History is always moving ahead in a wavelike fashion, and the people of today outpace those of yesterday in their continuous forward advance. - Peng Dehuai

Most of the officers and men in the PLA had their own histories of blood and tears. Since everybody had kept his bitter experience to himself, the soldiers’ common hatred for the enemy did not turn into a common class feeling.

I was deeply influenced by my grand-uncle who had been a member of the Taiping Army. He often told me stories about the Taiping forces. The Taipings, he used to say, had food for everybody, the women unbound their feet, and the land was shared out among the tillers. This instilled in me the idea of taking the landlords’ riches to relieve the poor, of wiping out the landlords and finding a way out for the poor.

We are determined to overthrow imperialism and the Kuomintang government, form a government of workers, peasants and soldiers; confiscate the land of the landlords and give it to the peasants. We will establish a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in which officers and men are equal, the officers are elected by soldiers’ committees, and the accounts are kept open.