We Are Able to Overcome Difficulties 1
 (July 31, 1949)
I
The Chinese Communist Party was responsible for the Nanchang Uprising as well
as the many other uprisings that took place throughout the country at the same
time. After Chiang Kaishek’s reactionaries declared their counterrevolutionary
coup on April 12, 1927, the Chinese Communist Party immediately decided to
lead the people against Chiang Kaishek’s counterrevolutionaries. The Nanchang
Uprising on August 1st was the first of a series of revolutionary uprisings at that
time. It has been twenty-two years since that uprising. The young people from that
time are adults now; the adults from that time are elderly now. But the revolution
has finally succeeded.
II
This army is made up of workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals, with
workers and peasants constituting about 90 percent and revolutionary intellectuals constituting about 10 percent. The revolutionary intellectuals have accepted
Marxism and Leninism. They not only know how to educate the troops with
a revolutionary spirit, and steadfastly execute the political line of the Chinese
Communist Party and its specific policies but they also understand the future of
the revolution, that is, that our revolution will pass through a republic that is a dictatorship of the people and progressively develop into socialism and communism.
III
All workers and revolutionary intellectuals throughout the country now
deeply trust the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.
However, in several newly liberated regions, there are people (including certain
Our source for this document is Mao Zedong wenji, Vol. 5, pp. 314–16, where it is
1.  These are three additional paragraphs written by Mao Zedong when he vetted the
draft of a Xinhua News Agency editorial commemorating the twenty-second anniversary
of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. The title of this document is the revised
title, as rewritten by Mao.
DOI:  10.4324/9781315719436-298

well-meaning and warm-hearted intellectuals) who feel nervous in the face of natural and manmade disasters and the economic and personal difficulties caused by
enemy blockades. This is because they have just recently been liberated, and they
have no experience overcoming difficulties under the leadership of the Chinese
Communist Party. The twenty-two-year war of people’s liberation has taught
us that all regions from which the enemies are expelled and where the people’s
political power is established inevitably experience a period of hardship. These
difficulties can be overcome, but this requires time and effort. Some places require
only several months or a year, while in other places we must spend two or three
years, or even longer, to completely pull military, political, economic, and cultural
functions away from the enemy’s old and chaotic trajectories and to completely
set ourselves on new and stable developmental trajectories. Overcoming these
difficulties requires first completing several basic tasks. These are: (1) annihilating feudal forces and giving peasants ownership of the land; (2) achieving better
troops and simpler administration and reducing the country’s expenditures; (3)
on the basis of the two aforementioned items, restoring and developing all beneficial industrial and agricultural production. Without these several basic tasks,
the so-called surmounting of difficulties will be but empty talk. But to complete
the aforementioned tasks, we must be prepared to spend, on average, about three
years in the various newly liberated provinces in the South and Northwest; it will
not do for us to rush things. In major cities such as Shanghai, where imperialism
and its “running dogs” have enacted blockade policies against us, we need to add
the further task of evacuating the population.
We are able to overcome difficulties; we are not afraid of any difficulties whatsoever. The twenty-two-year fighting record of the People’s Liberation Army
has given us this experience and confidence. As long as the Chinese Communist
Party, the People’s Liberation Army, and the people of the entire country understand the nature of the difficulties we face, and resolutely execute the fundamental
policies to overcome these difficulties, we will be able to attain our goal.

reproduced from Mao’s handwritten manuscript.