Secretary of the Front Committee of the First Army Group        Mao Zedong

                                                                Order for the First Army Group of
                                                                the Red Army to Leave Pingxiang and
                                                                        Advance Toward Ji’an

                                                                (September 23, 1930, 1:00 P.M.,
                                                                at General Headquarters in the city of Pingxiang)


                                1. Orders have been received from the Front Army as follows:

                                a. The vanguard of the enemy in Hunan (such as the Nineteenth and Thirty-
                                    first divisions of He Jian’s forces) has reached Liling, and some of the
                                    forces of the enemy in Jiangxi (Dai Yue’s brigade) have reached Wanzai.
                                    The city of Ji’an remains under the occupation of Deng Ying’s forces.
                                b. For the purpose of accomplishing its original tasks of taking Nanchang and
                                    Jiujiang, eliminating Lu Diping, and then going on to seize Changsha and
                                    Wuhan and attack Nanjing, it has been decided that this front army will
                                    first take the city of Ji’an. This will cause the forces of the worker and
                                    peasant masses of southwestern Jiangxi to progress downstream and coop-
                                    erate with us, and thus provide a large number of new recruits to expand
                                    the ranks of the Red Army.
                                c. The Third Army Group should set out from here (the city of Pingxiang)
                                    tomorrow (the 24th), and then advance toward the town of Zhangshu, first
                                    occupying Linjiangfu, mobilize the masses in the Linjiang area, block
                                    transportation on the Gan River, and cut off the enemy’s reinforcements.
                                d. The First Army Group should be divided into two routes: the right route via
                                    Youxian (Twelfth Army), and the left route via Pingxiang (Third and
                                    Fourth Armies) passing through Yuanzhou (the Twentieth Army is also in
                                    Yuanzhou), and advancing towards Ji’an. The troops in Anyuan and
                                    Pingxiang must set out by the 27th, gather together on arrival at Futian to
                                    the north of Ji’an, and coordinate with the local masses in resolutely seizing
                                    the city of Ji’an.

                                2. This Army Group will follow orders to take Ji’an.
                                3. The General Headquarters, the various directly attached units, and the

5. Central Committee Directive No. 47 of July 21, 1930, had called for the creation of
such an organ in each battle zone to wield both military and political authority, adding
that when victory was won in several provinces, these committees should be immediately
combined and transformed into a national organ of revolutionary power. See Central
Committee Documents, 1930, pp. 178–80.
6. Tu Zhennong (1896–1951) was a native of Jiangxi, who had joined the
Guomindang in 1921, and the Chinese Communist Party in 1925. As indicated above, in a
note to the text of June 25, 1930, Li Lisan sent Tu to the Jiangxi–Hunan soviet base area
as an inspector, to inform Mao of the new policies adopted by the Central Committee in
May and June. In this capacity, Tu addressed a number of meetings, and became familiar
with the situation in the army. When a Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government was set up
in Ji’an on October 7, 1930, Tu became a member of the Executive Committee. In the
early years of the Anti-Japanese War he played an important role in the organization of
the Chinese Communist Party, but after being arrested in 1942 he rallied to the
Guomindang, which he rejoined in 1943. From then until 1949, he published several
anti-Communist books, and helped to train Guomindang special agents. He was executed
as a counterrevolutionary in April 1951.

Our source for this document is Jiangxi ziliao, Vol. 6, pp. 145–47. A fragmentary
version of the first four paragraphs appears in Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 3, pp. 143–44,
where the text is reproduced from a documentary collection published in China in 1980.