Prepare to Deal with the Civil War Situation
That Is Certain to Arise
(August 4, 1945)
To Zheng [Weisan], Li [Xiannian], and Chen [Shaomin]:1
We received your telegram of July 21. You are correct to anticipate problems
in the future.
	 1.	 We predict that the Japanese aggressors will be defeated next winter, giving you one more year to prepare. You must prepare everything within this
period to deal with the certain arrival of a civil war situation; otherwise, you
will be forced to act during a state of crisis and suffer losses as a result.
	 2.	 After the defeat of the Japanese bandits and the outbreak of civil war, it will
certainly be very difficult for you to retain your present territory on the plain.
You should now think about expanding and developing base areas in the
Tongbo Mountains, the Dabie Mountains, western Hubei, southern Hubei,
eastern Hubei, and northern Xiangfan. This is an extremely difficult task,
so you must plan prudently in advance. You should have a few base areas.
Among them, the eastern Hubei, southern Hubei, western Hubei, and northern Xiangfan base areas can grow gradually out of the current base areas;
the base areas in Dabie and Tongbo already now have considerable scale. In
the future we may be able to concentrate our main forces to take over part or
a large part of them as their major base area, and the other places can be
satellites. Now, it is very important to try your best to increase our strength
in southern Henan and to merge as soon as possible with Wang [Shusheng]
and Dai [Jiying].2 Please consider whether the division headquarters and the
regional Party committee should be moved to southern Henan.
Our source for this text is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, Vol. 2, pp. 812–13, where it is
	 3.	 Strengthen mass work, the militia, military training, financial work, and the
preparation of cadres. We hope you can summarize your experience with
these five items at the enlarged meeting. You should stress the items you are
not very good at. Fighting is not the only task of the military; it also has the
tasks of carrying out mass work and engaging in production and becoming
self-reliant. You must see to it that this is properly resolved. The relationship
between officers and soldiers in the army as well as the relationship between
the army and the people should be resolved properly in military training. It
is not a matter of lacking cadres to do local work, but rather a problem of
the lack of emphasis on the military’s task of helping the local levels with
mass work. Putting emphasis on this and changing the army’s work style will
make more cadres available for local work.
	 4.	 Self-reliance should be practiced in all things. Do not depend on any outside
assistance. From now on, the starting point of your work must be to prepare
psychologically and in terms of strength to deal with the danger of civil war
in the future.
The Central Committee

reproduced from Mao Zedong’s handwritten manuscript in the Central Archives.

--- Notes

1.  Mao Zedong drafted this telegram on behalf of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Zheng Weisan (1902–1975, native of Hubei) was secretary of the
Hubei-Henan-Anhui Border Region Party Committee, and Chen Shaomin (1902–1977,
native of Shandong) was deputy secretary. Li Xiannian (1909–1992, native of Hubei) was
commander of the Fifth Division of the New Fourth Army and commander and political
commissar of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui-Hunan-Jiangxi Military Region.

2.  Wang Shusheng (1905–1974, native of Hubei) and Dai Jiying (1906–1997, native
of Hubei) were commander and political commissar, respectively, of the Henan Military
Region.
DOI:  10.4324/9781315719511-2