The Long March
Mao didn't plan the breakout from encirclement, but he did benefit from it.
In 1934, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek’s army was encircling the Central Soviet of the Chinese Soviet Republic. That was a large Communist base area in southern China that was operating under Red leadership. Mao Zedong was there and had been in important Communist positions before but had recently been demoted within the Communist Party. Mao had lost power because many Communists resented that Mao had been involved in purges and plays for power that had cost thousands of Communists their lives. Mao had also been critical of strategy by the Party leadership.
For example, in 1932, during a pause between encirclement campaigns against the Central Soviet Area, Mao and Zhou Enlai argued about defensive strategy. Mao favored mobile guerrilla warfare and luring the enemy deep into the Communist territory, where Communist troops could isolate and attack small bands of government troops. This strategy had been used against the first encirclement campaigns. Zhou Enlai, as secretary of the Bolshevik-dominated Political Bureau, or Politburo, had ordered that policy discontinued. This may because of the growing concerns among the civilian population in the Central Soviet Area. Mobile guerrilla warfare exposed civilians to destruction of property and retaliation by government troops. Civilians’ felt insecure and unhappy about other Communist policies. The locals were becoming less willing to cooperate with the Communists and were becoming difficult to recruit. So, Zhou Enlai may have recommended positional warfare ("to keep the enemy beyond the gates") to protect civilian property and to take the fight into enemy territory. In his view, guerrilla warfare still had its usefulness, but it was to be fought only behind enemy lines.
Zhou Enlai’s strategy was supported by the 28 Bolsheviks and Mao was removed from the Military Affairs Committee. Mao was then also excluded from the Politburo and therefore from the leadership of the Communist Party. He was put on probation as a Party member by an order from Moscow. He did not take part in the decision to abandon the Central Soviet and to prepare what later became known as the Long March
Who were these 28 Bolsheviks who were primarily in charge of the Communist Party of China at that time around 1933 and 1934? They were a group of Chinese communists who had studied together in Moscow at Sun Yat-sen University. It was a special university funded by the Soviet Union to train Chinese Communists. These former students then returned to China together and were nicknamed the 28 Bolsheviks.
When the Nationalist Army was encircling them and slowly advancing and winning battles, it was the leadership in the Chinese Soviet that made the decision to plan a breakout and escape. Zhou Enlai was assigned to come up with plans for the breakout. He was very secretive and virtually no one knew the details of the plan, such as the route or who would be included. Mao Zedong definitely wanted to join them and escape from the attacking armies. His younger brother Mao Zetan was not so lucky. He along with about 16,000 others, including some famous Communists, were ordered to stay and to distract the attacking army from the KMT government. Many of them, including Mao’s younger brother, lost their lives as the Nationalist government finished off the encirclement and won that campaign.
Another group of Communist soldiers were ordered to distract the government troops by breaking out to the north. They called themselves the Resist Japan Vanguards. But the idea that this was anti-Japanese march seems like fiction. A play was made in 1956 in Communist China suggesting that.
When the Japanese had first invaded Manchuria and Shanghai, the Communists had used the distraction to seize territory in the center of China at the expense of China’s Nationalist government. Now at this moment of the breakout from Jiangxi, the supposedly anti-Japanese force did move north towards Anhui. But it never crossed the Yangzi River from south China into north China before turning around. It seems to have been a deliberate diversion to distract Nationalist forces and added some clever messaging which Communist sympathizers repeated.
The actual Long March, by approximately 100,000 Communists and soldiers, was a retreat south and west from the Central Soviet in Jiangxi. That took them in the exact opposite direction from the invading Japanese. The Long March was about survival for the Communists.
There were three main Red Army Groups at this point. The First Army Group is the one most remembered. It included the leadership from the Jiangxi Soviet and included future People’s Republic of China Chairman Mao Zedong, future Premier Zhou Enlai, General Zhu De and the Bolsheviks. There was also a Second Army Group which left last from an area just west of where the First Army started from. The Third Army Group had been wiped out. The Fourth Army Group started further north and had already moved west first, to a new base area around the north of Sichuan and the south of Shaanxi. Eventually, all three Red Army groups would end up in the same place. But how that happened is the story of the Long March.
