The Long March

Strategic Failure and the Decision to Break Out

By the autumn of 1934, the Central Soviet Area in Jiangxi — the CPC's largest rural base — was facing imminent military collapse. The KMT's Fifth Encirclement Campaign (1933–34), guided by German military advisor Hans von Seeckt, had applied a strategy of slow, methodical advance supported by a network of blockhouses rather than the mobile pursuit operations that previous campaigns had used. The CPC's military strategy, controlled by Comintern advisors Otto Braun (Li De) and Bo Gu over Mao Zedong's objections, had attempted to counter this with positional warfare — a disastrous choice given the Red Army's inferiority in artillery and logistics.

The decision to abandon the base area and break out westward was made in secret by a small group of leaders. Most soldiers were not told their destination. On the night of 16 October 1934, the main force of approximately 86,000 — including party leaders, military commanders, and a large non-combat apparatus — crossed the Yudu River and began what would become a year-long retreat across some of the most difficult terrain in China.

The Crossing of the Xiang River and the Zunyi Conference

The early weeks of the march were catastrophic. Slowed by an enormous baggage train (including printing presses, industrial machinery, and archives) and harassed by Nationalist forces, the Red Army suffered devastating losses crossing the Xiang River in November 1934. Of the approximately 86,000 who set out, fewer than 30,000 survived the crossing. It was the single most costly episode of the entire march and the moment that decisively discredited the leadership of Bo Gu and Otto Braun.

In January 1935, the army briefly occupied the city of Zunyi in Guizhou Province. The Zunyi Conference (15–17 January 1935) was the pivotal political event of the march: an expanded meeting of the Politburo that criticised Bo Gu and Braun's military leadership, transferred real military authority to a new standing committee under the direction of Mao Zedong, and began the shift away from Comintern-directed strategy toward Mao's emphasis on flexible guerrilla tactics. The conference is officially celebrated in PRC historiography as the moment the party "learned to walk on its own legs."

The Crossing and Completion

After Zunyi, the march became less a retreat and more an extended guerrilla operation, with Mao's forces crossing and re-crossing the Chishui River four times to confuse pursuing Nationalist forces. Key episodes included the crossing of the Jinsha River (May 1935) by a small advance team that captured enemy boats; the storming of the Luding Bridge (29 May 1935) across the Dadu River, whose chains the advance troops crossed under fire; and the crossing of the snow-capped Jiajin Mountain and the vast Zoige Grasslands in Sichuan and Qinghai, where cold, starvation, and disease killed thousands more.

The First Front Army arrived at the Shaanxi Soviet in October 1935 with fewer than 10,000 survivors. Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army, which had split from the main force in a dispute over the march's direction, suffered even greater attrition in the northwest before reuniting with Mao's forces. The total number who completed a Long March route — across all CPC armies — is estimated at around 30,000 to 50,000.

Myth and Historical Record

The Long March became the founding myth of the People's Republic, invested with almost sacred significance in CPC historiography. Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937) — based on extended interviews with Mao and other survivors in Yan'an — brought the march's story to international audiences and shaped the sympathetic Western image of the CPC for decades. Subsequent critical scholarship, notably Sun Shuyun's The Long March (2006), conducted interviews with surviving participants and found accounts that differed significantly from the official narrative: incidents of plunder from local populations, internal coercion, and the improvised rather than strategically planned nature of much of the route.