邓小平文选/跃进中原的胜利形势与今后的政策策略

On this visit to the Henan-Shaanxi-Hubei Border Area I find the situation very good, the result not only of efforts made by all the Party, government and army comrades here, but also of the countrywide counter-offensives launched in July last year.

I have been asked to talk about the current situation and I think the existence of the embryonic Henan-Shaanxi-Hubei Border Area confirms, on the whole, what I have just said about the situation.

Over the past nine months there has been a new development in the war situation nationwide; our army has switched to counter-offensive in every area.

We have advanced five hundred kilometers from the Yellow River to the Yangtze River.

We cannot underestimate the significance of this advance, for China is only a few thousands of kilometers from north to south.

The present advance is indicative of the tremendous change that has taken place in the strategic situation, and as noted by Chairman Mao in his report “The Present Situation and Our Tasks”, our counter-offensive has turned the war around.

We have thwarted Chiang Kai-shek's counter-revolutionary plan, forcing him to go from the offensive to the defensive and from exterior to interior lines; at the same time, we have moved from the defensive to the offensive and from interior to exterior lines, thus changing the strategic situation.

Since our field armies moved to exterior lines, they have suffered hardships, with troops in the Dabie Mountains, in particular, encountering many difficulties.

Conditions are somewhat better for troops operating in the Henan-Shaanxi-Hubei Border Area, but they still feel that things are not so easy as before when they were fighting on interior lines in the Taiyue area.

Facts have shown that the counter-offensive was launched at just the right moment and that it would have been a mistake if we had delayed it.

This is because Chiang Kai-shek's counter-revolutionary strategy is to continue with the war in the liberated areas, an experience he gained from his protracted war against the people.

Comrades who took part in the civil war during the ten-year Soviet period can understand this point.

During those years, whether we were fighting in the Central Soviet Area, the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area or the Western Hunan-Hubei Soviet Area, we found ourselves encircled by the enemy on all sides.

The enemy's policy was to keep the fighting centred around or in the Soviet areas, trying to exhaust the manpower, material supplies and financial resources in our Soviet areas and make it impossible for us to fight on even if we were victorious in some military operations.

During the campaign against the enemy's fifth “encirclement and suppression”, if we had moved from interior to exterior lines, dragging the enemy out of the Soviet areas in accordance with the principle formulated by Chairman Mao, the outcome would have been better -- the Soviet areas would have been preserved and the Red Army would not have been forced to begin the Long March.

Unfortunately, the “Left” opportunists didn't do it that way and fell into Chiang Kai-shek's trap.

This time Chiang Kai-shek wanted to resort to the same trick of restricting the fight to the liberated areas in an attempt to exhaust our manpower, material supplies and financial resources and make it impossible for us to carry on the fight and move out of the liberated areas, so that he could keep his rear area, with a population of 300 million, out of the war and obtain supplies from the area for his military operations.

Although Chiang Kai-shek is shrewd in his calculations, we have our Chairman Mao, who is even wiser and saw through them as early as when he began to formulate the concept of the principle for the war of self-defence.

He pointed out to us that we should start by fighting on interior lines and then carry the war to exterior lines, that is, to the Kuomintang areas after we had weakened the enemy considerably.

Since, in the initial stage of the war, we were not equipped well enough and still lacked experience in military operations, it was more convenient for us to wipe out the enemy, organize and expand our forces and accumulate experience by fighting on interior lines.

In the first year of the war of self-defence, from July 1946 to June 1947, we annihilated a total of 1.12 million enemy troops on all the battle fronts in the country.

We organized the dispersed guerrilla units into field armies and accumulated a wealth of experience in military operations.

This is the right moment for us to carry the war to exterior lines; otherwise, we shall suffer setbacks.

After fighting on interior lines in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Area for one year, for example, the number of chickens, swine and draught animals raised by the local peasants dropped sharply, as also did the number of trees in the villages.