Your letter of September has been received today at Xiajiang.¹ In all, we have
received three letters from you dated prior to September. We made a general
reply on the 15th, and hope that you will have received that letter.2
Your September letter says that the Central Committee, the provincial committee, and the Yangzi Bureau all sent us letters which were delivered to us. But
we have not received them to date, and do not know where they were sent from
and went astray. We are most concerned. If you have kept copies, we hope you
will copy them again and send them to us as soon as possible.
As for the problem of new soldiers, it would be best if you could send five
thousand by the end of this month. We hope that you will step up your efforts at
propaganda and agitation, so as to recruit this number of new soldiers or even
more. As regards the method of transportation, you should also correspond with
the office of the Revolutionary Committee of the Workers and Peasants in Ji'an.
We have set up an office in Ji'an, with Mao Zetan as the director and Wan as his
deputy. Internally, a Committee of the Rear has been established with Mao Zetan
as secretary. The task of the Committee of the Rear is to recruit and transfer new soldiers and to make clothes. You should correspond with the Committee of the
Rear concerning the issue of sending new soldiers.

The General Front Committee arrived at Xiajiang on the 17th of this month,
held a plenary meeting here, and adopted resolutions on the assessment of the
situation, the question of action, the land question, and the question of capital. As
regards the situation, we believe that the chaotic fighting among the warlords of
the ruling class will definitely not subside or stop for the time being, but it will
also not continue to expand to the extreme. This is to say that under the increasingly tense conditions of the Chinese revolutionary situation, all factions of the
reactionary ruling class feel the necessity for a reformist political program. But
the question of the leadership of this reformist political régime certainly cannot
be resolved by peaceful means. In the near future, a warlord war will undoubtedly break out cruelly. But on the other hand, we should never depart from class
analysis and believe that the fighting of the warlords will expand further and
continue to the end. It should be understood that when class contradictions
surpass the internal contradictions of the ruling class, the reactionary ruling class
will inevitably unite to attack the revolution. But we must absolutely not give
way to pessimism, because this is a manifestation of the revolutionary high tide.
Therefore, our task is to win initial victory in one province, continue to develop
and expand such victories, and break through and destroy the allied offensives of
the reactionaries before the ruling class settles the issue of the leadership of the
reform. Our action at present is to go forward and occupy the Nanchang-Jiujiang
Railroad, attack Nanchang and Jiujiang, and annihilate the enemy. The whole
army group is scheduled to set out from Xiajiang tomorrow and the day after
tomorrow and advance toward the Nanchang-Jiujiang railroad. As regards the
land question, we maintain that complete and equal redistribution must be carried out, and that this is the only correct policy. Only by confiscating everything
and redistributing it equally can the broad masses of poor peasants be won over,
feudal exploitation be overthrown completely, and a future advance toward the
victory of socialism be guaranteed. As for the problem of capital, we hold that it
is wrong at present to confiscate all factories and shops unconditionally. We
should confiscate the shops of counterrevolutionaries, and the factories and
shops of warlords and bureaucratic capital. In dealing with capital that does not
violate the labor laws of the soviet régime, we should use the method of workers supervising capital to restrict it and overcome its plots and conspiracies (transferring capital, going slow, and not fulfilling orders). These are a few simple words
of explanation. For a detailed explanation, please consult the letter of Comrade
Zhou Yili, representative of the Yangzi Bureau.4
Secretary of the General Front Committee of the First Front Army
Mao Zedong
Xiajiang xian, on the night of October 19.

Notes

Our source for this document is Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 3, pp. 157-58, where the text
is reproduced from a documentary collection published in China in 1981. The letter can
also be found in Jiangxi dangshi ziliao, Vol. 6, pp. 169-70.
1. The reference may be to a missive accompanying the text of a letter from the Central
Committee dated September 4, which had been sent to the Yangzi Bureau with the request
that it be transmitted to the Front Committee. This letter indicated that, if it had proved
impossible to carry out the plans outlined in the Central Committee's directive of August
29 for taking Changsha and destroying He Jian's main force, the Red Army could turn
toward Jiangxi and develop its action there. (See the summary in Jiangxi dangshi ziliao,
Vol. 6, pp. 287-88.)
2. The reference is probably to the letter to the Central Committee translated above,
written on the night of October 14.
3. As indicated above, in the Introduction to this volume, Zhou Yili, the emissary of the
Yangzi Bureau, had brought to Mao and Zhu on September 29 the letter of August 29 from
the Central Committee ordering a renewed attack on Changsha. Thus Mao and his comrades
had in fact received at least one letter from higher Party authorities "dated prior to September,"
but no information is available about the other two letters which had "gone astray."
4. For the text of this letter, likewise dated October 19, 1930, see Jiangxi dangshi
ziliao, pp. 171-73.