The breakout from Yudu in Jiangxi in October 1934, after the fifth encirclement campaign (1934)
About 86,000 of the First Front Army set out; the Jiangxi Soviet was abandoned.
History · The 20th century
The Long March
1934–1935
The Chinese Communists' retreat from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, and the founding myth of the People's Republic
Driven out of their base in Jiangxi by the fifth of Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement campaigns, the Chinese Communists' First Front Army broke out from Yudu in October 1934 and marched west and north for a year. Heavy losses at the Xiang River in late 1934 discredited the leadership of Bo Gu and the Comintern adviser Otto Braun, and at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 Mao Zedong emerged as the dominant figure in the party's military direction. The route ran through Guizhou, across the Jinsha and Dadu rivers, over snow-covered passes and through the Songpan grasslands, before the survivors reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935; the headquarters settled at Yan'an the following year. Of roughly 86,000 who set out with the First Front Army, perhaps 8,000 completed the march, and the Communist Party has ever since dated its endurance, and Mao's ascendancy, from it.
How to spot them
- ▸A year-long retreat that the winners turned into an epic, conventionally given as 25,000 li
- ▸A conference in a Guizhou town in January 1935 at which a Comintern adviser lost his authority
- ▸A chain bridge over a river in Sichuan, stormed, in the official telling, across bare chains
- ▸Grasslands and snow mountains, and a destination cave city in the loess of the north-west
- ▸A poem of eight lines beginning that the Red Army fears not the trials of a distant march
What happened
A crossing in late 1934 that cost the column more than half its strength and discredited its leaders (1934)
The Battle of the Xiang River, the disaster that made a change of leadership possible.
The January 1935 meeting in Guizhou that ended the authority of Bo Gu and a German Comintern adviser (1935)
The Zunyi Conference, from which Mao Zedong's leadership is conventionally dated.
The storming of a chain bridge over the Dadu River in Sichuan, May 1935, the planks reportedly removed (1935)
Luding Bridge; the heroic version is a staple of party history and has been questioned by historians.
The journey's most costly stretches: passes above 4,000 metres and a boggy high plateau in northern Sichuan (1935)
The snowy mountains of the Jiajin range and the Songpan grasslands.
The quarrel at Maoergai in 1935 between Mao and a rival commander over whether to go north or south (1935)
The split with Zhang Guotao and the Fourth Front Army, which went south and was later defeated.
The arrival at Wuqi in northern Shaanxi in October 1935, ending the First Front Army's march (1935)
The base was consolidated at Bao'an and then Yan'an, headquarters until 1947.
Edgar Snow's 1937 book, written after months with the Communists at Bao'an, which told the story to the world (1937)
Red Star Over China, the first sympathetic Western account of Mao and the march.
Key ideas
- The march as founding myth: endurance, self-reliance and the vindication of rural guerrilla strategy against Comintern orthodoxy
- A 'New Long March' has been invoked repeatedly by Chinese leaders as a metaphor for a long, hard national effort
Quick-fire facts
- •The First Front Army left Yudu, Jiangxi, on 16 October 1934 and reached Wuqi, Shaanxi, on 19 October 1935
- •The distance is conventionally given as 25,000 li, about 12,500 km or 8,000 miles; historians' estimates are lower
- •Roughly 86,000 set out with the First Front Army and about 8,000 arrived, though other columns brought the total in the north-west higher
- •Otto Braun, known in China as Li De, was the Comintern's military adviser and the only Westerner on the march
- •Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping were among those who took part
- •Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army and He Long's Second Front Army made separate marches, converging in Shaanxi in 1936
- •Mao's poem 'The Long March' (1935) opens with the line that the Red Army fears not the trials of a distant march
- •Yan'an served as the Communist headquarters from 1936 until 1947 and gives its name to the Yan'an period
- •The Xi'an Incident of December 1936, in which Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own generals, produced the Second United Front against Japan
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Sources
- Sun Shuyun — The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth
- Edgar Snow — Red Star Over China