Qixinglazi: a forest base in the resistance years

In 1936, an independent division of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army established a base at Qixinglazi with an arms workshop, clothing workshop and military-political school. The division became the Eleventh Army in October 1937; other units, including parts of the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth armies, later entered the area. In February 1938, Japanese and puppet forces destroyed the base. A source published by the Chinese Communist Party history research office records the deaths of political officer Jin Gen, more than fifty arms-factory soldiers and over twenty workers, and notes a burial ground at the site, now within a provincial forest park and protected as a provincial key cultural site.

The arms plant was built as a set of small workshops, not a single factory hall. A 2025 account from the Heilongjiang provincial Party committee says sixty soldiers built gun and ammunition workshops at Laodaogou and a repair shop at Xiaobailazi; seven technicians from Shenyang joined under Hu Zhigang. To get a lathe into the forest, they dismantled it and hid the parts high in a straw-loaded cart. Power was equally improvised: a dam and generator supplied water power, a captured car engine burned oil in the dry season, and workers turned a flywheel by hand when other power failed. The first batch of pistols was test-produced in winter 1936.