The role of the Long March in his rise to power.

Table of content

Table de contend
Introduction

Investigation 4

Dismantling the Long March’s myth 5

Mao Zedong’s manipulation of the myth 6

Introduction

Investigation

- Dismantling Mao Zedong’s manipulation of Long March’s myth.

- Effects of the Long March’s propaganda

Conclusion

Mao and the Long March

 To what extent did The Long March contributed for the Chinese Communist party
uprising to become a true contender in the Chinese landscape?

Introduction

The Chinese civil war was a great marking event in the country’s history, mainly
due to the ideological conflict and the outcome of the war. The two sides battling for the
Chinese dominion were the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang
(GMD) also known as the nationalist party. The CCP's leader was Mao Zedong. He is
known for his many doings in aid of China, as well as the bloody purges and the
undeniable famines the country suffered under his rule. However, his unchallengeable
leadership would not be continuous during the war; one of the significant events that
enabled Mao to consolidate his leadership was the famous Long March. The Long
March meant a miraculous achievement by the communist party, because of the several
life-threatening feats the communists were able to survive. For this there are several
perspectives, there are those who approve and retell the communist miracle like the
acknowledged American journalist Edgar Snow, who in his book Red Star Over China
portrays The Long march as “one of the great exploits of military history.”[ CITATION
Sno18 \l 9226 ]. However, there is an opposite perspective that explains the significance
of the event as “China’s ever long-lasting myth” which British historian Jon Halliday
and Sino-British writer Jung Chang explain in their book Mao: The Unknown story after
10 years of investigation. The significance of the Long March and its effects vary from
one perspective to another. The attempt to disjoin the mythical aspect from the
veracious is the objective of the investigation, to understand the extent of the Long
March’s arguable mythologization.

Therefore, and considering Mao's actions to consolidate power, the question: To

what extent was the veracity of The Long March distorted and used for Mao Zedong's
rise to power? will be analyzed. There is no denial of the fact that Mao emerges as one
of the prominent leaders within communist party after the Long March, which was
unclear right before this feat took place. The achievement of the CCP has a
psychological consequence on the survivors who feel invincible, that Mao appears to
show and take advantage of. Though the exaggeration and distortions of the events
might add significance to explain Mao's accelerated rise to power, there is truth within
those myths which can´t be ignored. The debate around the Long March is a tough topic
since the Chinese government prevents opposite sources from being distributed in the
country. One of the sources used for this investigation as Jung Chang says during an
interview: “I don´t think the regime (current Chinese) wants our book to be known at
all.” [ CITATION steve \l 2058 ] Therefore, the effects, significance, and veracity of the
Long March reach as far as today. This source, an interview made to the co-authors of
Mao: The unknown story, is valuable to the investigation due to its alternate critical
perspective on Mao Zedong and his doings. However, the author’s background has a
limit, due to her arguable bias against the former communist leader. She lived in China
in her childhood and even joined the communist party at fourteen years old, but once
her parents revealed against Mao, they were publicly humiliated leading them
eventually to imprisonment, during The Great Leap Forward. [ CITATION Cha12 \l 2058 ]
This might create resentment and subjectivity in her assessment, as well as in her
husband and co-author Jon Halliday. It is important to consider this antecedent when
evaluating the source’s reliability.

Investigation

The perspective of the vast majority of the Chinese supports the Long March as an
incredibly miraculous achievement. For every specific event, there is an almost
mythological feat that gives it greatness. Bypassing the causes of The Long March, the
abandonment of the Chinese Soviet base in Rujian, Jiangxi province by the central Red
Army’s, is one of the strangest events to explain without seeming miraculous. Chinese
News documentary explains how the "central Red Army had fought its way through
three Goumindang encirclements".[CITATION CGT16 \l 9226 ] where he communists lost
around 30’000 to 40’000 soldiers.

However, there is solid evidence that explains this situation differently from what
is commonly said. Several perspectives have aroused mattering the main reasons that
allowed the CCP to escape from their base, excluding their self-styled fight. There were
4 encirclement blockades around the base. Three of them were easily passed by the
communists, due to a lucrative agreement they had with local warlords and landlords
who allowed them through without any inconvenient 1. Moreover, Jiang Jieshi was
oddly interested in letting the communists escape. He allowed the communist to break
away to the southwest, since he had been rejected in three of the most important
provinces of the area, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, by Cantonese tough warlords.
Jiang Jieshi saw this vast territory as his containment base in case of entering a war
against the Japanese. He planned to push the strong forces of the communist and guide
them towards this area, so that the warlords ruling the territory would request nationalist
assistance, and finally allow them in without fighting their way.2 However, the
nationalist leader knew that the only real threat for which the warlords would request his
assistance was the mayor and strongest part of the Red Army. Therefore, he permitted
the communist through three of the blockades. The fourth one, however, was where he
took nearly half of the communist forces, who held at least 40’000 casualties, but
enough survived to complete Jiang’s plan.3

