Local Retaliation Adopted toward Attacks by
the Diehard Army
(May 19, 1946)
To Zhou [Enlai] and Ye [Jianying]:1
	 1.	 Siping has become difficult to continue to defend and we have decided to
give up that city and engage in mobile warfare.
	 2.	 During the past week, the diehards have taken from us the four towns of
Anci, Xiao county, Xiayi, and Dingyuan and have attacked our Shuidong
region.2 In each place they deployed a force of about 20,000 troops in what
were clearly acts of deliberate provocation. In the main, we will continue to
put up with this and we only need to take local retaliatory measures.
A and B3

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Notes

Our source for this text is Mao Zedong junshi wenji, Vol. 3, p. 228, where it is reproduced from Mao’s handwritten manuscript held in the Central Archives.
2.  Shuidong, or “east of the water,” refers to the area in eastern Henan Province, south
of the Longhai railway and east of the Yellow River when it was rerouted in 1938. The
Chinese Communist Party established its Shuidong Military Subregion in the area of Sui
and Ji counties and Taikang during the war with Japan, and it became the Twelfth Military
Subregion of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region in January 1945.

--- Notes

1.  Mao Zedong drafted this telegram on behalf of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Ye Jianying was the representative of the Chinese Communist Party
to the Beiping Office for Military Mediation.

3.  Here as elsewhere, we have substituted the letters A and B for the characters jia and
yi. Since our source indicates that Mao drafted this text on behalf of the Central Committee, A and B may stand for the Central Committee and the Central Military Commission.
DOI:  10.4324/9781315719511-148