The Long March (1934-1935) led by the Chinese communists is probably one of the greatest revolutionary feats of the 20th century. 90 years ago this month, the Red Army and its peasant supporters began their year-long journey, traversing 9,000 kilometers, 18 mountains, and 24 rivers. Wearing sandals made from dried grasses, they marched an average of 50 kilometers per day and engaged in some battle every 72 hours, meanwhile being pursued by airstrikes from above and hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers from behind. Of the 86,000 people who had been organized into four columns and set off on the trek, many starved, were killed, defected, or gave up along the way. Only 8,000 soldiers were left at the end of the Long March. It was “an Odyssey unequal in modern times,” as US journalist Edgar Snow put it.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the start of the Long March as well as the 75th anniversary of the PRC. This historic Odyssey is a story that has been told and retold countless times by revolutionaries around the world. Looking back, it may seem distant and remote from today’s reality. Nevertheless, some key lessons and inspirations can be drawn from this history for the struggles of today, including the importance of organization, socialist experimentation, mobilization of the masses, and unification of political forces to advance a national and revolutionary project.
Crossing the river while feeling the stones
Crossing the river while feeling the stones is a slogan first coined by Communist Party of China (CPC) leader Chun Yun in 1950 and has been closely associated with Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up, beginning in 1978. However, it can easily be a slogan used to describe the whole Chinese revolutionary process. The Long March was one of those major crossings of the communist movement into the unknown, leaving behind the Chinese Soviet Republic that they had formed in 1931 in the south of China. After a series of failed uprisings led by the still-small urban proletariat in the late 1920s, a section of the communists led by Mao Zedong retreated to the countryside from the Chinese Workers and Peasants’ Red Army. Although the CPC’s central command was still based in Shanghai, dominated by the Moscow-trained leaders, the communists led by Mao began to form small soviets, culminating in the Chinese Soviet Republic in Ruijin, Jiangxi.
By the time of the Long March, six years later, the Soviet region had undergone land reform and redistributed to the peasants, collective enterprises in different sectors were established, over 10,000 co-operatives had been created, and the small group of revolutionary soldiers who fled the cities had grown into an army of several tens of thousands of workers and peasants. In order to break the economic and informational blockade imposed by the Nationalists (KMT), the first banks of the CPC were formed – producing 1-yuan notes with Lenin’s portrait on it – along with media instruments, like the predecessor of the Xinhua News Agency. Furthermore, unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage had been eliminated. As Edgar Snow described in his book, “Red Star Over China”, mass education had increased the literacy levels of peasants in a few years to more than what had been done in all rural China for centuries.
The years spent in this region engaged in building the CPC’s mass line, experimentations with new forms of governance, and defending the red base from external attacks, were formative experiences for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, and other revolutionaries of that generation, and was a crucial site in the formation of the Thought of Mao Zedong. In other words, socialist construction and experimentation did not begin when the CPC took power in 1949 but was built off the two decades of experiments and experiences from Ruijin to Yan’an, of crossing the river while feeling the stones.
Exterminate the menace of communism.
The Long March was a strategic retreat from Ruijin, after rounds of military assaults on the Soviet by the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. For the fifth and final encirclement campaign, Chiang mobilized up to 900,000 troops with superior resources, technical equipment, mechanized warfare (including 400 war planes), and ample supplies from the outside world, while receiving military guidance of Nazi German advisors. The communists, on the other hand, had the strength of 180,000 soldiers and with a very limited supply of munitions and weapons, mostly rifles and no heavy artillery. The siege was expected to be a funeral march for the communists, and even Chiang had believed he had finally “exterminated the menace of Communism”. But they were wrong. As the first two columns organized a surprise attack to break through the southern and western fortifications, thousands of peasant guards stayed behind to stave off the Nationalist forces. It took them several weeks to complete their occupation of the Soviet territories; in exchange for their lives, they bought time for the Communists columns to make their strategic retreat.
Beyond mere survival, the following are three important achievements and lessons of the Long March, the first being the consolidation of Mao Zedong’s leadership of the CPC. Halfway through the Long March, the Zunyi Conference was held in which the CPC’s Politburo was elected. Mao Zedong emerged as the Party’s highest leader and its chairman, displacing the former political nucleus lead by Bo Gu, of the “28 Bolsheviks” who had returned from studying at the Sun Yatsen University in Moscow. This Conference consolidated the direction of the revolutionary strategy with the peasantry at its center. History, of course, is not only made up of individuals – although leaders do matter – but it is based on the organized power of the masses.
Do not take a single need or piece of thread from the masses.