The Long March is also the story of Mao’s further rise to power. And his use of storytelling, or if you prefer, propaganda, to turn this retreat into a story of heroism.
One historian put it this way and I like it so much that I will quote it. The “myth of the Long March toward the New China. The affliction of the old regime, like the suffering of Israel in Egypt, is something that can be escaped only by a journey through the desert, or in this case, by a journey through dark valleys, down roaring streams, over perilous cliffs.”
It isn’t only this historian who saw the Long March as a useful mythmaking opportunity. Mao himself, at an early stage, saw its potential.
Mao, at a party conference in 1935 when the Long March was only about halfway through, understood the symbolism of the Long March. Mao then stated "that the Long March is the first of its kind in the annals of history, that it is a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding machine. Since Pan Ku divided the heavens from the earth and the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors reigned, has history ever witnessed a Long March such as ours?"
In 1940, in his book On New Democracy, Mao wrote “not only do we want to change a China that is politically oppressed and economically exploited into a China that is politically free and economically prosperous, we also want to change the China which is being kept ignorant and backward under the sway of the old culture into an enlightened and progressive China under the sway of a new culture. In short, we want to build a new China." The Long March has been a useful story to show the journey from an old China to a new one. A difficult journey to a new promised land.
In fact, both the journey and the destination were difficult. Yenan (Yan’an), the eventual end point of the Long March, was not a paradise. It was a cold, remote and poor part of north central China. So, suffering both on the Long March and in Yenan, became something to recall later and to inspire Communists and Chinese. Mao explained this to a French man in 1965, around the time of the Cultural Revolution. "Thought, culture, customs must be born of struggle and the struggle must continue for as long as there is still a danger of a return to the past…. The purification period must penetrate deeper into the psyche of the Chinese people. Struggle and more struggle—the theme was constantly repeated. The heroic days of Yenan must never pass from memory. The sufferings endured there must not be betrayed. Above all, beware of revisionism, a softening of the militant attitude.”
Reality of the Long March for the First Red Army
The Long March began in early October 1934. It was meant to be an escape and survival for the marchers. The plan was also to reunite with other Communists, primarily the other Red Armies. At the start, the marchers were carrying a lot of supplies, including typewriters, desks, furniture, printing presses, chests of currency and more than two million rounds of ammunition.
Zhou Enlai's intelligence network identified a section of blockhouses manned by troops under General Chen Jitang’s command. He was a Guangdong warlord who Zhou believed would prefer to preserve his troops instead of fighting. Zhou sent an agent to negotiate for safe passage with General Chen, who allowed the Red Army to pass through his territory without fighting. The First Red Army successfully passed blockhouses and marched through Guangdong and into Hunan, towards the Second Red Army’s base, before encountering the last of Chiang's fortifications at the Xiang River.
Mao and the other Communist leaders themselves did not march. They were carried, either on horses or by litters on the shoulders of others. Virtually every Communist leader survived the Long March. Mao had time and energy to think as he was carried. He insisted that his third wife He Zizhen come too, although she would have preferred to stay in Jiangxi where she was from. She was one of about 35 women on the Long March and was injured by shrapnel in 1935. She was pregnant and had a painful childbirth along the way. She, with Mao’s approval, left the child with a village near where the child was born. She later went looking and tried to reunite, but Mao never did.
Mao was already tiring of his third wife. By 1937, Mao had an affair with another woman. He would then find his fourth and final wife in Yenan, after the Long March. He confronted him about the 1937 affair and after that fight, He went to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. That way they did not have to see each other every day. Their relationship was over, at least from Mao’s perspective. It seems like He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic in Moscow and confined to a sanatorium. She then returned to China but was not allowed any political role. This seems to have been another unhappy story for an ex-wife of Mao Zedong.
The First Red Army suffered their first serious casualties on the Long March during the Battle of Xiang River in late 1934. When they started the Long March, they had 80,000 troops or more as well as heavy weapons. After they crossed the Xiang River in Hunan, however, they had lost about 40,000 soldiers and almost all their heavy weapons. The Nationalists dominated the skies and used that to their advantage around this time, with bombing runs.
Instead of continuing into Hunan, the First Red Army moved west and tried to march quickly and possibly at night. They bypassed provincial capitals and direct confrontations with provincial armies. More than once they had made feints towards important cities, to distract the provincial governors, but never actually attacked them.
