Manifesto to the Workers, Peasants, and
Toiling Popular Masses Throughout the World
(September 6, 1933)

Dear brothers and sisters, comrades, and friends!

We are the Chinese workers, peasants, urban and rural poor, revolutionary soldiers, and intellectuals. We do not wish to be forever slaves and beasts of burden
for the imperialists and the Chinese landlords and capitalists, and we have begun
to create for ourselves a new life of freedom. We are leading our country's 450
million people in a struggle for liberation. Using our own strength, we have
begun to create within a sixth of China's territory (in many places in Jiangxi,
Fujian, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, and other provinces) the
only genuine régime of the popular masses—the soviet régime—and the only
genuine army of the popular masses—the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.
The Chinese Soviet Government and the Red Army are fighting to improve
fundamentally the political and economic conditions of the Chinese workers,
peasants, and toiling popular masses. The Chinese Soviet Government and the
Red Army want to begin by achieving one end, which is to enable workers,
peasants, poor people, revolutionary soldiers, and intellectuals to do freely what
they wish to do and to decide their own destinies, so as to be transformed from
those leading lives like beasts suffering from hunger and cold, with no places to
live and no jobs, altogether illiterate, into those leading lives of real people, with
food, clothing, places to live, jobs, and basic literacy. To achieve this the Soviet
Government has given them land, housing, and employment; set up numerous
free schools, literacy classes, libraries, and clubs for adults and children; and
opened many free hospitals and convalescent homes for the sick and the aged.

Yet that handful of parasites who rule China—foreign imperialists, Chinese
warlords, bureaucrats, landlords, capitalists, and usurers—never want us to be
able to live like human beings at all.

Precisely because we have begun to create a new life of freedom for ourselves, however, and because we work only eight hours a day at higher wages,
and because we who had little or no land before have received some land, and

We have translated this manifesto from Mao Zedong ji, Vol. 4, pp. 23-28, where it is
reproduced in its entirety from Wang Ming's preface to Suweiai Zhongguo, published in
Moscow in 1933.


because the women here have been liberated, Chiang Kaishek, Wang Jingwei,
and all those Guomindang wild beasts curse us as "Red bandits" and "Communist bandits." And they have launched large-scale "Encirclement and Suppres-sion" campaigns against us not just once or twice but incessantly.
At a time when the Japanese imperialists are madly slaughtering our compatriots and occupying one province after another in northern and northeastern China,
and the American, British, and French imperialists are going all out to carve up
China, we have repeatedly proclaimed to the people and armies of the whole
country: the various imperialists are trying to partition China completely, and all
the Chinese popular masses should rise up as one to defend our motherland!
We have openly declared time and again to all armed forces: Any army may
sign combat agreements¹ with us so that together we may take up arms against
Japan and other imperialists to protect the existence of our people and win
national liberation, provided only that they endorse our three very simple conditions (necessary truly to organize and arm the people so as to carry out a sacred
war of national defense against Japan and other imperialists): (1) Immediately
stop attacking the soviet areas; (2) give the people the minimum democratic
rights that is, freedom of speech, publication, assembly, organization, demonstration, strike, and so on; and (3) allow people the freedom to organize extensively and arm volunteer forces against Japan.
From beginning to end, Chiang Kaishek, Wang Jingwei, and all the
Guomindang traitors selling out their country have had only one reply to these
proposals of ours: intensify and expand their cruel attacks on the soviet
areas!
The Guomindang has now started the Sixth "Encirclement and Suppression"²
against our free Soviet China! In this "Encirclement and Suppression" they have
concentrated over 442,000 troops of the Nanjing and Guangdong armies around
our Central Soviet Area alone (Jiangxi, Fujian, Hunan, and Guangdong). These
armies are equipped, in addition, with very up-to-date and good weapons such as
artillery, tanks, airplanes, and poison gases.
Where did the Guomindang warlords and politicians get so many new weapons and the money to keep the soldiers? They got them from American, British,
Japanese, French, and German imperialists.

1. Passages set in bold in this document are emphasized by the use of dots both in the
Mao Zedong ji and Moscow versions of the Chinese text.
2. Mao and his comrades in Jiangxi counted, like the Guomindang, only five "Encir-clement and Suppression" campaigns, the fifth and last being the one which began at this
time and ended in the defeat of the Red Army and the Long March. From afar, Wang Ming
and other observers in Moscow somehow turned these into six. The point is illustrated by
the variants between the texts of Mao's report of January 1934 to the Second Soviet
Congress published in China and in the Soviet Union. (See below, the translation of this
text.) In the present instance, the sole source is one printed in Moscow, which refers here
to the sixth campaign; undoubtedly this should read fifth.


These imperialists use the weapons you have made, and the blood money
they squeeze out of you to eliminate us, the Chinese people who are fighting
for our own national and social liberation!
We, like you, still remember very clearly how the British, American, and
Japanese armies not long ago bombarded our Guangzhou Commune and
Changsha Soviet. French bombers raided our Longzhou Soviet in Guangxi.
This time, in the Guomindang's Sixth "Encirclement and Suppression," the
imperialists' role as its organizer could not have been more clearly exposed. The
American imperialists, aside from giving the Nanjing government a so-called "cotton and wheat loan" of $50,000,000 and a so-called "aviation loan" of $40,000,000,
also gave the Nanjing army 150 military airplanes and dozens of shipments of
artillery guns, tanks, machine guns, chemical weapons, and bullets, plus hundreds of
pilots and all sorts of specialists in military techniques. Lampson, the English
minister to China, went personally on an inspection tour to Sichuan and gave Liu
Xiang £20,000,000 and large quantities of arms so that he could attack our Red
Army's Fourth Army stationed there. Although the English, American, and Japan-ese imperialists have sharp conflicts of interest over the carving up of China, they are
united in their actions against Soviet China. They each give orders to their respective
running dogs-the warlords of the Nanjing faction, the Guangdong faction, and the
Northern faction to "encircle and suppress" in concert the people in our soviet
areas, who have already achieved liberation. The fascist German government has
sent seventy military experts (including former Defense Minister Seeckt) to Nanjing.
Chiang Kaishek has organized this group of people into a special department within
his General Headquarters in Nanchang to command military operations against the
Red Army. Just at that time, the League of Nations sent a so-called "Technical

