Local Troops Should Be Transferred to
Replenish the Field Army
 (October 19, 1945)
To Zheng [Weisan] and Li [Xiannian]:1
	 1.	 We received your telegram sent on October 14 between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M.2
You have too few field armies and too many local armies. We expect you
to transfer at least 10,000 troops from the subdistricts to replenish the field
army, raising the number of troops in each regiment to over 2,000 so it will
be possible to win major victories. This will be the first field army group and
its total must reach about 24,000.
	 2.	 In the future, the field army should form a second group. We estimate
that the first group will not survive in the Yanhe Plain District under the
Guomindang’s policy of annihilation. Senior officials must now become psychologically prepared and begin the necessary preparatory work. When the
time comes, our struggle in the area will become lawful (in coordination with
other local unlawful struggles),3 and you will organize the principal local
forces into a second group of the field army (one brigade for each subdistrict)
to accompany the first group of the field army in its operations in the new
area. Careful thought should be given to this matter, and it should not be
done in a haphazard way.
	 3.	 The forces in southern Hubei Province and around Jiujiang must move north
at once.
	 4.	 We look forward to hearing your opinions.
The Military Commission

--- Notes

Our source for this text is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, Vol. 3, pp. 62–63, where it is reproduced from Mao’s handwritten manuscript preserved in the Central Archives.

1.  Zheng Weisan was acting secretary of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui (E-Yu-Wan) Bureau
of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Li Xiannian was a committee member of the bureau and commander of the Fifth Division of the New Fourth Army
as well as commander and political commissar of the Hubei-Henan-Anhui-Hunan-Jiangxi
(E-Yu-Wan-Xiang-Gan) Military Region.

2.  The telegram from the Hunan-Henan-Anhui Military Region spoke of reorganizing
the number of personnel in the military region.

3.  Mao here uses “lawful” and “unlawful” (hefa, feifa) to designate what the Chinese
Communist Party usually referred to as “open work” and “secret work.”
DOI:  10.4324/9781315719511-49