The Long March

Category: History Key figures: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Zhang Guotao, Lin Biao, Bo Gu, Otto Braun (Li De)

Summary

The Long March (1934–1935) was a military retreat undertaken by the Communist Party of China (CPC) following their defeat by the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces in the fifth encirclement campaign. Encircled by superior Nationalist armies in their Jiangxi Soviet base, the CPC’s main forces — approximately 86,000 troops and support personnel — broke through Nationalist lines beginning on October 16, 1934, and began a grueling journey of roughly 9,000 kilometers (approximately 5,600 miles) westward and northward through some of China’s most forbidding terrain. The retreat lasted roughly one year, during which the Red Army traversed 11 provinces, crossed 18 mountain ranges, and forded 24 rivers while pursued by Nationalist forces and local militias.

During the March, the CPC’s political and military leadership underwent crucial transformations. The March began under the military direction of German Comintern advisor Otto Braun (known in Chinese as Li De) and Party General Secretary Bo Gu, whose rigid positional defense strategy had failed against Nationalist commander Chiang Kai-shek’s methodical blockhouse system. Leadership shifted decisively to Mao Zedong at the Zunyi Conference (January 15–17, 1935) in Guizhou Province, where Mao consolidated his influence over party military strategy and became pre-eminent among the leadership. The CPC forces were severely depleted by combat, disease, starvation, and the extreme conditions of high-altitude mountain crossings and marsh traversals; of the approximately 86,000 who began the March with the First Front Army, only an estimated 7,000–8,000 reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935. The survivors included Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and other figures who would lead the CPC to victory in the Civil War fourteen years later.

The March culminated in the establishment of a revolutionary base at Yan’an in northern Shaanxi, where the CPC regrouped, refined its ideology and military tactics, and built the organizational apparatus that would defeat the Nationalists. During the Yan’an period (1935–1947), the CPC developed the doctrine of peasant-based revolution, improved party discipline through the Yan’an Rectification Campaign (1942–1944), and created the sophisticated state apparatus that would govern the People’s Republic after 1949.

Prelude: The Jiangxi Soviet Under Siege

The Chinese Soviet Republic — headquartered at Ruijin in Jiangxi Province — had existed since November 1931, governing a rural territory of several million people under CPC administration. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government launched five successive “encirclement and suppression” campaigns against the Soviet between 1930 and 1934. The first four campaigns were defeated by the Red Army using flexible guerrilla tactics developed by Mao Zedong and Zhu De: luring enemy forces deep into Communist territory, concentrating superior numbers against isolated units, and avoiding pitched battles.

The fifth encirclement campaign (1933–1934) succeeded where its predecessors had failed. Advised by German General Hans von Seeckt, Chiang’s forces constructed a network of approximately 14,000 blockhouses — fortified positions connected by roads that allowed Nationalist troops to control territory methodically rather than chase Red Army units. This system negated the guerrilla tactics that had previously protected the Soviet. Under Bo Gu and Otto Braun’s leadership, the CPC abandoned mobile warfare and attempted to hold fixed lines, a strategy that proved catastrophic. By late 1934 the Jiangxi Soviet was losing territory steadily, its population declining and its resources exhausted.

The Breakthrough and the Battle of Xiangjiang

The decision to break out was made in October 1934, but the route chosen — a direct westward march through KMT-controlled territory — exposed the column to predictable ambush. The most catastrophic engagement occurred at the Xiang River (Xiangjiang) in Guangxi province in late November 1934. Chiang Kai-shek’s forces had anticipated the crossing route and concentrated large forces on both banks. The battle of the Xiang River crossing lasted approximately five days; Red Army units suffered devastating losses holding the flanks open while the main column crossed. The First Front Army, which had numbered approximately 80,000 effective troops at the outbreak of the march, was reduced to approximately 30,000–40,000 survivors after crossing the Xiang River. Some units lost 70% of their strength in a single engagement. The catastrophe discredited Bo Gu and Braun’s military leadership and galvanized support for Mao’s alternative approach.

The Zunyi Conference: Mao’s Rise

The Zunyi Conference, convened January 15–17, 1935, in the Guizhou city of Zunyi, was the pivotal political event of the Long March. Attended by the Politburo, the Military Affairs Commission, and senior commanders, the conference formally criticized the military leadership that had produced the Xiang River disaster. Zhou Enlai’s self-criticism helped shift blame onto Bo Gu and Braun.

The conference elevated Mao Zedong to a newly created position as assistant to the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission — in practical terms establishing him as the dominant voice in military decisions. Zhou Enlai and Zhu De retained authority, while Bo Gu was relieved of his role as Party General Secretary (replaced by Zhang Wentian) and Braun was marginalized from command decisions. The Zunyi Conference is canonized in CPC historiography as the moment the Party rescued itself through collective wisdom — the first instance, the official narrative holds, where the CPC resolved an internal crisis without Comintern direction.

Key Crossings and Challenges

From Zunyi, the Red Army pursued a strategy of mobile deception: feinting southward, crossing the Wu River multiple times, and keeping Nationalist forces off-balance. A decisive maneuver — the crossing of the Jinsha River (upper Yangtze) in May 1935 — allowed the Red Army to escape a closing encirclement; Communist engineers secured boats and crossed approximately 18,000 troops before Nationalist forces arrived.

