It was led by the Guangxi Front Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including Li Mingrui and Deng Xiaoping.

Like the Baise Uprising, it was quickly successful, perhaps with the assistance of Vietnamese Communists operating just across the border.

[1] Yu Zuoyu was made commander of the Eighth Red Army and Deng Xiaoping served as the political commissar.

The Seventh and Eighth Red Armies immediately marched on Nanning to take advantage of the conflict between Guangxi warlord Li Zongren and the Nationalist Government.

[4] Although he was the political commissar of both the Zuo and You River Soviets, Deng Xiaoping had actually been in Shanghai at the beginning of the uprising to tend to his pregnant wife Zhang Xiyuan, who died in childbirth that January.