Another perspective argues Jiang was being indirectly blackmailed by the USSR
because they held his son "hostage" 4 back in Moscow. He was sent there due to the
Soviet support for the GMD to stablish state power back in 1925. Nevertheless, he was
accompanied by a red mole named Shao Lizi, who deceived the nationalist leader. For
that reason, Jingguo, his son, never returned to China; and as Chinese culture demands,
a decent leader must have a rightful heir to build a proper family. Jingguo was Jieshi’s
only blood son and could not afford to lose him. Hence, he proposed a trade, that
involved assuring the CCP’s survival during the escape to have his son back. 5 He was
naive to believe in the soviet's goodwill, and his son never returned, but the communist
still made it through his once successful blockades. However, some claim that Jingguo
was not supposedly “kidnapped” he was only studying in Russia. Moreover, if this
agreement was undebatable after Jingguo left in 1925 then Jiang Jieshi would have
measured his efforts to slaughter the communists in Shanghai back in 1927 during the
Shanghai Massacre6.[ CITATION Ben10 \l 2058 ]

1
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
2
[ CITATION steve \l 3082 ]
3
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
4
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
5
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
6
[ CITATION Ben10 \l 2058 ]
 Then, one of the most significant events of The Long March acknowledged by the
Chinese is the Zunyi meeting. From Chinese common perspective, Zunyi meant a
defining point in Mao’s rise to power. The current Chinese online newspaper China
Daily portrays the events during the Zunyi Conference in Guizhou as the critical
moment where Mao emerges as the clear, undoubted leader of the communist party
because he represented the new central leadership, proposed by the party, that emerged
from the conference.7 He became the “dominant” leader of the CCP Politburo at the
Zunyi conference, so he was ultimately controlling the party, principally from the
political scope. “The official history presents Mao taking the helm at the Zunyi
conference (15-17 January 1935, soon after the start of the Long March) at which the
brilliance of his military strategy won the day, and after which he was always right and
the undisputed leader of the CCP, ousting the 28 Bolsheviks who had led the Party
almost to extinction”[CITATION Rob16 \l 3082 ]

According to Jon Halliday and Jung Chang, however, the veracity of the
happenings in Zunyi are debatable. They argue that Mao did not emerge as the leader of
the communist party by the majority’s consent, he supposedly forced his way in by
playing “dirty”. Mao’s cleverness inspired Luo Fu and Wang Jiaxiang, both ambitious,
discounted members of the party towards a defiant initiative. They all agreed that the
party needed a change in leadership. Then so, in Zunyi, the three overthrew German
military advisor Otto Braun and current leader Bo Gu, justifying that the Red state’s
downfall back in Jiangxi soviet base was on them to blame. The secretary agreed, but
still did not appoint Mao as the leader; Luo Fu took this place8.

After this, Mao knew that from the four members of the secretary that were
present during the march, he had a severe influence on two. Luo Fu, his ally and Zhou
Enlai due to blackmail. Communication with the USSR had been lost, this explains why
the members of the party did not consult anything that happened in Zunyi with the
Comintern. Therefore, Mao was allowed in the secretary and he managed to be assigned
the redaction of the act sent to the soviets, which he would manipulate to his benefit. He
blackmailed Zhou Enlai, saying his act would acknowledge him as the military
7
[ CITATION Guo16 \l 3082 ]
8
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
blamable for the defeat against the encirclement campaign that entailed the Long
March.9 Hence, Mao was able to install himself in both the political and military
components of the CCP. The whole party knew Luo Fu was always under Mao's
influence and Zhou appointed him as a military assistant, a new position made
exclusively for him.

Furthermore, the Luding bridge Battle is probably the most mythical and heroic
event of The Long March. To cross the Dadu River, the Red Army had to pass through
a 300-year-old chain suspended bridge guarded by the GMD’s armed forces. Chinese
Daily says The Red Army soldiers climbed on the iron chains to take over the bridge
after the enemy took away the planks in May 1935. 10 The less acknowledged
perspective again portrays this event as a propagandistic tool presenting a miraculous
biased perspective. Instead of crossing a flaming bridge, holding only on chains,
crossing while being continuously aimed for and watching their companions fall to
death, some argue the communists didn’t even live a battle. When they arrived to cross
the river, the nationalists were far behind, there was no military threat. Mao and his
colleagues went through the Luding Bridge11. Though in disrepair, the bridge was fairly
fit for the communists to cross it. They even used door and wooden coffin caps to
complete the bridge and replace the fallen planks. Also, according to Jung Chang,
Communist military leader Zhou Enlai was worried about the possible casualties that
the army could have suffered after the events, to which the commander, Yang Chengwu
responded: “none”12. There was never a battle. Sun Shuyan, a Chinese Oxford-educated
woman said: “This matter was not as complicated as people made it out to be later",
[ CITATION Mar06 \l 9226 ] when referring to the Luding battle.13

