Long March

Between October 1934 and October 1935 the main force of the Chinese Red Army fought its way out of Nationalist encirclement in Jiangxi and retreated, by a long and winding route of roughly 10,000 kilometres, to a new base in northern Shaanxi. Of the tens of thousands who set out, only about 8,000 completed the journey. The retreat nearly destroyed the Chinese Communist Party, yet it also made Mao Zedong its leading figure and became the founding legend of the movement that would later rule China.

The Communists and the Kuomintang (KMT) had split in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek turned on his former allies, opening the Chinese Civil War. Driven from the cities, the Communists built rural bases, the largest being the Jiangxi Soviet, with its capital at Ruijin. Mao had helped found it but had lost influence to a Moscow-trained leadership under Bo Gu and the German Comintern adviser Otto Braun. The Red Army beat back four Nationalist offensives, but Chiang's fifth encirclement campaign, begun in September 1933, used rings of fortified blockhouses to squeeze the base. By October 1934 the position could no longer be held.

In mid-October 1934 a column of around 130,000 soldiers and civilians, of whom more than 86,000 were troops, broke through the blockade near Yudu, while some 16,000 men stayed behind as a rearguard. A Guangdong warlord let them pass his lines, but at the Xiang River at the end of November they met regular Nationalist troops and suffered devastating losses; only about 36,000 got away. Mao then persuaded the leadership to turn west into Guizhou, where defences were weaker, and in mid-January 1935 the army took the city of Zunyi.

At an enlarged Politburo meeting at Zunyi on 15 to 17 January 1935, Bo Gu and Braun were blamed for the army's defeats. Mao, backed by Zhou Enlai, won the argument, though he did not yet take supreme power; for some months Zhou held the final say on military matters with Mao as his assistant. The conference is nonetheless widely seen as the start of his rise to leadership.

To shake off pursuit, the army zigzagged through Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan, crossing the Chishui River repeatedly and feinting towards Guiyang and Kunming. It crossed the upper Yangtze, the Jinsha, in early May 1935. The seizure of the Luding Bridge on 29 May was later celebrated as a heroic feat, although many historians now think its difficulty was exaggerated or even invented for propaganda. The marchers then crossed high mountain passes and, in August, the marshes of Zoigê, suffering from cold, hunger and attacks by local forces.

In June and July 1935 Mao's force joined the larger Fourth Red Army of Zhang Guotao, but the two leaders disagreed over where to go, and the armies separated. Mao led his men north, and on 19 October 1935 they reached Wuqizhen in northern Shaanxi, where a Communist base already existed. Zhang's army was largely destroyed by Nationalist forces and the Muslim Ma clique. A Second Red Army under He Long made its own retreat, and the surviving forces finally united in October 1936.

Fewer than 7,000 of the original marchers are thought to have reached Shaanxi, and party membership fell from about 300,000 to around 40,000 during the retreat. In November 1935 Mao became chairman of the party's military commission. From the remote north-west the Communists rebuilt, and a year later the Xi'an Incident pushed Chiang towards a truce with them against Japan. The march became central to Mao's public image and to the official story of the People's Republic.

Our 1930 and 1938 maps show the Republic of China during the years of the civil war and the march.