to exercise these functions.

For Comrade Peng Dehuai
(A Six-Character Poem)1
(October 21, 1935)2 The mountains are high, the roads are long, the gullies are deep,3
Huge forces gallop through in every direction.
Who is it dares to ride on horseback with drawn sword?
None but our great General Peng!4 Investigate the Roads and the Topography
in the Vicinity of Zhiluozhen
(November 6, 1935, 8:00 P.M.)

Haidong:1
1. The 117th Division has already arrived at Fu xian, but Dong Yingbin2 has
made no moves yet.
2. Please pay attention to the following three matters:
    a. Eliminate as quickly as possible the militia bandits in [the village of]
    Zhangcunyi.
    b. Direct two companies of guerrilla forces to Zhiluozhen to carry out guer-
    rilla attacks on [the village of] Heishuisui.
    c. Investigate the roads, topography, and conditions among the people in the
    areas to the north and to the south of the Zhiluozhen region. Find out
    whether the Hulu River can be crossed on foot, and report by telegraph.
3. We and the Twenty-fifth Army will remain in the same place tomorrow.

Peng [Dehuai] Mao [Zedong] Manifesto of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party
on the Annexation of North China
by Japanese Imperialism, and
Chiang Kaishek’s Sellout of North China
and of the Whole Country
(November 13, 1935)

To the popular masses of the whole of China: China is now at the critical point of the destruction of the state and the extermination of the race. The Japanese imperialist bandits’ attack against China has
taken a drastic turn. Since the Chahar Incident, the five provinces in North China
(Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Chahar and Suiyuan) have, in effect, been placed
under Japanese imperialist rule. And yet this cannot satisfy the greed of the
Japanese imperialist bandits. Their new attacks have begun on an even greater
scale. Just look at the eight conditions they have recently raised: (1) complete
political and economic autonomy for the five provinces of North China; (2) withdrawal of all Guomindang troops from Shaanxi and the other provinces in the
Northwest; (3) complete transformation into demilitarized zones of the five coastal
provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shandong; (4) China’s
withdrawal from the League of Nations and abandonment of all assistance from
Britain and the United States; (5) recognition of “Manchukuo” and close cooperation among the three states of China, Japan, and Manchukuo to create a
political and economic association in the Far East; (6) a halt to all anti-Japanese
movements in China; (7) concentrating all the power of China and Japan to
attack China’s soviet revolution, especially the soviets and the Workers’ and
Peasants’ Red Army in the Northwest; (8) the right of Japanese representatives
to attend Guomindang congresses to observe whether China is sincere about
Sino-Japanese friendship.

These conditions put forward by the Japanese imperialist bandits are clearly
designed not only to annex the whole of North China, but to turn the whole of
China into a colony of Japanese imperialism! No Chinese with the slightest
degree of conscience, faced with the danger of the destruction of the state and
the extermination of the race, can possibly accept these conditions or willingly

---

Notes

4. According to Peng’s autobiography (Peng Dehuai zishu [Beijing: Renmin
chubanshe, 1981], pp. 206–7), when he received this poem from Mao, out of modesty he
changed the last line to read: “None other than our heroic Red Army,” and sent it back to
Mao. The version of the poem as given in Peng’s autobiography also has several variants
from the published text. The editors of the Shici duilian quote reminiscences of Zhang
Aiping (1910–) to the effect that in August 1947 Peng Dehuai scored a crucial victory in
the battle of Shajiadian, at which point Mao wrote this poem again for him, with the last
line as in the original.

--- Notes

This poem first appeared in the August 1, 1947, issue of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan
People’s Liberation Army paper, Zhanyou, and was reprinted in the April 1957 issue of
Jiefangjun wenyi. We have translated it from the Shici duilian, pp. 61–62.

1. This is another occurrence of a poem by Mao in other than the ci form. The
six-character poem [liuyan shi] is a classical verse form with six characters to a line, in
which the rhyme scheme, number of lines, and tonal patterns are not strictly defined as
they are in “regulated verse.”

2. This poem is usually dated simply October, but the Nianpu, Vol. 1, p. 481, states
that Mao wrote it immediately after Peng’s forces had smashed the Guomindang cavalry
on October 21.

3. According to the editors of the Shici duilian, when the Central Red Army’s
Shaanxi-Gansu Detachment (commanded by Peng Dehuai) reached Wuqizhen on the
border of the northern Shaanxi base area, they were pursued by the cavalry forces of Ma
Hongkui (1892–1970) and Ma Hongbin (1884–1960). Both these men were generals in
the Guomindang armies; Ma Hongkui had formerly been chairman of the Ningxia
provincial government, and Ma Hongbin had been chairman of the Gansu government. In
1934, they had combined with Ma Bufang (1903–1975) to establish the power of the
so-called “Ma Family Clique” in the northwest, and in September 1935, Ma Hongbin, as
commander of the Guomindang Thirty-fifth Army, had participated in an attack on the
Red Army in north Shaanxi. Mao and Peng composed a telegram advocating a
counterattack on the Ma family forces. The telegram, which is not available to us,
contained a sentence describing the Shaanxi and Gansu terrain as being full of “high
mountains, long roads, and deep gullies.” Using a different word for “gullies,” Mao took
that description as the first line of this poem.

Our source for this telegram is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, vol. 1, pp. 380–81.

    1. This telegram is addressed to Xu Haidong, commander of the Red Army First
       Front Army’s Fifteenth Army Group. Xu Haidong (1900–1970) was a native of Hubei.
       After serving under Zhang Fakui during the Northern Expedition, Xu became a guerrilla
       leader in the Eyuwan (Hubei-Henan-Anhui) area during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
       Eventually, he became commander of the Red Twenty-fifth Army, which was ordered to
       North Shaanxi by the Party in 1935. There the Twenty-fifth Army joined forces with the
       Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh armies, and together formed the Fifteenth Army Group.
       As noted above in the Introduction, the Fifteenth Army Group had just welcomed Mao
       Zedong to Shaanxi in mid-October.

    2. Dong Yingbin (1894–1950) was a native of Liaoning. At this time he was
       commander of the Seventh Column (Fifty-seventh Army) of the Second Route under the
       Guomindang army’s Northwest “Bandit Suppression” General Headquarters.


We have translated this document from Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, vol. 4, pp. 233–36.