February 10, 1940

[This article was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung for the New China
News of Yenan on the occasion of its first anniversary.]


Resistance, unity and progress--these are the three major principles which
the Communist Party put forward last July 7 on the second anniversary of
the War of Resistance. The three form an organic whole, and not one of them
can be dispensed with. If the stress is solely on resistance to the exclusion
of unity and progress, then such "resistance" will be neither dependable
nor enduring. Without a programme for unity and progress, resistance must
sooner or later turn into capitulation or end in defeat. We Communists hold
that the three must be integrated. For the sake of the War of Resistance,
it is necessary to fight against capitulation, against Wang Ching-wei's
traitorous pact with Japan, against his puppet regime, and against all the
traitors and capitulators concealed in the anti-Japanese ranks. For the sake
of unity, it is necessary to oppose splitting activities and internal "friction",
to oppose the stabbing of the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies and other
progressive anti-Japanese groups in the back, to oppose the disruption of
the anti-Japanese base areas behind the enemy lines and of the
Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region which is the rear area of the Eighth Route
Army, to oppose the denial of legal status to the Communist Party and the
avalanche of documents for "restricting the activities of alien parties".
For the sake of progress, it is necessary to oppose retrogression and the
shelving of the Three People's Principles and of the Programme of Armed
Resistance and National Reconstruction, to oppose the refusal to carry out
the injunction in Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Testament to "arouse the masses of the
people", to oppose the internment of progressive young people in concentration
camps, to oppose the suppression of what little freedom of speech and of
the press there was in the early days of the War of Resistance, to oppose
the scheme to turn the movement for constitutional government into the private
concern of a few bureaucrats, to oppose the attacks on the new army, the
persecution of the League of Self-Sacrifice and the massacre of progressives
in Shansi,[1] to oppose the activities of the Three
People's Principles Youth League in kidnapping people along the Hsienyang-Yulin
Highway and the Lunghai Railway,[2] to oppose such
shameless practices as taking nine concubines and making fortunes of 100
million yuan out of the national crisis, and to oppose the unbridled brutality
of the corrupt officials and the local tyrants and evil gentry. Without opposing
all these and without unity and progress, "resistance" will be just empty
talk and victory a vain hope. What will be the political orientation of the
New China News in its second year? It will be to stress unity and
progress and oppose all the vicious practices which are detrimental to the
war, so that further successes can be achieved in our cause of resistance
to Japan.

NOTES


1. The League of Self-Sacrifice for National Salvation
in Shansi was a local anti-Japanese mass organization formed in 1936 which
co-operated closely with the Communist Party. It played an important role
in the anti-Japanese fighting there. In December 1939 Yen Hsi-shan, the
Kuomintang warlord-governor of Shansi, openly began to suppress the league
in the western part of the province and brutally killed a great number of
Communists, officers of the league and other progressives.

2. In 1939 the Kuomintang drew a cordon along the
Hsienyang-Yulin Highway and the Lunghai (Kansu-Haichow) Railway by setting
up a number of check-posts in the guise of "hostels" of the Three Peoples
Principles Youth League. Secret agents posted at these hostels, working together
with the Kuomintang troops, arrested progressive young people and intellectuals
entering or leaving the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region and interned them
in concentration camps, where they were either cruelly murdered or
compelled to turn informer against the Communist Party.


Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project.