The crossing of the Luding Bridge (Luding Qiao) on May 29, 1935 became one of the March’s most celebrated episodes. The Luding Bridge — a 100-meter chain-link suspension bridge over the Dadu River in Sichuan — had been partially stripped of its planking by KMT forces holding the eastern bank. A detachment of volunteers from the First Army Corps (commanded by Lin Biao) climbed hand-over-hand along the chains under fire and overwhelmed the defenders, allowing the column to cross. The episode became a founding myth of PLA martial courage, though the number of enemy defenders and the intensity of resistance have been contested by later historians.

In June 1935, the Red Army crossed the Jiajin Mountain (Jiajinshan, or “Great Snow Mountain”) — a glacier-covered pass at approximately 4,900 meters elevation — largely without adequate cold-weather equipment. Casualties from altitude sickness, exhaustion, and exposure were severe.

The most harrowing stretch was the Great Grasslands (Zoige Plateau), a vast, waterlogged peat marsh straddling the Sichuan-Gansu border, crossed in August 1935. With no roads and no shelter, the column slogged through the marsh for approximately seven days; soldiers who stepped off the narrow paths risked sinking into the bog. Food supplies were nearly exhausted; soldiers boiled leather belts and ate roots. Dysentery killed many.

Zhang Guotao and the Split

In late June 1935, the First Front Army met the Fourth Front Army — a force of approximately 80,000 troops commanded by Zhang Guotao — at Maogong in Sichuan. Zhang, commanding a larger force and controlling more territory, challenged Mao’s authority and proposed a different strategy, favoring a southwestern base rather than a northward march. After weeks of political maneuvering, the First and Third Army Corps left without Zhang’s forces, secretly marching north in mid-September 1935 while Zhang led his forces south into Sichuan and later Tibet.

Zhang Guotao’s separate “Long March” ended in failure; his forces suffered enormous losses and he eventually submitted to Mao’s authority in 1936. In 1938, disillusioned and politically marginalized, Zhang defected to the Nationalists — a singular case of a senior CPC leader publicly abandoning the Communist cause.

Arrival and the Yan’an Base

The First Front Army’s vanguard reached Wuqi in northern Shaanxi on October 19, 1935, having marched roughly 9,000 kilometers in approximately one year. The surviving 7,000–8,000 troops of the First Front Army joined a local Communist force already operating in the region, establishing what would become the Yan’an base area.

At Yan’an, the CPC rebuilt its organizational capacity under dramatically different conditions from the Jiangxi Soviet. The relative security of the remote northwest, combined with the strategic opportunity created by the Japanese invasion of China (beginning in full in 1937), allowed the CPC to rebuild its forces and expand its political network across rural northern China. The Yan’an Rectification Campaign (Zhengfeng, 1942–1944) imposed Mao’s ideological framework — including the “mass line” concept of leadership derived from peasant experience — as the party’s binding ideology. By the time the Civil War resumed in full in 1946, the CPC commanded an army of over one million and governed territory containing some 90 million people.

Significance

The Long March holds supreme mythological and historical importance in Communist Chinese historiography and in the actual trajectory of power that brought the CPC to rule. It represents a foundational narrative of Communist sacrifice, perseverance, and the righteousness of the revolutionary cause — the epic tale told and retold to legitimize CPC rule and to bind generations of cadres to the party’s historical mission. Every successive party leader from Mao through Xi Jinping has invoked the March as proof of the party’s resilience and mandate.

Historically, the Long March accomplished several decisive things: it transformed Mao Zedong from a marginal figure within CPC politics into the pre-eminent leader, an authority he would maintain until his death in September 1976. It preserved the Communist Party as an organized force when it faced existential defeat — had the Communists been annihilated in Jiangxi, the subsequent history of China would have been radically different. The survival of the revolutionary core allowed the CPC to exploit the Japanese invasion (1937–1945) and Nationalist military exhaustion to eventually triumph in the Civil War.

The Long March also crystallized the peasant-based theory of revolution that became distinctly Chinese Marxism. Marx and Lenin had theorized revolution as a phenomenon of the urban industrial proletariat, but the CPC’s survival and ultimate victory depended on mobilizing peasant armies and building bases in rural, agrarian regions. This adaptation would influence revolutionary movements across Asia and the developing world and became foundational to Maoist theory as it spread internationally in the 1960s and 1970s.

Related

• Mao Zedong — the leader whose power consolidated during and after the March
• The Chinese Civil War — the larger conflict of which the March was a decisive phase
• The Communist Party of China — the party that undertook and survived the March
• Zhou Enlai — key political and military figure alongside Mao during the March
• Cultural Revolution — later Maoist campaign that invoked the March as inspirational precedent
• The Boxer Rebellion — earlier anti-foreign crisis that deepened the nationalist and revolutionary ferment from which the CPC emerged

Sources

• Edgar Snow. Red Star over China. Random House, 1937. Firsthand accounts gathered during interviews with CPC leaders in Yan’an, documenting the March’s impact and mythology from insiders’ perspective.
• Benjamin Yang. From Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March. Westview Press, 1990. Analytical account of how the March reshaped party leadership and ideology.
• Jonathan Spence. The Search for Modern China. W.W. Norton, 1990. Contextual narrative of the Long March within the broader Chinese Civil War and CPC rise to power.
• Sun Shuyun. The Long March: The True History of Communist China’s Founding Myth. Doubleday, 2006. Field research and oral histories challenging the mythologized casualty and distance figures with contemporary evidence.