Where Is the Way Out?

(November 7, 1934)

Where is the way out?

Where is the way out??? Workers, peasants, soldiers, and all the impoverished masses!

The utterly evil Guomindang warlords—Chiang Kai-shek, Chen Jitang, He Jian, and others—have not only sold out our China to the imperialists, turning you into the slaves and beasts of burden of the imperialist bandits, but they themselves also frantically slaughter you, oppress you, and exploit you. You toil bitterly all year and every month, yet you can never feed yourselves or your parents, wives, and children. Exorbitant taxes and levies can never be fully paid off; the various military corvée and labor services, such as building blockhouses and constructing roads, can never be completed. On top of this, the landlords, capitalists, usurers, local tyrants, and evil ruffians, with their brutal exploitation of you, drive you to ruin and the selling of your wives and children, yet still you cannot pay off their land rents and debts.

You are enduring hunger, disease, cold, and suffering. Like cattle and horses, you die on the roads and in the fields, with no one to bury you.

You cannot resist, cannot utter a single word of dissatisfaction. The Guomindang warlords, militia, police, hooligans, and evil ruffians will, like wolves and tigers, whip you, kill you, behead you, and throw you into prison. They will also call you "Communist bandits" and want to kill your entire family, old and young. The Guomindang warlords, landlords, and capitalists all intimidate you, saying that the "Communist bandits" "kill and burn" and practice "communism of property and wives." They want to force you to give money, give strength, and give your lives

to help them "encircle and suppress the Communist bandits," to force you to organize militia, watch-and-guard corps, and communist-suppression corps to guard against the "Communist bandits." But you yourselves have only heard people curse the Communist Party, curse the Soviet and the Red Army; you yourselves have never yet seen what the Communist Party, the Soviet, and the Red Army are.

You only need to know the propositions of the Communist Party, the Soviet, and the Red Army, and you will support them! Their propositions:

We poor people, we workers, peasants, soldiers, and all toiling masses, must no longer suffer the exploitation and oppression of the imperialists, the Guomindang, the gentry, landlords, and capitalists. We must all unite, arm ourselves, rise up in insurrection, overthrow imperialism, overthrow the rule of the Guomindang gentry and landlords, and establish our own army of workers and peasants, our own government of workers, peasants, and soldiers. This army of workers and peasants is the Red Army, and this government of workers, peasants, and soldiers is the Soviet government.

We must immediately abolish all exorbitant taxes and levies and military corvée and labor services of the Guomindang government, abolish all usury, confiscate all land and property of the landlord class and distribute it to the impoverished peasants, implement the eight-hour workday for workers, and increase wages. We must enable every worker and peasant to have warm clothes to wear and ample food to eat, abolish the forced mercenary conscription system and replace it with a voluntary military service system, distribute land to the soldiers, improve the soldiers' livelihood, and forbid beating or cursing soldiers. Guarantee to the worker and peasant masses all freedoms and democratic rights, such as freedom of speech, assembly, association, publication, and strike, as well as complete equality between men and women.

Dear brothers and sisters! The Soviet and the Red Army advocated by the Communist Party are your way out. Not only must you not oppose the Soviet and the Red Army, but you must also support the Soviet and the Red Army and help our Soviet and Red Army achieve victory in every way.

Dear brothers and sisters! Your way out lies right here. We impoverished workers and peasants must all be of one heart, must unite, take up our kitchen knives, hoes, broadswords, wooden clubs, bird guns, rifles, and all weapons to rise up in insurrection, develop guerrilla warfare, go and slaughter all the Guomindang warlords and bureaucrats, call upon the soldiers of the White Army to kill their officers and mutiny over to the side of the masses, to join together in revolution, realize the propositions of the Communist Party, and create the workers' and peasants' own Red Army, the workers' and peasants' own Soviet government.

Dear brothers and sisters! Resolutely struggle for your own way out! Do not fear the traitorous executioner Guomindang warlords, do not fear the gentry, landlords, and capitalists. They are only a handful of people; we here have millions upon millions of worker and peasant masses, and we also have the help of our own Red Army and Soviet government. We will certainly win victory, we must win victory, we will win victory no matter what.

Mao Zedong
Chairman of the Soviet Central Government

Zhu De
Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army

November 7