In early December 1934, they had their first real rest in northern Guizhou. They had taken 80 days to travel that far. It was the third province they travelled to, or fourth if you include the unsuccessful move to Hunan, after leaving Jiangxi.
Zunyi Conference
The Zunyi Conference was a meeting in Guizhou. It of course followed the loss of the Central Soviet and the crippling losses at the Xiang River crossing. Many of the Long Marchers were experiencing anger, panic and despair. Many were suffering from serious anxiety. Mao was different. He excused those who had actually fought from the defeat, which he blamed on the leadership, and suggested a new strategy to victory.
According to Jerome Chen, a historian, Mao rose to brilliance at Zunyi. First, Mao prepared with great care to build a majority through his personal contacts. Second, he anticipated the other side’s line of argument accurately and worked out his criticism with skill. He predicted that the existing leadership would not want to alienate the soldiers, so they could not be blamed for the defeat. The only line open for the leadership was to say that the enemy had been overwhelmingly strong. Also, under conditions of the Long March and at Zunyi, it might not be easy to pore over piles of documents to cite indisputable evidence. So, the existing leadership argued generally that the defeats of 1934 were inevitable. Mao's key arguments were "Had such and such battles been fought differently, we might or could have won,". That sounded plausible and Mao undermined the old leadership.
Two men clearly gained strength during the Zunyi Conference: Zhang Wentian and Mao Zedong. Both men had their views adopted and both men were promoted in their Party positions. For Zhang, it was to the highest post in the Party; for Mao, a return to the Political Bureau from which he had been removed. Mao was also elected as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. That was probably the more important post for the rest of the Long March. It gave him a position from which he could influence the strategic and tactical decisions of at least one body of Communist troops, the First Red Army.
The main outcome of the Zunyi Conference was not the personal victory of Mao over his rivals. It was the rise of a military frame of mind within the Party leadership. After that conference, the Chinese Communists gave more attention to military matters to which the old leadership, who had lived and written in the cities until 1931, had never been suited. Mao, who had earlier written that "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun", was more suited to the situation.
Zhang Wentian was to be General Secretary of the Party. He was one of the 28 Bolsheviks who changed to Mao’s side just before or during the Long March.
Wang Ming and the remaining 28 Bolsheviks’ influence over the main Communist forces was minimal after the Zunyi Conference of January 1935. Wang Ming, which was his alias, was in the USSR then. From Moscow, Wang and another Bolshevik did maintain control over Communist forces in Manchuria. The Communists in Manchuria were ordered to conserve their strength and avoid direct confrontation with the Japanese army. This directive was resisted by some Manchurian leaders and later criticized by Mao as evidence of Wang Ming having stifled Manchuria's “revolutionary potential”.
By now, the plan had been for the First Red Army to create a base in northern Guizhou, which was close to where the Second Red Army was, just a bit northeast of Zunyi and northern Guizhou. But that plan seems to have changed at Zunyi. Now, the First Army would not wage positional warfare again. It opted for mobile and guerrilla operations. It would now try to cross the river from Guizhou to join forces with the Fourth Red Army and to turn Sichuan red.
So, it moved north towards southern Sichuan. But it failed to penetrate the defences. This was very costly. This period in northern Guizhou, along with the earlier mentioned Xiang River crossing, seem to have been the heaviest fighting for the First Army group.
It then engaged in very unorthodox behaviour. The First Army was at risk of being trapped as government troops from Sichuan crossed south. So, the First Red Army, quite unusually, did four crossings of the Chishui River. That surprised and deceived the enemy. Instead of the Red Army being defeated, it regained some initiative and marched faster and now to the west towards Yunnan, rather than directly north into Sichuan. After going west and then north through Yunnan, it then crossed into western rather than eastern Sichuan.
Taking the First Red Army into Yunnan meant crossing more difficult terrain. One of the challenges was the Snowy Mountains, where these poorly equipped soldiers got to heights of something like up to 5000 metres (or 16,000 feet) in elevation. That meant low oxygen and narrow passes. Some people fell to their death. Eventually the army also crossed a grassland that was experiencing heavy rain and became a bog for them. To survive, they learned to send animals first…or else the scouts would sink to their death.
