Mao's Long March

In October 1934, the Chinese Communist Party's main Red Army broke out of encirclement in southeastern China and began a year-long retreat that became known as the Long March. Covering thousands of miles across rivers, mountains, and grasslands, the march cost the Communists most of their original force, yet it became the founding legend of the movement that would later rule China. It also elevated Mao Zedong from one contender among several to the party's dominant figure.

The roots of the march lay in the collapse of the alliance between the Nationalists (Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists in 1927, when Chiang turned violently on his former partners. The surviving Communists built a rural base, the Jiangxi Soviet, in the southeast. Chiang launched a series of "encirclement campaigns" against it. The fifth, begun in 1933, used a strategy of blockhouses and a tightening economic blockade. Party leaders, advised by the German Comintern agent Otto Braun, abandoned the mobile guerrilla tactics that Mao favored and fought conventional positional battles, suffering heavy losses.

Facing destruction, roughly 80,000 to 90,000 people, including soldiers, party officials, and support staff, left Jiangxi in October 1934. Early on, the column moved slowly with heavy equipment and suffered severe casualties, notably in crossing the Xiang River in late 1934. In January 1935, at a meeting in Zunyi in Guizhou province, party leaders criticized the military leadership's failures. Mao gained a prominent role in military decision-making, though his full supremacy came later. The marchers then pursued evasive maneuvers, crossed the Dadu River, and traversed high snowy mountains and marshy grasslands in the west. Different armies took separate routes, and the main body under Mao reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935, where the Communists established a new base at Yan'an.

Estimates vary, but only a small fraction of those who set out, perhaps around ten percent, are usually said to have arrived with the main force. Total distances are commonly given as about 6,000 miles, although routes varied by column. Later accounts, especially Communist ones, embellished some episodes, such as the fighting at the Luding Bridge, and historians continue to debate details.

The march's consequences were profound. It left the Communists in a remote northern base, far from Nationalist power, where they could regroup and later cooperate nominally with Chiang against Japan after 1937. Mao used the years at Yan'an to consolidate ideological and organizational control. The Long March became a central symbol of endurance and revolutionary sacrifice, and its veterans formed a core of the leadership that won the civil war and founded the People's Republic of China in 1949.