After Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei staged successive counter-revolutionary soups, the once-dynamic Great Revolution ended in failure. To save the revolution, the Communist Party launched a series of armed uprisings against the reactionary Kuomintang regime. In the summer of 1929 Li Mingrui and Yu Zuobo, who had just taken control of military and political power in Guangxi to direct the work of the local Party organizations and prepare for an armed uprising. This was the first time that Deng was independently undertaking the important responsibility of leading a region.

Deng Xiaoping leads the Baise Uprising in 1929.

In Nanning Deng Xiaoping made contact with Yu Zuobo and Li Minrui under the alias of Deng Bin and began building revolutionary forces. In October Yu and Li's campaign against Chiang was defeated. Deng and Zhang Yunyi pulled the three Communist-controlled detachments out Nanning and led them to the Zuojiang and Youjiang areas. By the end of the month Deng was appointed Secretary of the Guangxi Front-line Committee of the Chinese Community Party.In December, together with Zhang Yunyi and Wei Baqun, he launched the Bose Uprising, founding the Youjiang Soviet Government and the Seventh Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and Secretary of its Front-line Committee. In February of the following year, along with Li Mingrui and Yu Zuoyu, he launched the Longzhou Uprising , creating the Zuojiang Soviet Government and the Eighth Army and serving as its Political Commissar. In the same month Deng returned secretly to Shanghai to report to the Central Committee. The Committee officially appointed Li Mingrui General Commander of both the Seventh and Eighth Armies and Deng Xiaoping their Political Commissar. In the Youjiang area they mobilized the masses to expropriate local tyrants, distribute land, carry out agrarian revolution and establish revolutionary governments at various levels. As a result, the local Red Army forces were expended to cover some 29 countries with a population totaling more than one million. thus the Youjiang area became one of the largest revolutionary bases.

At this time, however, the leaders of the Central Committee made some "Left" errors. In October 1930 a representative of the Committee came to Guangxi to push the Li Lisan line, asserting that a nationwide revolutionary high tide had set in. He accordingly ordered the Seventh Army (with which the Eighth Army had already been merged, after suffering military setbacks) to leave the base area immediately and to fight its way to Liuzhou, Guiling and Guangzhou. Deng Xiaoping doubted the possibility of taking these cities and expressed his disagreement. nevertheless, most of his comrades maintained that they should obey the representative's instructions, and Deng was therefore obliged to act accordingly. Eventually, owing to repeated defeats and heavy losses, the Army had to give up the plan of attacking the big cities.

After the representative of the Central Committee left, the Army, now reduced to less than ,000 men, was reorganized. The Front-line Committee decided to move the troops to Jiangxi Province to join the Red Army forces in the Central Revolutionary Base Area there. After the Seventh Army took the seat of Chongyi County in Jiangxi in February 1931, the Front-line Committee sent Deng to Shanghai to report to the Central Committee. In Shanghai he wrote a report in which he described in detail how things stood in the Seventh Army and analyzed the lessons they had learned from their uprisings.