They also encountered locals. Some were hostile and fought them. Some welcomed them and fed them. In other cases, the Red Army took what they needed and even conscripted young men into the army.
I’m not relying much on Edgar Snow as a source. He was an American who got permission to interview Mao and others in Yenan after the Long March. He then told some stories like the Luding Bridge crossing that most historians and even more recent Communist Party officials say were exaggerated and did not happen in the way Edgar Snow recounted. I consider Snow’s work to be a bit of successful PR for Mao and the Communists after the Long March. It seems to have been more promotion than history.
The new idea of settling in Sichuan had some merit. It had been autonomous since the 1911 Revolution and was unstable. It had six competing local armies at that time. There had been lots of civil war and plenty of civilians and peasants had been affected. They might have been good prospects for recruitment by the Reds. The province was remote and wealthy, with plenty of resources to exploit. Food and salt were in abundance. Salt had been in very short supply in the Central Soviet once Chiang Kai-shek instituted a blockade around the time of the Encirclement. Sichuan would have been an attractive target.
There already was a Red Army in Sichuan. The Fourth Red Army, also known as the Fourth Front Army.
Mao and most of the Chinese Communist leadership had been in the Central Soviet area around Jiangxi. But there were other Communist bases in China. One was the Oyuman Soviet a bit northwest of the Central Soviet area. The Oyuman Soviet leadership had moved out in December 1932 with around 20,000 from their base in central China around the borders of Hubei, Henan and Anhui to the border area of Sichuan and Shaanxi, where they had grown.
Their army was the Fourth Red Army. Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Army had some veterans from Oyuman and a lot of new local recruits.
Not only was Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Red Army the largest, but he was also an alternative leader. He had made himself Chairman of the Sichuan-Shaanxi Soviet Area, with about 9 million people within its territory.
To facilitate the First Red Army's march after Zunyi, the Fourth Army left its Sichuan-Shaanxi base in March 1935 and moved westward. It is said to have had about 80,000 troops, which was then reduced to about 70,000 troops after heavy fighting. Its rear was being attacked. That may be why the Fourth Red Army then attacked southern Shaanxi before moving west through Sichuan.
But then it was again able to rest and be well armed. He then met the First Red Army in northern Sichuan in June 1935.
The First Front Army had lost much of its strength, its original 80,000 troops and 100,000 people having been reduced to about 35,000 exhausted, starved and poorly armed troops.
At this time, the Second Red Army had still not moved from its base in northwestern Hunan.
Lianghekou Conference
The leaders of the two front armies met at Lianghekou in June 1935. By then, there were already tensions between the First and Fourth Red Armies and between Mao and Zhang. It seems like the First Red Army felt let down. The Fourth Red Army was larger, but had not helped them, especially when they were trying to cross into Sichuan and crossed the Chishui River four times.
At this conference, Mao argued for both armies to continue the Long March to a new location: northward to northern Shaanxi, where there already was a Communist base area. Zhang Guotao, on the other hand, thought that this strategy was unrealistic given the weakened strength of the Communists. He suggested instead that the Communists should remain in Sichuan and later establish contact with the Soviet Union through Xinjiang. That would allow the Chinese Communists to get aid and supplies from the USSR.
This seems to have been a positioning between those two men. Zhang controlled the larger army and did not want Mao to have superiority over him which might have occurred if the two forces moved together. Mao seems to have controlled a majority among the highest party bodies. Zhang had more soldiers at this point, but not the central party votes. Zhang was not as good as Mao at behind-the-scenes discussions to build a majority.
The conference ended in a stalemate and, Zhu De, who acted as mediator, suggested the two armies rest.
Maoerkai Conference
They moved on to Maoerkai and rested there from July 10 to 29th of 1935. They once again failed to agree on a common strategy, but they reached a compromise. The two front armies were divided so that two columns, east and west, be formed from both armies. Mao Zedong was to command the eastern column. Zhang Guotao was to command the western column. The two columns were roughly equal in numerical strength, but Zhang had a clear edge over Mao. First, virtually the entire Red Army headquarters, including Commander in Chief Zhu De, was attached to his column. Second, soon after Mao's column resumed its northern march, one of its units lost its way and had to return to Maoerkai where it was added to Zhang Guotao's column. Zhang even created a rival Central Committee with himself as its head. Tensions were high.
