Chinese Revolution · CHAPTER 7 ·
Long March
Chapter 7 of China in Revolution, 1911–1949: “The Long March”
The Long March of 1934–35 began as a forced escape from the collapsing Jiangxi Soviet. The column lost perhaps half its strength at the Xiang River, Mao joined the military leadership at Zunyi in January 1935, and survivors reached Shaanxi in 1935 after crossing snow mountains and grasslands.
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The map above is the world of China, 1935 — The march ends at Yan’an.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1938 · Europe in 1938.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
In October 1934 the Jiangxi Soviet could no longer withstand Nationalist encirclement. Its escape became the Long March, a retreat whose destination emerged only as the survivors traveled. At the Xiang River perhaps half the column was lost. The defeat brought the Comintern-backed commanders under attack at Zunyi and brought Mao into the military leadership, although his supremacy over the party still lay years ahead.
Rivers, snow mountains and the Songpan Grasslands lay between the column and Shaanxi, which several thousand reached in 1935. The ordeal bound survivors who would become important leaders, and their escape supplied the party with a powerful story. In 1936 the Xi’an Incident helped suspend the civil war and opened the way to a united front against Japan.
The full story
The three red arrows trace roughly 9,000 kilometers, but they can make the Long March look more purposeful than it was. The journey began with the collapse of the Jiangxi base in October 1934. Some 86,000 people broke out, carrying archives, treasury and machine tools with them: the institutions of a state were traveling with an army that had lost its home. Between October 1934 and October 1935, the Communist revolution held no territory at all.
A column burdened in this way was vulnerable to pursuit. At the Xiang River (the ✕), it spent four days crossing under fire; perhaps half were killed, drowned or deserted. The disaster raised a question for the surviving leaders: how had their military decisions brought them to this point? In January 1935 they met in an upstairs room of a merchant’s house at Zunyi (the ●) and challenged the Comintern-backed commanders. Mao Zedong, sidelined for two years, joined the military leadership. His rise was incomplete, but the campaign changed: feints, split columns and reversals of direction now helped evade pursuit, including four crossings of the Chishui.
The escape still depended on getting through formidable country. After traveling through Yunnan, the column turned north to the Dadu gorge. At Luding (the ✕), it crossed by chain bridge, avoiding the fate of the Taiping prince Shi Dakai, caught on the same river seventy-two years earlier. Beyond the Great Snowy Mountains came the Songpan Grasslands (the ●), a bog about 3,000 meters above sea level. Food failed; marchers boiled grass and leather, and some sat down and never rose.
Several thousand of those who had left Ruijin reached Shaanxi in October 1935. Survivors of other columns joined them, and a few tens of thousands gathered around Yan’an in poor yellow-earth country. The small red patch on the map became a headquarters, though the movement remained exposed. Its next opportunity came from a Nationalist commander. In December 1936 Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, seized Chiang at Xi’an (the ●). Japan had taken Zhang’s Manchurian homeland, and Chiang had declined to fight for it. Zhang wanted resistance to Japan; Zhou Enlai negotiated, while Stalin urged Chiang’s survival. The settlement led toward a suspension of civil war and a united front against Japan, giving the CCP room to survive.
FULL EXPLANATION
What happened at Zunyi?
How much changed at Zunyi? The meeting became central to the party’s founding story, but it was a closed emergency gathering of a defeated leadership, and no complete contemporaneous record survives. The party later assembled and repeatedly revised an authoritative account of an event in whose meaning it had a stake. Historians such as Benjamin Yang reconstruct a more limited change than Mao’s immediate accession: Mao joined the leading military group and allied with Zhou Enlai. His supremacy took roughly another eight years, consolidated through the Yan’an rectification campaigns of the 1940s and a party history written under his direction. Shared command and the long interval matter because the later legend compressed that process into one meeting.
A sympathetic witness
In 1936 Edgar Snow, an American journalist, reached the Communist base in Shaanxi. The party gave him extraordinary access, and Mao dictated the first version of his life story to him. Snow’s “Red Star Over China” (1937) reached foreign readers and educated Chinese readers in translation, presenting Communists as disciplined, popular, incorruptible and the real resistance. Historians value Snow’s eyewitness reporting while recognizing a carefully managed performance: the people who admitted him also shaped what he could see. His account appeared when the survivors of military catastrophe needed support. By making their endurance known, it gave them political capital and helped draw students to the movement in 1937.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A destination found on the road. The Jiangxi base could no longer be held (Chapter 6), but escape did not dictate a single destination. The column went west along watersheds where pursuit and warlord armies were thinner, then turned north after Zunyi. The call to go “north to fight Japan” gave the retreat a nationalist purpose as well as a strategic direction. Shaanxi became its destination only late in the journey; the endpoint was found on the road.
