(March 6, 1932)

Comrade Yuan Guoping:¹

1. Your first letter from Jiangkou has reached us. Since the masses in Sandu
are as you described them in your letter, Gulonggang and other places must be
even better than Sandu.² We should work even harder to win them over and must
not, on the contrary, slacken our efforts or relax our self-discipline because of the
consciousness of the masses.

2. This time in your work you must be ever-vigilant about all your strategies and work methods and never allow them to stray from the general task of
"winning over the masses and creating soviet areas." It is not right to abandon our political slogans and yield to the ideology of the backward masses.
To be sure, there are times when, for the purpose of winning over the
masses,³ our work may be divided into several steps, but we must in no wise
stray from our basic task. On the contrary, we must carry out our general task of
"winning over the masses and creating soviet areas" in a more realistic way. The
instructions on strategy and working methods contained in issue no. 3 of General
[X]⁴ Correspondence are on the whole correct, but you are expected to apply
them in a flexible way, not to be rigidly tied to them exactly as they are
written. Our estimation of the masses in Sandu and Qibao was somewhat
different from what you said in your letter, so the tactics and methods of our
work should not be applied mechanically. For example, take the method—it is in
no sense a tactic or a line—of attacking big landlords before attacking small
landlords. When we take into consideration the conditions in Sandu, mechanical

Our source for this letter is Mao Zedong ji, Vol. 3, pp. 95-97, where it is reproduced from
a contemporary mimeographed version.
1. For biographical information about Yuan Guoping, see the relevant note to the
"Minutes of the First Eight Meetings of the General Front Committee of the First Front
Army of the Red Army," May 25-June 10, 1931.
2. Sandu, a settlement in Xingguo xian, along with nearby Qibao and Gulonggang,
comprised an area whose population had been very resistant to the revolutionary movement.
3. Emphasized in original with dots next to the characters.
4. The missing character here must be zheng (political); the full title of the periodical
mentioned could then be rendered as Correspondence from (or Bulletin of) the General
Political Department.


application of the method would lead to opportunism. Furthermore, the process
of going from peasant associations to soviets and poor peasant leagues should
not be delayed too long. Great efforts should first be made to mobilize rapidly
the masses of poor peasants, farm laborers, and middle peasants for the struggle.
During the struggle, develop the attack against big landlords rapidly to the phase
of attacking small landlords and rich peasants, that is, redistribution of property
and land and abolition of debts. As soon as a majority of the impoverished
masses has risen up, all small landlords and rich peasants remaining in the
peasant associations for the purpose of speculation should immediately be expelled and the organ of political power of the masses the soviets and the class
organization of the masses the poor peasant leagues should immediately be
established. In a word, strategies and work methods are formulated in the light of
actual conditions. You should make a very realistic analysis of the local conditions and the sentiments and demands of the local masses in the course of their
struggle, in order to decide on more realistic strategies and methods. Only thus
can you attain greater practical results.
When members of the Red masses first enter a White village, retaliation and
adventurism are bound to occur. You must at the same time watch out for similar
incidents in other areas as well. Army discipline must not be relaxed in the
slightest. If the masses want to organize small guerrilla detachments to distribute
the possessions of the despotic gentry among the masses, then in order to organize small guerrilla detachments, they will establish preliminary mass bodies,
such as peasant associations, and even set up provisional organs of political
power revolutionary committees all this with a view to organizing small
guerrilla detachments to attack the fortified villages feared by the masses. Why
do I say this? Because under circumstances such as those in Sandu and Qibao (to
say nothing of situations worse than those in Sandu and Qibao, such as the town
of Yongfeng where the Third Army is now working, or the vicinity of Nanfeng
where the Fifty-eighth Army is now working, or Anyuansi where the Fourth
Army is now working, or the border areas between Shicheng and Ninghua
where the Twelfth Army is now working), there is no security for the various
organizations, such as mass bodies and organs of political power, nor for all
the benefits derived from redistribution of land and the abolition of debts. As
soon as the Red Army withdraws, the armed forces of the landlords return, all
organizations collapse, and all benefits are nullified. At such times, only
small guerrilla detachments that have been organized and trained by us and
have fought the local despots and divided up and distributed their belongings,
and who have pitted themselves irreconcilably against the despotic gentry
and the landlords, are able to withdraw with the Red Army to the Red border
areas and wait for a chance to launch a second attack. Only this is something to

5. The place referred to here appears to be the town (and surrounding township) of
Anyuan, in northwestern Ninghua xian in Fujian, bordering Shicheng xian in Jiangxi.


rely on, a way to prevent the work this time from ending up in vain. Not to
mention earlier events, but just looking at things after the battle of Changsha,
does not all of the first-stage work in Ping[xiang], Li[ling], You[xian], and in the
Yuanshui Valley, and in the Wujiang Valley, teach us the same lesson, that we
failed to grasp the central task in our work—the organization of guerrilla detachments who do not participate in production? Is it not as though all the work that
our comrades have done, through innumerable trials and tribulations, such as the
redistribution of land, the abolition of debts, the establishment of soviets, and the
organization of Red Guard units (which do participate in production), has been
in vain? Because in all four of your letters you have not mentioned the organization of guerrilla detachments, it is discussed here in detail. But this is not to say that
you should not make plans to establish and consolidate political power in Sandu and
Qibao. The circumstances and conditions in Sandu and Qibao at the moment are
very different from those in places like the town of Yongfeng, the town of Nanfeng,
and Anyuansi, and there is no doubt whatsoever that you should make plans to
establish and consolidate political power. You should plan to mobilize all of the
masses thoroughly, annihilate the armed forces of the landlords completely, organize
class organizations of the masses and organs of political power, and carry out
redistribution of the land. You must, however, make plans for a situation in
which the enemy advances rapidly, the Red Army has to be concentrated, and
the armed forces of the landlord class have not yet been eliminated; if you have
planned for such a situation, you will know that the organization of small local
guerrilla detachments that do not participate in production and that fight the local
despots is truly the central task of all of your work. Not only will taking the organization of guerrilla detachments as the central task not cause neglect of other tasks;
quite the contrary, it will tightly link all other tasks together. In the past, the
political departments of various armies and the great majority of the comrades who
are engaged in political work did not understand the central task of organizing
guerrilla detachments under special circumstances, and most of the work they did
was not in accord with the circumstances and conditions, so on the whole they
wasted much effort and achieved few practical results. For this reason, what is
said in this letter not only constitutes instructions for the work your army is
doing in Sandu and Qibao, but is also something to which the whole front army
as well as all independent divisions and all local guerrillas should pay equal
attention, and which they should put into practice to the letter.

Director of the General Political
Department

Mao Zedong

March 6, at Huangpi

6. The references here appear to be to organizing activities in *xian* in northwestern
Jiangxi and northeastern Hunan in the aftermath of the attacks on Changsha in the summer of 1930.