Zhang preferred not to leave the Sichuan area for Shaanxi. Interestingly, Zhu De, the famous Red Army leader usually associated with Mao, remained in Sichuan with Zhang. Zhu was originally from Sichuan and it is possible that he preferred the Sichuan option to the Shaanxi option. But later Party history makes it sound like Zhu was forced because of a Nationalist Army Attack which split him from Mao’s Red Army group. Other stories say that Zhang threatened Zhu by gunpoint. A lot of the history is difficult to separate from the mythology built up once Mao was firmly in control of the party. What is clear is that there was a party split at this point. Some Communists did not want to leave Sichuan for Shaanxi. Zhu De, for a time, might have been one of them.
Arrival in Northern Shaanxi
Mao and his force arrived in northern Shaanxi in October 1935. The next year, they moved within northern Shaanxi to Yenan (Yan’an). It has been said that they crossed 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers to reach there. From the original 80,000 troops, about 7000 arrived. But the Communist leadership survived. Their journey had been less grueling than those required to actually walk. Losing 90% of the force could certainly be considered a defeat. But Mao spun that into a victory. He did it through clever propaganda and later events which he worked to his favour. If the retreat from Jiangxi had been to preserve the Red Army and to save the Communist Leaders, only one of those two goals was accomplished. The First Red Army was almost completely wiped out. And the goal of bringing the Red Armies together failed. The Fourth Red Army had remained behind in Sichuan.
This area of Shaanxi had already had a Communist base before the Long Marchers arrived. It was extremely poor. Zhou Enlai gave some indication of its poverty in an interview with Edgar Snow in 1936. Zhou said: Peasants in Shaanxi are extremely poor, their land very unproductive. If Jiangxi peasants owned as much land as Shaanxi peasants, they would be considered rich landlords...The population of the Jiangxi Soviet numbered 3,000,000 whereas here it is at most 600,000... In Jiangxi and Fujian people brought bundles with them when they joined the Red Army; here they do not even bring chopsticks; they are utterly destitute.
Outcome for Zhang Guotao
Zhang Guotao, Mao’s most serious rival, soon after the division of the armies into east and west columns, saw his military power decimated by central government troops. After moving southward from Maoerkai, his column suffered heavy casualties when it tried to establish a base in Xikang, an area in the Tibet / Sichuan area dominated by the Khampas people, a Tibetan group.
Most of the column then moved northward in the direction of Shaanxi, where Mao's column had arrived in late 1935. But Zhang Guotao still didn’t want to go to northern Shaanxi but to move westward to the Gansu Corridor and Xinjiang. He called his troops the Western Route Army. It had about 22,500 men. Only 700 survivors actually reached Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang. Then, he finally went to the northern Shaanxi base area. His earlier advantage, his strong army, had been lost. Zhang was brought to trial in January 1937 and ordered to "study" until he had purged himself of his "incorrect" ideas. That was the end of Zhang Guotao as an active member of the Party leadership. A short time later, in April, 1938, he left Yenan (Yan’an), and then in Wuhan the same month, went over to the Kuomintang. He was then formally stripped of his Communist Party positions and of his Party membership.
It was a historical accident that Zhang Guotao's armies were destroyed and that Mao was with the first of the Long Marchers to reach the northern Shaanxi base area. This helped to bolster Mao’s prestige. He now had the largest number of troops. Also helpful to Mao was the fairly peaceful and compact nature of the northern Shaanxi base area. This allowed frequent face-to-face contacts among the leaders. Mao seemed to do well in such an environment.
Chiang Kai-shek’s perspective
It is said the Communists tried to travel at night to avoid the Nationalists’ surveillance planes.
Jung Chang’s book suggests Chiang Kai-shek knew where they were. The Nationalists had an air force, which the Communists did not. She says, and other sources support this to some extent, that Chiang Kai-shek was willing to let the Communists march west. That allowed his army to follow them and to then take control of provinces like Sichuan that had so far been outside of Nanjing’s authority. Chiang intended to use the Communists to occupy autonomous provinces.
