This volume opens with the Chinese Communists in the midst of the Long March, and threatened with defeat in the face of Chiang Kaishek's efforts to exterminate the "Communist bandits" once and for all; it ends with the establishment, after a decade of civil war, of a new agreement between the Communists and the Guomindang to join together in resisting Japanese aggression. During the whole of the year 1935, the Red Army was moving and fighting, so battlefield telegrams are naturally prominent in this part of the volume. There are also, however, a number of political statements denouncing Chiang Kaishek's failure to fight Japan, and proposing a "government of national defense" including all patriotic forces, as well as texts which throw light on the increasingly tense relationship between Mao Zedong and Zhang Guotao. In 1936, the line changes from denouncing Chiang to forcing him to fight the Japanese. The materials translated here include many previously unpublished documents regarding negotiations with representatives of Chiang Kaishek on the one hand, and Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng on the other, in pursuit of this objective. The volume includes a day-by-day chronicle, in Mao's own words, of his reaction to the Xi'an Incident, followed by materials regarding the negotiations during the ensuing half year which led to the formation of the Second United Front. Among the texts made available are numerous letters from Mao to Chiang, Zhang, Yang, and other leading figures of the time. The volume also contains a new translation of Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War, which includes Mao's analysis, deleted from the Selected Works version, of military tactics in Napoleon'sinvasion of Russia and in the First World War.