The second great achievement of the Long March was the mobilization of mass power of the peasant majority, ethnic minorities, youth, and women under the leadership of the communists. Already during the Ruijin period, the Red Army had systematized their method of work in the countryside, summarized in the “Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” issued in 1928. The Three Rules included: Obey orders in all your actions; do not take a single need or piece of thread from the masses; and turn in everything captured. The Eight Points were: speak politely; pay fairly for what you buy; return everything you borrow; pay for anything you damage; do not hit or swear at people; do not damage crops; do not take liberties with women; and do not ill-treat captives. With these well-honed practices that greatly contrasted the brutal approach of the Nationalists, feudal landlords, and warlords, the communists gained mass support wherever they traveled to. More than a retreat, the Long March became an opportunity of massification of the Party into the interior of the country.
In particular, the communists traveled through ten ethnic minority regions, where Miao, Yao, Zhuang, Dong, Tujia, Shui, Li, Buyi, Gelao, Naxi, Yi, Tibetan, Bai, Qiang, Hui, Dongxiang, and Yugu peoples lived, accounting for more than half of the territories that the Red Army passed through during the Long March. During this time, the CPC promoted their political program while advocating equality among all ethnic groups and opposing ethnic oppression, and helped ethnic minorities to carry out economic and political struggles against local landlords and warlords. Without the support of the local Yi people, for example, the Red Army would have never successfully passed through Daliangshan, Sichuan. In turn, a special detachment of the Chinese Yi People’s Red Army was formed there.
Youth played an important role during the Long March, and young people dominated the Party from the lowest to the highest ranks from the Ruijin to Yan’an periods. By 1936, the average age of rank and file of the Red Army was only 19 years, meanwhile the CPC leadership that had already been in the Party for over a decade, was only in their 30s and 40s. Meanwhile, women played a key role, not only in the provisions of food and clothing for the Red Army soldiers along the way but were also participants on the Long March. 32 women marched with the First Army, all of whom survived, with their main tasks being in agitation and propaganda, taking care of the wounded soldiers, and gathering the supplies and financial resources for the Red Army. It is only with the mass support of local peasants, ethnic minorities, women, and youth that the communists were able to navigate treacherous landscape, evade enemy attacks, get enough food and supplies to survive, and complete the Long March.
The third achievement of the Long March was the unification of the country against Japanese imperialism. While mobilizing and conscientizing the masses throughout the country, the communists also charted a course that later became the Second United Front beginning in 1936. In other words, the objective was to unite all classes and all patriotic forces in communist-led fight against Japanese imperialism, which was seen as the primary contradiction. Rarely mentioned in Western version of the Second World War are the 20 million Chinese people who died resisting Japanese fascism, during a brutal occupation that lasted 14 years (1931-1945).
The Chinese people have stood up.
In October 1935, a mere 8,000 Red Army soldiers arrived in Yan’an, in the north-central province of Shaanxi. An important site of Chinese civilization and people with roots tracing back 3,000 years, Yan’an had become a poor, dusty, and remote frontier town of above 10,000 inhabitants by the time the communists made it their new capital. As one of the soldiers told journalist Edgar Snow, “This is culturally one of the darkest places on earth… We have to start everything from the beginning.” And start everything again they did, building from the experiences of the Ruijin Soviet period.
In the “Yan’an decade” that followed, the ragtag group of poorly-fed and poorly-equipped communists would mobilize the support of tens of millions of peasants in the region, gain popular support in the cities, grow its active Party membership to 1.2 million people, and build a Red Army made up of one million soldiers, supported by millions more armed peasants. October 1949, 14 years after arriving in Yan’an, Mao Zedong would declare the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing. Today, as the PRC celebrates its 75th anniversary, the CPC is an organization of over 98 million members. The Long March remains a revolutionary inspiration and thread that connects the different periods of socialist experimentation from Ruijin to Yan’an to Beijing.
During the Cultural Revolution, president Xi Jinping was sent as a teenager from Beijing to Yan’an to live humbly in the cave – just as the Long March generation did – and work alongside the peasant. It was there that he joined the CPC – after nine failed attempts – and started his political life as a village party secretary. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of the first-generation leaders that participated on the Long March to Yan’an, and became the vice-premier of the PRC. One of the big regrets of Mao Zedong and that generation of leaders is that they never went back to Ruijin after the Long March, since it was such a hard-to-reach mountainous region. Today, almost every family in Ruijin still carries a story of a family member who had left on the journey and never returned, or who had stayed behind to resist the enemy forces. In one village named Huawu, where I visited last year, each person from that community who went on the Long March is memorialized by a tree planted in their honor.
Ruijin is called the ‘cradle’ of the Chinese revolution because, in its few years of existence, it became the experimental ground for socialist construction. Ruijin is where the CPC built its revolutionary rural strategy, with the peasantry as its base, and where the communists set off on the historic Long March in 1934. It is also where the foundations were laid for the CPC’s own structure, the Red Army’s tactics and strategies, and the policies of economic, social, and land reform that would be later implemented by the PRC. 90 years after the Long March set off from there, Ruijin is going through its new phase of socialist construction, from the eradication of extreme poverty to the revitalization of the rural economy, building towards a modern socialist future.
Tings Chak is the art director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought, and a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Portuguese version of this article was published on the website of the MST.