3. China's deficiency in aerial defense was highlighted in the fighting that broke out
with Japanese forces in Shanghai in January 1932. In addition to airplane purchases,
China sought aid in training; in mid-1932, an American aviation mission led by Colonel
John H. Jouett arrived in China to train pilots, remaining until 1935. See William M.
Leary, Jr., "Wings for China: The Jouett Mission, 1932-1935," Pacific Historical Review
Vol. 38, no. 4 (Nov. 1969), 447-62.
4. Liu Xiang (1890-1938) was a prominent Sichuan warlord.
5. Sir Miles Lampson's visit to Sichuan occurred in 1933. Contemporary Japanese and
Chinese as well as left-leaning foreigners variously (and somewhat contradictorily) suggested that the trip was connected to continuing volatility along the disputed Tibet-China
border (in which Britain was thought to be sympathetic to Tibetan interests), and to British
interest in arming Sichuanese warlords against the Communists (though presumably the
same military aid could also be used to bolster Chinese arms in the China-Tibet frontier
zone.) See Victor Yakhontoff, The Chinese Soviets (N.Y.: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1934),
pp. 185-86.
6. General Hans von Seeckt, who had recreated the German Army in the aftermath of
Versailles, came to China in May 1933 and gave extensive advice on China's overall
military development to Chiang Kaishek and his government. A German military mission
had been in China since 1930, and the former principal advisor had proposed a strategy for
the conduct of the Third Encirclement Campaign in 1931 which Chiang did not in fact

Committee" to Nanjing, which was actually to help Chiang Kaishek plan and
execute attacks on the Chinese soviets and Red Army.7
Brothers and sisters, comrades and friends!
Look! The pilots and experts on military technique from so-called "democratic" America and other countries are waging the cruelest air battles and chemical warfare within the territory of Soviet China, under the command of fascist
German generals and Chinese Guomindang warlords, using airplanes, poison
gas, tanks, and artillery made in America, England, France, and Germany. They
are slaughtering huge numbers of workers, peasants, soldiers, poor people, intellectuals, and others, so as to destroy the free Chinese Soviet Republic and the
Workers' and Peasants' Red Army.
Brothers and sisters, comrades and friends!
To defend their own Soviet Republic, thousands upon thousands of toilers,
men, women, old, and young, have not spared their own flesh and blood, their
minds, and their lives in bravely beating back five consecutive "Encirclement
and Suppression" campaigns of the Guomindang, who were much more numerous and better armed than they. At present, however, this young Chinese Soviet
Republic is in serious danger.
At this crucial moment, we entreat you:
Help us resist the butchers who wish to force us back into dark and
subhuman lives, and who wish to slaughter us!
To force us back as slaves and beasts of burden into our previous subhuman
lives, the international imperialists are determined to drown the Chinese soviet
revolution in a sea of blood. The British, American, Japanese, and French imperialist robbers have concentrated their war fleets, airplanes, marines, and so on
around Soviet China, and on all of China's large cities, river ports, and sea ports.
They have made up their minds to massacre us first and then launch a new
internecine imperialist world war, and to inflict the utmost sacrifice and suffering
upon mankind all over the world!
The highest organization of the Chinese Soviet Republic, the Central Execu-tive Committee, calls upon you most solemnly to join with us in waging a
courageous mass struggle.

adopt. Von Seeckt, who formally became Adviser-General to the National Government in
1934, was treated by Chiang with much greater respect. Nonetheless, the importance of
these advisors to the eventual success of the Communist-suppression campaigns, which
has been stressed in many accounts, has undoubtedly been exaggerated. See William C.
Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), pp.
110-26.
7. Numerous League of Nations advisory groups came to China during the 1930s,
including a number in 1933, and it is unclear which of these is being referred to here.
During T. V. Soong's visit to Geneva in the summer of 1933 he successfully requested that
the League appoint a technical representative to the Nationalist government's National
Economic Council, a body with which the League had a long history of close cooperation.
Perhaps this is what is being mentioned here.


Oppose imperialism's intervention in Soviet China!
Oppose imperialism's carving up of China! Oppose the imperialists' slaughter
of the Chinese people in preparation for their new imperialist world war!
Oppose the American, British, Japanese, French, and German imperialists'
murdering the toiling masses of Soviet China with poison gas, airplanes, tanks,
and artillery! Oppose the shipment of all arms into China! Demand the immediate withdrawal of American pilots and military technical experts and of German
generals and advisers! Demand the immediate withdrawal of all American, English,
Japanese, French, and Italian naval, air, and ground troops!
Long live the international sympathy of the proletariat and the oppressed
peoples of the world!

Chairman of the Central Executive
Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic
Mao Zedong
Vice-Chairmen
Xiang Ying
Zhang Guotao
Chairman of the Revolutionary
Military Commission of the Chinese
Soviet Republic and Commander-in-Chief
of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army
Zhu De

Ruijin, Jiangxi. September 6, 1933