The Long March begins

In mid-October 1934 the main forces of the Chinese Red Army – some 86,000 soldiers, officials and porters – gathered on the river by the small town of Yudu in southern Jiangxi. By night, on pontoon bridges and boats, they crossed to the western bank and then set off westwards towards the first line of the government troops’ blockade. The Communists were abandoning the Chinese Soviet Republic, the state they had been building since 1931 around the town of Ruijin, because Chiang Kai-shek’s fifth encirclement campaign had shut it inside an ever-tighter ring of forts. The retreat that began then lasted a year, led through eleven provinces and across the mountains, rivers and marshes of western China, and went down in history as the Long March. Only a small fraction of those who set out from the Yudu river survived it, but in its course Mao Zedong began to take over the leadership of the party, and the surviving Communists ended up in northern China, in a place from which they would soon play an important role in the war with Japan.

Which date?

The Long March did not begin on a single day. The party leadership had secretly decided to abandon the base as early as the spring of 1934, and the first units set out in the summer as an advance guard. On the evening of 10 October 1934 the columns of the headquarters and central offices left Ruijin, and the historiography of the People’s Republic of China usually gives this as the date the march began. The combat units assembled around Yudu over the following days. According to most accounts, the main crossing of the Yudu river (a tributary of the Gan) began on 16 October, and Chinese party sources describe the evening of 17 October, when the headquarters and army corps crossed the river, as the “first step” of the Long March. The crossing took several days. On the night of 21–22 October the vanguard broke through the government troops’ first blockade line. The date of 16 October thus marks the beginning of the crossing and of the departure from the base. In that sense it is justified, although it is not the only date to be found.

The name itself came later. Those who took part spoke of a “transfer”, a “strategic regrouping” or simply the “western march”. Mao Zedong first used the term “Long March” (changzheng) publicly only in December 1935, when it was all over. The Kuomintang called the same operation the “pursuit of the bandits”.

A republic encircled

The Communists had ended up in Jiangxi after their defeat in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek turned on them in the Shanghai massacre and their urban uprisings failed. In the mountains on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi, the Red Army of Mao Zedong and Zhu De was born, and on 7 November 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Ruijin, with Mao as its chairman. The republic covered several dozen counties with a few million people; it had its own currency, offices, schools and security police, and lived on confiscated land and compulsory grain deliveries.

Chiang Kai-shek regarded the Communists as more dangerous than the Japanese. His slogan was: first internal pacification, then external resistance. Even after the Mukden incident and the loss of Manchuria, he sent his best divisions not north but against the Communist bases. The first four encirclement campaigns, in 1930–1933, ended in defeat for the government troops. The Red Army drew the enemy’s columns deep into its territory and then destroyed them one by one in rapid manoeuvres. After the Tanggu Truce of May 1933, which calmed the north for a time, Chiang was able to concentrate his forces on Jiangxi.

The fifth campaign

The fifth campaign began in September 1933 and was quite unlike its predecessors. The government mobilised, according to various estimates, between 700,000 and a million soldiers across the country, of whom about half a million were sent against the Communists’ central base. The troops no longer pushed deep into enemy territory; instead they advanced slowly, a few kilometres at a time, building small forts of stone and concrete at every step, linked by roads and barbed wire. According to Chinese figures, more than ten thousand of them had been built by the autumn of 1934. The base was cut off from salt, medicines and manufactured goods. Under the slogan “three parts military, seven parts political”, the administration and the system of collective responsibility of villages were rebuilt in the occupied areas.

This method is often attributed to Chiang’s German military advisers, among them Hans von Seeckt, who was in China in 1933 and returned in the spring of 1934 as chief adviser. The Germans trained officers and recommended methodical operations, but the blockhouse tactics themselves were also developed by Chinese staff officers, and some historians consider their German pedigree exaggerated.

On the Communist side, command passed into the hands of men who had returned from Moscow. The party was led by Bo Gu, still in his twenties, one of the so-called “28 Bolsheviks”, graduates of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. The military adviser was the Comintern envoy Otto Braun, a German Communist and graduate of a Soviet military academy, known in China as Li De. Mao, criticised since 1932 for his “guerrilla” methods, had been removed from military command, although he formally remained head of the republic’s government. Bo Gu and Braun decided that the Red Army must not give up ground, and ordered it to defend the republic’s borders. The Communists built their own fortifications of earth and timber and launched counter-attacks against the forts. Nor did they take advantage of the revolt of the 19th Route Army in Fujian (November 1933 – January 1934), which drew government troops away for several weeks.

The decision came in the spring of 1934 at the town of Guangchang, known as the northern gate of the republic. The Red Army defended it in open battle and suffered heavy losses, and on 28 April the town fell. In the summer the government troops came within a few dozen kilometres of Ruijin. The republic shrank to a handful of counties, and its army had lost tens of thousands of men in a year.