Besides, The Long March did not only allow Mao to rise to power and consolidate
his leadership within the communist power, but it was also a tool for the spread of
communism throughout the country, especially in the countryside. By crossing most of
the northern and western provinces of the country, peasants would help and join the
9
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
10
[ CITATION Chi16 \l 3082 ]
11
[ CITATION Mar06 \l 9226 ]
12
[ CITATION Jun06 \l 3082 ]
13
[ CITATION Mar06 \l 9226 ]
communist cause, especially due to Mao’s treatment towards them through the Three
Rules of Discipline and Eight Points o for Attention. [ CITATION Mao47 \l 2058 ] Mao
anticipated the importance of Chinese peasants and modified his methodology and
ideology to adjust it to his context. He was aware of how the countryside, both the
territory from the military perspective through guerrilla warfare, and the actual people
from the socioeconomic perspective would enable him to become China’s leader. He
required both the support and the territory of the peasants. As a consequence he made
this part of the population his main target of propaganda, the poems, stories and books
like Red star over China were intended to persuade the peasantry of the heroism seen in
CCP, a party that was portrayed as the far better option in comparison to Jiang Jieshi’s
pro-imperialist and false nationalist party.

Withal, there are several “facts” of the Long March that exhibit how Mao
manipulated and created propaganda to expose a valid perspective, but distorted the
truth to consolidate his power, and create a greater myth around the Long March.
Firstly, there are two important perspectives regarding the CCP’s initial escape from
their Soviet base in Jiangxi. The number of people who left the base is unclear, it varies
between 80’000[ CITATION Jun06 \l 9226 ] and 100’000 [ CITATION Edw94 \l 9226 ] . The
number has never been exact, and the approximate varies too widely. Even today it is
unprecise to say how many people left Jiangxi due of the unclarity of the facts and
important numbers of the Red Army’s achievements; casualties, provinces crossed,
rivers crossed, enemy’s forces, among others.

Another clear example is the duration of the March. Most of the western news
sources state the Long March lasted a year, from October 1934 to October 1935 like
History Channel14. Nonetheless, Chinese sources like China Daily and China Global
Television Network (CGTN) present a different story, where the duration of the Long
March is counted until the last Red army’s company crosses to the new base in the
Gansu province, in October 193615. Though it is not wrong to say the March finished
once the three major forces of the army arrived in Gansu, most of the soldiers did not
march for two straight year. Mao distorted this to make people believe that the brave,
immortal soldiers marched the whole of country for two years instead of one. Even

14
[ CITATION His09 \l 3082 ]
15
[ CITATION Chi16 \l 3082 ][ CITATION CGT16 \l 3082 ]
though it is still heroic, the two-sided perspective on this matter supports the fact that
Mao distorted the truth to his favor. The Chinese perspective on the heroism of the
Long March goes beyond the facts. It is unlikely that every single man who arrived at
Gansu had travelled the whole march, or even lived the daily combat since the start at
Jiangxi. Still, Mao manages to convince people to ignore questionings and blindly
believe on the mythical appreciation of the March, to the extent of inculcating this
perspective on current sources and recent leaders, like Xi Jinping, Chinese president in
the Chinese Global television Network.

Moreover, another blurry measurement of this feat is the distance travelled by the
Red Army. Similar to the confusion on the number of marchers, western-inclined
sources like History Channel state the travelers covered around 4’000 miles through the
whole March. In contrast, Edgar Snow’s account of the Long March in Red Star over
China, states that the distance was more than 5’000 miles 16. Though Snow is closer to
being a primary source, the bias in his account of the Long March has been proved
several times, which questions the validity of his outlook. Both in the origin and
content, even the purpose has an evident bias towards Maoist perspective, where the
mythologization of the story is evident. The significance of Edgar Snow in Chinese
modern history, especially in the Long March’s account, is critical to understand Mao’s
distortion of the truth. Also, it allows to verify the leader’s manipulation of the masses
to consolidate both his leadership and power over the CCP and China respectively.
Carolin Gutman, refers to Edgar Snow’s role in the historiography of the Chinese
communist where she says his acknowledgment of the journey is 6’000 miles. 17 She
refers to it as “incomplete” and her research concludes that the “widely accepted Long
March narrative must be reevaluated in view of its many flaws”.

