The former site of the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi'an Office lies at No 1Qixian Zhuang(manors for seven virtuous persons),BeixinStreet(a new street in the north),XiwuRoad(the fifth road in the west), Xi'an City, ShaanxiProvince. It faces south and has 10 rooms. It has been rebuilt as theMemorialMuseumof the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi'an Office.
The second KMT (Kuomintang)-CCP cooperation came into being after the peaceful settlement of the Xi'an Incident in 1936. To make their deliberations over matters about the resistance against the Japanese aggression more convenient, the CPC (the Communist Party of China) established the Red Army Liaison Office.
After the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) broke out, the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (1927-1937) was reorganized into the Eighth Army of the National Revolutionary Army. In September 1937, the Red Army liaison Office was renamed the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi'an Office. Its main tasks were to disseminate Anti-Japanese National United Front policies, as well as expand them, organize the resistance against Japanese invaders for national salvation, escort the patriotic Progressive Youth to Yan'an to cultivate and enlarge the revolutionary force and, at the same time, purchase and transport materials to the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region and front, in support of the Anti-Japanese War. Numerous leaders of the CPC, such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Wu Yuzhang, and many others, once came here to give instructions. Many foreign friends, like Henry Norman Bethune, 1890-1939; Dwarkanath Shantaram Kotnis, 1910-1942, an Indian doctor who spent the last 10 years of his life in China working with the Communist Party; Agnes Smedley, 1890-1950, a US journalist and writer who wrote books about China's revolution, includingThe Great Road-- the biography of Marshal Zhu De -- also lived and worked here for some time.
The Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi'an Office is a legal office settled in the provinces under the KMT's control. In September 1946, Chiang Kaishek started a full-scale civil war and the office was moved fromXi'anto Yan'an.
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