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The Long March as

a Leadership Journey
From the Encyclopedia of Leadership, edited by James MacGregor Burns, George R.
Goethals, and Georgia J. Sorenson. A Berkshire Reference Work, published by Sage (2004).
by Arthur L. Rosenbaum, Clarement McKenna College

The Long March (October 1934–October 1935) was the epic 9,600-kilometer flight of the

Chinese Communists from their beleaguered bases in southeast China to safety in northwest Chi-

na. After breaking through Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) encircling armies,

the Communist units marched for almost a year, averaging 43 kilometers per day across hostile

terrain, including mountain ranges, rivers, grasslands, and swamps. During the march Mao Zedong

bested his party rivals to emerge as the leading figure in the Communist movement.

The Fall of the Jiangxi Soviet

In the early 1930s Chinese Communist forces controlled base areas in parts of rural southeast

China, the most important of which was the Jiangxi Soviet base area, founded by Mao Zedong and

Zhu De (1886–1976). From 1930 to 1934, the Nationalist government of Jiang Jieshi launched

five military “extermination” campaigns designed to annihilate Communist forces. The first four

expeditions were repulsed by Mao’s use of mobile warfare and guerrilla tactics.

Despite these military victories, Mao Zedong was in a losing struggle with the national lead-

ership of the Chinese Communist Party, which had moved from its illegal underground headquar-

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Arthur L. Rosenbaum “The Long March as a Leadership Journey”

ters in Shanghai to a safer location in Jiangxi. Dominated by the Moscow-oriented international-

ist faction, headed by Bo Gu (1907–1946) and Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), the Central Committee

removed Mao from the party’s Military Committee in 1932, but temporarily allowed him to retain

other offices in recognition of his support among local activists. Mao’s opponents, condemning his

reliance on guerrilla tactics, gave control of military policy to Zhou Enlai and Otto Braun, a Ger-

man military advisor sent by Moscow.

During the fifth extermination campaign, from 1933 to 1934, Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi

took personal command and employed almost a million men, including his best German-trained

units. This overwhelming force was backed by an air force of four hundred planes and a new strat-

egy of encircling the Jiangxi Soviet with concentric rings of fortifications and blockhouses, while

units advanced forward in a slow, methodical fashion. Braun’s adoption of conventional positional

warfare against the more numerous and better-armed Nationalists led to military disaster.

In August 1934 the Communist leadership concluded that the Jiangxi Soviet had to be aban-

doned. On 15 October 1934, 85,000 troops and 15,000 administrative personnel broke through

enemy lines. Left behind was a rearguard of 28,000 men (of whom 20,000 were wounded) and

most of the wives and children. Mao’s pregnant second wife, He Zizhen, joined the Long March,

but his children and younger brother remained behind.

The Cunyi Conference and the Rise of Mao

Despite an auspicious start, the First Front Army columns—slowed down by the Central

Committee’s decision to bring along cumbersome baggage trains—suffered grievous losses from

aerial bombardment and pursuing troops. Prevented from moving north to link up with He Long’s

(1896–1969) forces in the Sanzhi Soviet, the army instead swung westward into Guizhou prov-

ince. At a Politburo meeting in Cunyi in January 1935, Mao emerged from political disgrace to

begin his ascendancy as party leader. He convinced his colleagues that fundamental policy errors

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Arthur L. Rosenbaum “The Long March as a Leadership Journey”

by the internationalist faction caused the fall of the Jiangxi Soviet and unnecessary military losses

on the Long March. The Cunyi Conference gave Mao control over the military and endorsed his

political policies as the correct approach to the Chinese revolution.

