Telegram to Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying, and Others[1]

(September 26, 1946)

Regardless of whether Huaiyin, Heze, Jining, and even certain other key locations have been or will be occupied by the enemy, it is entirely possible for our field forces to annihilate forty to fifty enemy brigades (twenty brigades have already been annihilated from July to the present). So long as this objective is attained, the situation will immediately change for the better. Chiang Kai-shek’s reserves are already exhausted; with every brigade annihilated, he will have one brigade fewer.

[1] This is the main content of a telegram drafted by Mao Zedong for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China to Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying, Lin Biao, and Li Fuchun, reporting that the Fourth Column of the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Field Army and local armed forces had annihilated the First Brigade of the First Reorganized Division of Hu Zongnan’s forces near Fushan City.