Sixteen-Character Formula

"Sixteen-character formula" of the guerrilla warfare of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army was short for "the enemy advances, we retreat, the enemy is stationed, we disturb, the enemy is tired, we fight, and the enemy retreats, we pursue".

Mao Zedong led the troops of the Autumn Harvest Uprising at the Hunan-Jiangxi border and moved to the Jinggang Mountain area at the border of Hunan-Jiangxi in October 1927, mobilizing and organizing the people to carry out "the armed division of the workers and peasants" and guerrilla warfare.

Between November and December of that year, Mao Zedong summed up the positive and negative experiences of the two attacks on Chalin by the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army and proposed the principle of "the enemy advances and I retreat". At the same time, the peasant self-defense army of Wan’an County also fought ten major battles with the enemy from November 1927 to January 1928, accumulating some experience in guerrilla warfare.

In January 1928, Mao Zedong presided over a joint meeting of the Front Enemy Committee of the First Division of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army of the Communist Party of China, the Suichuan County Committee and the Wan'an County Committee in Suichuan County, summarizing the experience and lessons learned from the guerrilla warfare in the past few months and proposing the "twelve words" of "the enemy comes and I go, the enemy stays and I disturb, the enemy retreats and I chase."

Soon after, the enemy attacked Suichuan, Mao Zedong avoided the strong enemy and led his troops back to Jinggang Mountain. When the enemy attacked Wan'an, the CPC Wan'an County Committee adopted the principle of "clear the field, the enemy comes, I retreat, the enemy goes, I chase, the enemy stationed, I disturb, the enemy less, I attack" to fight with the enemy.

In April of the same year, the Fourth Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army was established, and its commander Zhu De and Party representative Mao Zedong further enriched the content of this principle by directing the troops in guerrilla activities and combat practice against the enemy's "advance and suppression" and "meet and attack".

In May of the same year, after the victory in the battle of Wudoujiang in Suichuan (Jiangxi Province), Mao Zedong put forward for the first time the strategic guiding principle of "the enemy advances, I retreat, the enemy stations, I disturb, the enemy is tired, I fight, the enemy retreats, I chase" in full.

On April 5, 1929, this principle was formally put forward in the "Report of the Fourth Red Army Front Committee to the Central Committee on the Current Situation and the Guerrilla Tactics of the Red Army in Fujian-Jiangxi Struggle".

September 28, 1929, the "Letter of Instruction from the CPC Central Committee to the Fourth Red Army Forward Committee" (i.e., the "September Letter") referred to it for the first time as the "Sixteen Characters."

In December 1936, Mao Zedong further pointed out in his article "The Strategic Problems of the Chinese Revolutionary War" that "the Sixteen-Character Tactic encompasses the basic principles of anti-'encirclement', the two stages of strategic defense and strategic attack, and in defense the two stages of strategic retreat and strategic counterattack, and what comes later is simply its development.”

This showed that the "Sixteen Characters" is not only a theoretical summary and generalization of the combat experience of the Red Army in its infancy, but also the basis of the strategic and tactical system of the People's Army under the leadership of the Communist Party. It correctly solved some major problems of the Communist Party's independent leadership of the army and revolutionary warfare, and was a creative development of the Marxist-Leninist theory of strategy and tactics of revolutionary warfare, which had important guiding significance at that time and later.

The strategic principles of guerrilla warfare against Japan put forward during the Anti-Japanese War and the "Ten Military Principles" summarized during the War of Liberation were all developed on the basis of the "Sixteen-Character Formula". It still has positive guiding significance for China's future war against aggression.