Defeat changes the leadership. At Zunyi the leaders had the Xiang losses before them, and the existing military line had become hard to defend. The Comintern’s radio link was down, so Moscow could not veto their decisions. Mao had used methods that helped win earlier campaigns before the leadership abandoned them; he now entered a shared command. His supremacy required years more and the rectification campaigns. The change nevertheless showed that the party could reconsider command after failure, a point worth comparing with the Nationalists’ later wars.
A corridor through divided provinces. Chiang’s coalition gave the marchers openings. In Guizhou, Yunnan and the edges of Sichuan, provincial warlords feared the Communists, but they also feared that inviting Chiang’s pursuing armies in would leave them subject to central control. Some fought hard enough to usher the column out without welcoming that assistance. The divisions among the party’s enemies, seen in Chapter 3, helped create an escape corridor.
The survivors as a leadership group. The people who reached Shaanxi were a small fraction of those who had set out. Many were young cadres hardened by an experience they shared with few others. A striking share of the People’s Republic’s first leadership had marched, and survivors remained influential in the party and army for fifty years. The losses thus left a group whose shared endurance could become a source of loyalty and authority.
THE TURNING POINT
Zunyi, 15–17 January 1935. The Xiang crossing had exposed the cost of the existing command’s decisions. At Zunyi the leaders acted on that failure: the Comintern-backed commanders lost ground and Mao joined a shared military leadership. The decision moved the party away from imported strategy, while establishing a way to reconsider command after defeat. Luding and the Grasslands still had to be crossed, and Mao’s supremacy and the later victories associated with his methods remained years away.
What it changed
Yan’an becomes the laboratory. The small red zone around Yan’an remained a base through 1947. In its loess country the party developed practices it would extend after 1945: rent reduction rather than terror, village elections it could guide, army units that farmed, and the education and purging of cadres during rectification. Edgar Snow’s 1936 visit carried the survivors’ story abroad.
An uneasy united front. After Xi’an, civil war could be suspended so that the parties could face Japan. The Red Army was reorganized as the Eighth Route Army under nominal Nationalist command, yet neither side trusted the other; both prepared for a struggle after the war. Chiang was released and became a symbol of national resistance. Eight months later fighting at Marco Polo Bridge brought full-scale war.
The march becomes a founding story. The party began collecting accounts in the 1930s and presented the march as an epic of survival: the Red Army had endured, so the party could claim it could not be destroyed. That story helped recruit students in 1937 and lent authority to the leadership in 1949. Its exaggerations and the treatment of people who gave inconvenient versions are part of its history. To understand the story’s power, we can examine both what it accomplished and claims such as the distance marched.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How did the Long March’s founding story contribute to its historical importance, and how should we assess it?
The march was a military catastrophe: roughly nine-tenths of the original force was lost. Its familiar account also enlarged some claims. The traditional 25,000 li (12,500 km) is roughly twice the distance measured by two British writers who walked the route in 2002–03; survivors’ accounts of the twenty-two heroes at Luding differ over the fire and the defenders. Yet the story itself had consequences. The claim that “the Red Army cannot be destroyed” attracted students in 1936–37, impressed war correspondents and shaped party memory. Mao called the march a manifesto and a seeding-machine, expressing what its survivors might still bring into being. They retained cadres and methods as well as a story, and all three helped the movement rebuild. Checking the story’s arithmetic tells us about its construction; its political uses explain why that construction mattered.
An interesting fact
About thirty women made the First Front Army’s march from Jiangxi, chosen largely for political rank and endurance. Among them was Mao’s pregnant wife He Zizhen, who gave birth on the route and left the infant with a peasant family, as marchers’ children commonly were. Kang Keqing, Zhu De’s wife, carried a rifle as a soldier. She and several others later held senior rank in the People’s Republic. Many marchers were in their teens or twenties, and their leaders were barely past forty. The column carried printing presses, while families faced painful choices about children who could not travel with it.
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