Besides, it is clear that Snow’s perspective is directly influenced by Mao’s, since

the eventual Chairman was the interviewed giving his own testimony about his own
myth. The bias is undebatable because Snow’s book was revised and submitted to CCP
officials which would later approve.18 Red Star over China develops a testimony that

16
[ CITATION Sno18 \l 3082 ]
17
[ CITATION Gut09 \l 3082 ]
18
[ CITATION She80 \l 3082 ]
became one of the founding sources to explain the legend of the Long March, which
was available for everyone in China and abroad 19. Whether it was intended or not, this
ensured Mao that western perspective on the CCP’s achievement was also positive, due
to Snow’s reputation and ethnic origin. His own perspective on the Long March would
be spread by an American journalist, which enabled him to create a founding myth on
his country and gain further support within it. Snow, former journalist, was the first to
acknowledge the Long March as a marking feat and gave Mao the opportunity to spread
his myth to the whole world, but most importantly without any threatening contrariness
or antagonist perspective for his rise to power.

The effects of The Long March’s propaganda

One of the best examples of Mao Zedong’s attempt to create a mythical story of
the events of the Long March was his poem on why the Long March was a victory. “Let
us ask, has history ever known a long march to equal ours? No, never. The Long March
is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes,
while the imperialists and their running dogs, Jiang Jieshi and his like, are impotent.  . .
.  The Long March is also a seeding machine. In the 11 provinces, it has sown many
seeds which will sprout, leaf, blossom and bear fruit, and will yield a harvest in the
future”[ CITATION Mao35 \l 9226 ] . During a military discussion of tactics, Mao expressed
his perspective on the recent achievement of the communists in 1935. The strength of
the Red Army is now shown to the whole world, by being incomparable to any other
achievement worldwide. Considering the language and direct criticism towards the
imperialists and his comparison to Jian Jieshi expose Mao’s clear intention of
dehumanize the western ideology, even qualifying them as dogs. The reach of this type
of poems, which are directed to the Chinese people and specify peasants, influences
their perspective due to their lack of critical perspective consequential to their lack of
education. In other words, Mao portrays the different ideology and the western powers
with a direct and exaggerate critique, weakening their image. Therefore, most of the
Chinese peasants, the fundamental class in China, will adopt this perspective without
any hesitation. Nationalism is one of the effects of this, which rejects foreign

19
[ CITATION steve \l 3082 ]
intervention an imperialist influence unlike Jiang Jieshi, but exactly how Mao attempts
to be, he is the true nationalist and people are unconsciously manipulated to believe it.

The effects of Mao´s propaganda have a reach that lasts until nowadays. The
Chinese government has banned and prohibited several books that portray a new,
opposite perspective about Zedong, his ideals and achievements. Books like Jon
Halliday’s and Jung Chang’s Mao: the unknown story after ten years of research, or as
Sun Shuyan’s Long March account, for which she interviewed more than 40 Long
March survivors are some of the many examples.20 It is evident how Chinese modern
history has been severely unrevised with over 75 years of vague perception of the events
which are yet to be resulted. "We are far from accepting the real truth. The most
important base for the ruling party ideology is a favorable description of party history,”
says Li Datong. The dismissed editor of the Freezing Point magazine attempts to
question most of China’s modern history, arguing the questioning of Chinese historical
events never ends. This happens due to the constant manipulation of history, which
causes several perspectives and gives significance to the intentions and outcome of any
event. In this case, Mao attempts to “erase” facts that could prevent him from gaining
support while on his rise to power, as the Long March’s legend.

20
[ CITATION Mar06 \l 3082 ]
 Oil on Canvas, 1980. Long Museum Gallery 2 [ CITATION She80 \l 9226 ] Shown in
2016 documentary

Analyze, consider the years and significance of the painting

Oil on Canvas, 1980. Long Museum Gallery 2 [ CITATION She80 \l 9226 ] Shown in
2016 documentary

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"Problems of Strategy in China's

Revolutionary War" (December 1936),
Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 238.

Unquestionably, victory or defeat in

war is determined mainly by the military,
political, economic and natural
conditions on both sides. However, not
by these alone. It is also determined by
each side's subjective ability in directing
the war. In his endeavor to win a war, a
military strategist cannot overstep the
limitations imposed by the material
conditions; within these limitations,
however, he can and must strive for
victory. The stage of action for a military
strategist is built upon objective material
conditions, but on that stage, he can
direct the performance of many a drama,
full of sound and color, power and
grandeur.

Communists should be the most

farsighted, the most self-sacrificing, the
most resolute, and the least prejudiced in
sizing up situations, and should rely on
the majority of the masses and win their
support.
"The Tasks of the Chinese Communist
Party in the Period of Resistance to
Japan" (May 3, 1937), Selected Works,
Vol. I, p. 274.*

As for people who are politically

backward, Communists should not slight
or despise them, but should befriend
them, unite with them, convince them
and encourage them to go forward.
Ibid.