(April 20, 1938)

To Comrades [Nie] Rongzhen and Peng Zhen,¹ and to be passed on to Zhu [De]
and Peng [Dehuai]:

Your telegram of the 10th has arrived only today.
1. As a result of various favorable conditions, plus your leadership and the
efforts made by our comrades, there has been great development in all aspects of
the anti-Japanese movement in the broad area of Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei. On the
whole, the establishment of the base area has already been successfully completed,
but it is still not consolidated in all respects. Your central task at present is to
consolidate the victories that have already been won in all areas and to pursue
further development on the basis of consolidating the existing foundation.
2. Your victory and development pose an enormous threat to the base area of
the Japanese bandits-Beiping and Tianjin--and the Japanese bandits are bound
to exhaust every possible means to attack and destroy you. Besides engaging in
brutal armed attacks, they are even more certain to send out and buy off large
numbers of Chinese traitors, vagabonds, and local bandits to sneak into various
Party, government, military, and mass organizations, and particularly into military
organizations, to engage in conspiracy and sabotage. It would be hard to rule out
the role of enemy conspiracies in the assassination of the person in charge of the
Party Committee for the area east of the railroad and in the various unprincipled
disputes within the Party and the army. You should pay serious attention to this.
3. In order to consolidate your forces rapidly, so as to continue to bring about
even greater development, we make the following proposals:
a. Step up reorganization and training, and Party work within the armed forces.
Purge undesirable elements such as vagabonds, local bandits, and others who

Our source for this text is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, Vol. 2, pp. 214-16, where it is reproduced from a copy in the Central Archives.
1. Peng Zhen (1902-1997), a native of Shanxi, was released by the Guomindang in
1935 after six years in prison. When the Sino-Japanese war began, he moved to Yan'an and
was assigned to work with the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army in Shanxi, under
the command of Nie Rongzhen.

have wormed their way into our forces. Investigate and unite cadres at all
levels. Carefully and effectively set up security work within the military.
b. Rid the base area of local bandits, and use prudent and effective methods to
reform those banditlike anti-Japanese troops. Strengthen the work of eliminating traitors at the local level. Restore and establish an anti-Japanese order.
c. Apart from sending Huang Jing² to the east of the railway to rectify the work
of the Party there, one person should immediately be chosen from among
comrades Wang Ping, Liu Daosheng, and Zhao Erlu,³ and sent east of the
railway to serve as political commissar for Lü's troops⁴ and, concurrently,
head of the Provincial Military Affairs Department. Or else a command headquarters should be established for the army subdistrict to the east of the railroad, so as to rectify effectively the troops under Lü and Meng.⁵ Once Lü's
forces have been reorganized and are in order, a portion of his troops may be
assigned to follow Deng Hua's forces in expanding toward eastern Hebei and
the Rehe border area.
d. Consolidate the Party organization and its internal unity and cohesion, and
improve its iron discipline. Any act at present that undermines the internal
unity and cohesion of the Party is of the greatest assistance to the enemy.
Severely criticize and correct all factional activities, strengthen education
with regard to principles within the Party, and raise the prestige of the Party
and its leading cadres among the masses.
e. Correct certain ultra-Left actions and guild tendencies in the mass movement, and ameliorate the landlords' and rich peasants' fear of and opposition
to us. But the central task must remain the mobilization of the enthusiasm of
the masses for the War of Resistance, to establish genuine mass organizations
which are truly powerful, and to carry out effective organizational work.
f. There should be no further changes in the way the government is organized.
In addition to broadly organizing and training the Self-Defense Army, the
main work is to raise funds and procure food so as to solve the problem of
supplying the troops. As for the way to raise funds, in addition to regular

2. At this time, Huang Jing was secretary of the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei District Party
Committee. On the following day, April 21, he became secretary of the Central Hebei District Party Committee.
3. Wang, Liu, and Zhao were the political commissars for, respectively, the third army
subdistrict, the fourth army subdistrict, and the second army subdistrict under the Eighth
Route Army's Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region. Zhao served concurrently as his army
subdistrict's commander.
4. The reference is to the unit under the command of Lü Zhengcao, a Communist Party
member, which had originally been the Sixty-ninth Regiment of the 388th Column of the
Fifty-third Army of the Guomindang Northeastern Army, but which Lü had led in October
1937 to abandon the Guomindang and become part of the People's Self-Defense Army.
5. Meng refers to Meng Qingshan, then commander of the guerrilla army in Hebei.