in the Party archives.
1. This is an extract from a letter which Mao sent to the Hunan and Jiangxi Provincial
Committees for transmittal to the Central Committee.
2. Yang Ruxuan was at this time the commander of the Twenty-seventh Division of the
Guomindang Third Army. Wu Shang was commander of the Guomindang Eighth Army.
3. As indicated by Mao's reference to it in the Circular of July 20, 1927, para. (6), the
household militia (aihutuan) was originally a kind of peasant military organization.
"Household" referred to the compulsory participation by almost every household. After the
defeat of the left in the summer of 1927, many "household militia" units were taken over
by the landlords and used against the revolution.
4. This refers to the counterattack at Caoshi'ao in mid-May 1928, during the third
"annihilation" campaign against the Jinggangshan base.