Conflict with Zhang Guotao

From Cunyi the Long Marchers moved north, where Mao hoped to link up with Communist

forces in Sichuan under the command of Zhang Guotao (1897–1979). Against near-impossible

odds, the army evaded Jiang’s Nationalist forces to cross the Yangtze River, secured the Luding

River crossing by storming across a chain link bridge in the face of enemy fire, and then marched

across the 4,200-meter Great Snowy Mountains. In June 1935 Mao’s depleted forces joined with

Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Field Army—almost four times larger—in northern Sichuan. The two

leaders clashed. Mao proposed to move northeast to Shaanxi Province, where he would promote

a united Chinese front against Japanese aggression. Zhang preferred moving to the sparsely popu-

lated areas of Xinjiang, close to the Soviet Union. Tensions were so high that for a time armed con-

flict seemed likely. In the end the two armies merged and then subdivided. Zhang, accompanied by

Zhu De, went west to Xinjiang. Mao’s troops advanced through swampy grasslands, where men

had to sleep standing up, crossed the Huang (Yellow River), and on 20 October reached the safety

of a local Chinese Soviet in northern Shaanxi. Only 7,000 to 8,000 Long Marchers—one out of

twenty—who had started out from Jiangxi with Mao survived.

In Shaanxi the survivors gradually reconstituted their political and military strength. In De-

cember 1936 Mao moved his capital to the nearby city of Yan’an. As Mao had predicted, Zhang

Guotao’s units were unable to sustain themselves in the backward regions of Xinjiang. Survivors of

Zhang’s forces (including Zhu De) straggled into Yan’an in 1936. At Yan’an the Communists res-

urrected themselves during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) and laid the founda-

tions for their eventual conquest of power, resulting in the People’s Republic of China, in 1949.

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Arthur L. Rosenbaum “The Long March as a Leadership Journey”

The Legacy of the Long March

By conventional measures the Long March was a terrible military defeat, with the loss of al-

most 90 percent of those who started on the trek, but it did not lead to the annihilation of the Com-

munist movement. The Long Marchers’ ability to endure unimaginable hardships and surmount

overwhelming odds generated a myth of invincibility and a belief in the inevitability of ultimate

success. It validated Mao’s military-political judgment and his capacity to inspire fanatical dedica-

tion within the rank-and-file.

The Long March marked Mao’s rise to a dominant position within the central leadership, al-

though his power was not fully consolidated until the Rectification Campaigns of the early 1940s.

Two powerful rivals, Bo Gu and Zhang Guotao, were discredited by their failures during the Long

March; other rivals, such as Zhou Enlai, converted to Mao’s side. From the Cunyi Conference

onward, Mao’s methods were defined as the correct path to ultimate victory. The horrific hardships

of the Long March also created a lasting bond among the surviving veterans that helped create

China’s political and military inner circles. Until the 1970s, the top leadership of the People’s Re-

public of China consisted of those revolutionaries who had participated in the Long March.

Further Reading
Chen, C. (1959). On the Long March with Chairman Mao. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Lindesay, W. (1993). Marching with Mao: A biographical journey. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Liu, P. (Ed.). (1978). Recalling the long march. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Mao, Z. (1992). Mao’s road to power: revolutionary writings 1912–1949 (S. R. Schram, Ed.). Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe.
Salisbury, H. E. (1985). The Long March: The untold story. New York: Harper & Row.
Schram, S. R. (1989). The thought of Mao Tse-Tung. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Short, P. (1999). Mao: A life. New York: Henry Holt.
Terrill, R. (1999). Mao: A biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wilson, D. (1971). The Long March, 1935; The epic of Chinese communism’s survival. New York: Viking Press.
Wu, T-W. (1974). Mao Tse-Tung and the Tsunyi conference: An annotated bibliography. Washington, DC: Center for
Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries.
Young, H. P. (2001). Choosing revolution: Chinese women soldiers on the Long March. Urbana: University of Illinois

 © Copyright 2006 Berkshire Publishing Group llc

Arthur L. Rosenbaum “The Long March as a Leadership Journey”

Press.
Zhang, G. (1971). The rise of the Chinese Communist Party; The autobiography of Chang Kuo-T’ao. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas.

Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum

Arthur Lewis Rosenbaum is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.

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