Preparing to break out

In May 1934 the party secretariat secretly decided to lead the main forces out of Jiangxi. Planning was entrusted to a “triumvirate”: Bo Gu was responsible for politics, Braun for strategy and Zhou Enlai for execution. The destination was to be western Hunan, where the units of He Long were operating. The decision was not put before the full Politburo, and most commanders and soldiers learned of the departure only at the last moment. In the summer two forces were sent out as a screen: the 7th Corps set off north-east as the “Anti-Japanese Vanguard”, and Xiao Ke’s 6th Corps went west to clear the way. At the turn of September and October Zhou Enlai’s intelligence service, which had agents on the Kuomintang staff in Nanchang, reported that the government was preparing a final offensive.

Zhou also sent negotiators to General Chen Jitang, the ruler of Guangdong, whose troops held the southern sector of the blockade. Chen feared that Chiang’s central army would enter his province just as readily as the Communists would, and secretly agreed to let the Red Army pass through his sector on condition that it did not venture deep into Guangdong.

The departure

The 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th and 9th Corps left Jiangxi, together with two columns of the headquarters and central offices – more than 86,000 people in all. Among them were Bo Gu, Braun, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De as commander-in-chief, Zhang Wentian and Mao Zedong, as well as about thirty women, mostly the wives of leaders. The army took everything it could: printing presses, machinery from the arms workshops, archives, stocks of silver. Thousands of porters carried this equipment on poles, and the columns stretched for dozens of kilometres. The soldiers called this baggage train “the house move”.

Some 16,000 soldiers remained in Jiangxi under Xiang Ying and Chen Yi, many of them wounded and sick, together with children and most of the women. Their task was to cover the retreat and wage guerrilla war. Government troops took Ruijin on 10 November 1934. Many of the activists left behind were killed or executed, among them the former party leader Qu Qiubai, shot in June 1935, and Mao’s younger brother Mao Zetan, who was killed in action in the spring of that year. Landlords and government officials returned to the territory of the former republic, and with them came reprisals against those who had cooperated with the Communists.

The army passed the first two blockade lines relatively easily, thanks to the agreement with Chen Jitang and the enemy’s surprise. Even so, Cantonese units, not all of which had been told of the deal, inflicted losses on it in skirmishes. At the beginning of November it crossed the second line, and in mid-month the third, on the border of Hunan and Guangdong. By then Chiang Kai-shek had realised that the Communists were heading west, and he concentrated government, Hunanese and Guangxi troops on the Xiang River in northern Guangxi. The heavy, slow-moving column with its baggage marched straight into the trap. In the fighting at the crossing, from 27 November to 1 December 1934, the Red Army suffered its heaviest losses of the entire march. When it reached Zunyi in January 1935, of the more than 86,000 people who had set out from the Yudu river, just over 30,000 remained, according to the most common estimates. Many had been killed, but many had also deserted or stayed behind in villages along the way.

What happened next

The disaster on the Xiang undermined the authority of Bo Gu and Braun. In January 1935, at the Zunyi Conference, they were stripped of command and Mao joined the inner leadership. For many months afterwards the army evaded its pursuers in Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan, crossed the Dadu River and the high passes and marshes on the Tibetan borderlands, split from the other Communist army, that of Zhang Guotao, after a dispute, and in October 1935 reached northern Shaanxi. According to various estimates, between a few thousand and just under 8,000 people from the column that had left Jiangxi arrived there.

Significance

For Chiang Kai-shek, driving the Communists out of Jiangxi was a great success. The enemy’s most important base ceased to exist, and the pursuit of the Red Army allowed the central army to enter provinces hitherto ruled by independent warlords: Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan. A few years later Sichuan became China’s rear base in the war with Japan, with the temporary capital at Chongqing. Chiang did not, however, manage to destroy the Communists. Their leadership survived, and a movement that had seemed doomed in Jiangxi was reborn in the north.

For the road to the Second World War in Asia, what matters above all is where the Communists ended up. In northern Shaanxi they faced the North-Eastern Army of Zhang Xueliang, driven out of Manchuria by the Japanese, whose soldiers did not want to fight fellow Chinese. The slogan “Chinese do not shoot Chinese” and the Comintern’s turn towards the popular front led in December 1936 to the Xi’an incident, after which Chiang had to suspend the civil war. When war with Japan broke out in July 1937, the Communists who had survived the Long March became, alongside the Kuomintang, the second force of Chinese resistance, and during the war they expanded their armies and bases behind Japanese lines. The Long March also became the party’s founding myth and the source of the authority of Mao, who in 1949 took power over the whole of China.