Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
February 10, 1940
[This article was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung for the New China News of Yenan on the occasion of its first anniversary.]
Resistance, unity and progress--these are the three major principles which the Communist Party put forward last July 7 on the second anniversary of the War of Resistance. The three form an organic whole, and not one of them can be dispensed with. If the stress is solely on resistance to the exclusion of unity and progress, then such "resistance" will be neither dependable nor enduring. Without a programme for unity and progress, resistance must sooner or later turn into capitulation or end in defeat. We Communists hold that the three must be integrated. For the sake of the War of Resistance, it is necessary to fight against capitulation, against Wang Ching-wei's traitorous pact with Japan, against his puppet regime, and against all the traitors and capitulators concealed in the anti-Japanese ranks. For the sake of unity, it is necessary to oppose splitting activities and internal "friction", to oppose the stabbing of the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies and other progressive anti-Japanese groups in the back, to oppose the disruption of the anti-Japanese base areas behind the enemy lines and of the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region which is the rear area of the Eighth Route Army, to oppose the denial of legal status to the Communist Party and the avalanche of documents for "restricting the activities of alien parties". For the sake of progress, it is necessary to oppose retrogression and the shelving of the Three People's Principles and of the Programme of Armed Resistance and National Reconstruction, to oppose the refusal to carry out the injunction in Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Testament to "arouse the masses of the people", to oppose the internment of progressive young people in concentration camps, to oppose the suppression of what little freedom of speech and of the press there was in the early days of the War of Resistance, to oppose the scheme to turn the movement for constitutional government into the private concern of a few bureaucrats, to oppose the attacks on the new army, the persecution of the League of Self-Sacrifice and the massacre of progressives in Shansi,[1] to oppose the activities of the Three People's Principles Youth League in kidnapping people along the Hsienyang-Yulin Highway and the Lunghai Railway,[2] to oppose such shameless practices as taking nine concubines and making fortunes of 100 million yuan out of the national crisis, and to oppose the unbridled brutality of the corrupt officials and the local tyrants and evil gentry. Without opposing all these and without unity and progress, "resistance" will be just empty talk and victory a vain hope. What will be the political orientation of the New China News in its second year? It will be to stress unity and progress and oppose all the vicious practices which are detrimental to the war, so that further successes can be achieved in our cause of resistance to Japan.
1. The League of Self-Sacrifice for National Salvation in Shansi was a local anti-Japanese mass organization formed in 1936 which co-operated closely with the Communist Party. It played an important role in the anti-Japanese fighting there. In December 1939 Yen Hsi-shan, the Kuomintang warlord-governor of Shansi, openly began to suppress the league in the western part of the province and brutally killed a great number of Communists, officers of the league and other progressives.
2. In 1939 the Kuomintang drew a cordon along the Hsienyang-Yulin Highway and the Lunghai (Kansu-Haichow) Railway by setting up a number of check-posts in the guise of "hostels" of the Three Peoples Principles Youth League. Secret agents posted at these hostels, working together with the Kuomintang troops, arrested progressive young people and intellectuals entering or leaving the Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region and interned them in concentration camps, where they were either cruelly murdered or compelled to turn informer against the Communist Party.