Speech at the Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China[1]

(October 27, 1935)

The troops have suffered attrition, and though the ranks are now small, they are the foundation for future development. Now that the environment has changed and the twenty thousand li have been completed, there will never again be another twenty thousand li in the future. The future prospects for development should be explained to the cadres.

The Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Armies are to concentrate at Ganquan and Fuxian for coordinated operations. If we can continue to strike another blow at the route taken by Yang Hucheng and Sun Weiru[2] from the southern city toward the Wei River, and if we can win two battles, we can break the "encirclement and suppression." We must smash the enemy's "encirclement and suppression" before the severe winter.

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[1] This is part of Mao Zedong's speech at the meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China concerning troop work and the southward movement of the Shaanxi-Gansu Detachment to join forces with the Red Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Armies to smash the Kuomintang army's "encirclement and suppression."

[2] Yang Hucheng was then Commander-in-Chief of the Kuomintang Seventeenth Route Army and Director of the Xi'an Pacification Office. Sun Weiru was then Commander of the Kuomintang Thirty-eighth Army.