His first target was a takeover of Guangxi, which had had a strong autonomous streak dating back perhaps to the Taiping Rebellion or earlier. In Hunan, there was a strong government force, so the Communists turned west towards Guizhou, which seems to have been Chiang’s wish. Later, Chiang was able to get his Nationalist Army commanders placed in Sichuan. This was the first time that his capital had real military influence in that important province. He established a military headquarters in Chongqing in 1935. This would prove important. It would become his national capital once the Japanese took and raped Nanjing. So, Chiang Kai-shek did gain some advantage from the Long March. Communist forces were weakened considerably. And he was able to bring regions like Sichuan into the Nationalist fold for the first time.
Jung Chang also introduces a more unique theory. Chiang Kai-shek’s oldest son, heir and eventual successor in Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, was then being held by Stalin in Moscow. He had been taken from China during the First United Front, maybe without Chiang’s permission and Stalin was holding him as a hostage since the KMT broke with the Communists. During the Long March, Chiang, usually through contacts and not directly, was looking to get his son back. I think her book lacks a smoking gun on this issue, but she suggests Chiang both with the Long March and soon thereafter, with the Second United Front (against Japan) was willing to let the Communists survive in a weakened form to get his son back.
Chiang suffered somewhat from provincial armies preferring to live another day than to fight the Communists. A lot of regional powers did what they could to preserve their own position and strength, even if it meant that the Communists could pass through.
In any event, Chiang Kai-shek reduced but did not eliminate the Red Armies. This seems to have been a missed opportunity by government forces to have eliminated the leadership of the Communist Party of China. Most of them survived the Long March. Most ordinary soldiers and evacuees did not. They either died or abandoned the March along the way.
Conclusion
Mao Zedong was a minor Communist official at the beginning of the Long March. The 28 Bolsheviks were solidly in charge. But they became tainted by the defeats during the last Encirclement Campaign and the losses at the Xiang River. With each conference along the way of the Long March, and in conversations outside of those official meetings, Mao Zedong was able to build up his power and gain support for his military viewpoint. He was able to outlast both the Bolsheviks and Zhang Guotao and emerge in a much stronger position by the end of the Long March.
He also realized the messaging potential of this retreat. The fact that we remember it as a Long March: as a symbolic journey through the wilderness to a new land, is a testament to Mao’s mythmaking abilities. He saw that potential early, when a lot of the Communist Party leaders were feeling defeated and anxious.
Mao later admitted that living in Yenan (Yan’an), their destination following the Long March, was not his first choice as a home. By some counts, it was the fourth choice along the march. But Mao may have pushed for Shaanxi instead of Sichuan because Zhang had a stronger claim to leadership if the new base was in Sichuan. By making the destination somewhere else, Mao was better able to lead the remaining Communists. It is possible that personal power considerations led to settling in colder, poorer, more remote Shaanxi, instead of Sichuan, which had advantages. Of course, Mao was too clever to mention personal power as his motivation and mentioned instead that the new base would be better for resisting Japan.
Yet, despite that message, the Chinese Communists took no military steps against Japan during the first 6 years of the Second Sino-Japanese war. Between 1931 and 1937, the Chinese Communists did not fight the Japanese. Up to that point, the anti-Japanese declarations by the Reds were mere words without actions. Of course, the Communists declared that the Nationalist Armies should focus on Japan. That was because the alternative was attacking the Communists, who themselves were fighting for survival. And the Communist line about attacking the Japanese also served the remaining warlords, who preferred to keep their independence from Chiang Kai-shek and have him turn his armies eastward. Full throated patriotism was a nice cover for self-interest.
Despite the Long March moving the Chinese Communists further north, the Communist Party of China seems to have gained greater independence of Moscow. This was for a few reasons, including Mao Zedong's growth at the expense of the Bolsheviks in unusual conditions, difficulties in maintaining contact with the USSR during the time in the wilderness, the Comintern’s support for popular fronts and Stalin’s preference for the Chinese rather than the Soviet Union to fight Japan, all played a role. After the Long March, and especially after the Zunyi Conference, the Russians seem to have had less and less influence in the Communist Party of China's internal affairs. This was one of the major consequences of the Long March.
P.S. Did you know that The Chinese Revolution is on YouTube and is also a podcast?
Sources:
Important in the history of China.