To All Field Armies and All Military Regions[1]

(August 14, 1948)

We hope that all field armies and all rear-area military regions will produce reports of this kind—substantive in content, analytical, and conclusive. However, within the military, with regard to such important matters as major training plans and operational plans, the course of training and operations, policy education and the implementation of policies, there still exists a phenomenon that has not yet been completely eliminated: neither requesting instructions beforehand nor submitting reports afterward, and still regarding the field armies or military region organs and units under one’s command as if they were independent states, without seriously examining or reflecting on the dangerous tendency toward indiscipline that the Central Committee has initiated within the Party to oppose. We now issue a warning to all responsible comrades in all armies and military regions: in the third year of the war, we will demand that you strictly implement a timely and complete reporting system, and we make this an absolutely inviolable directive. The content of both prior requests for instructions and subsequent reports must be analytical and conclusive, not empty and devoid of substance; it must speak of both merits and strengths as well as shortcomings and errors, and not only speak of merits and strengths while omitting or downplaying shortcomings and errors.

[1] This is the main content of a telegram drafted by Mao Zedong for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and its Military Commission, addressed to all field armies, all military regions, and all central bureaus and sub-bureaus.