Transfer of Intelligence
After the successful besiege of the adjacent regions of Ruijin, the capital of the Jiangxi Soviet, and occupying most of the Jiangxi Soviet, Chiang was confident that he would finish off the Communists in one final decisive strike. In late September 1934, Chiang distributed his top secret plan named "Iron Bucket Plan" to everyone in his general headquarters at Lushan, which detailed the final push to totally annihilate the Communist force. The plan was to build 30 blockade lines supported by 30 barbed wire fences, most of them electric, in the region 150 km around Ruijin, to starve the Communists. In addition, more than 1,000 trucks were to be mobilized to form a rapid reaction force in order to prevent any communist breakout. Realizing the certain annihilation of the Communists, Mo Xiong handed the document weighing several kilograms to his communist handler the same night he received it, risking not only his own life, but that of his entire family.
With the help of Liu Yafo (刘亚佛) and Lu Zhiying (卢志英), the Communist agents copied the important intelligence on four dictionaries and Xiang Yunian (项与年) was tasked to take the intelligence personally to the Jiangxi Soviet. The trip was hazardous, as the nationalist force would arrest and even execute anyone who attempted to cross the blockade. Xiang Yunian (项与年) was forced to hide in the mountain for a while, and then used rocks to knock out four of his own teeth, resulting in a swollen face. Disguised as a beggar, he tore off the covers of the four dictionaries and hid them at the bottom of his bag with rotten food, then successfully crossed several lines of blockade and reached Ruijin on October 7, 1934. The valuable intelligence provided by Mo Xiong (莫雄) finally convinced the Communists in the Jiangxi Soviet to abandon its base and started the Long March before Chiang could complete the building of his blockade lines with supporting barbed wire fences, and mobilizing trucks and troops, thus saving themselves from total annihilation. The intelligence was so secret that only Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Otto Braun (Li De) of the three men committee of the Communist leadership had known about it, not even Mao Zedong. On October 10, 1934, the Communist leadership formally issued the order of the general retreat, and on October 16, 1934, the Chinese Red Army begun what was later known as the Long March, fully abandoning the Jiangxi Soviet. Seventeen days after the main Communist force had already left its base, the nationalists were finally aware that the enemy had escaped after reaching the empty city of Ruijin on November 5, 1934.
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