The Long March (Changzheng)

The night the lines broke and the march began

It started before dawn on October 16, 1934, with the quiet business of departure: wagons unhitched, sentries relieved, small clusters of men lifting canvas and shouldering rifles. Around Ruijin, the Jiangxi Soviet was a city of tents, workshops, and committees — a fragile experiment in rural government under constant pressure from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces. The Red Army that moved out that morning did not march as one army. It split into columns, each sent down different roads with different orders, each hoping to outrun the cordon the Kuomintang had been tightening for months.

For those who left, the logic was simple and grim. The KMT’s fifth encirclement campaign — a methodical campaign of blockhouses, attrition, and better supply lines — had made static defense impossible. The leadership in Jiangxi faced a choice: stay and be surrounded, or break out and gamble everything on a mobile survival. They chose the gamble.

What followed was not a single triumphant journey but a year of separate survivals, of small victories and devastating losses, of arguments over strategy and the slow remaking of a party that would one day govern a nation.

When the noose tightened: why the retreat was ordered

By 1934 China was a fractured place. The Nationalists (KMT) claimed national authority from Nanjing, warlords held local power, and the Chinese Communist Party had carved out soviet-style enclaves in the countryside, most prominently the Jiangxi Soviet. For a decade the KMT had launched encirclement campaigns to destroy these bases. Early attempts failed; the Red Army used guerrilla tactics and the depth of peasant support to survive. But the fifth campaign was different.

Reorganized, better funded, and using blockhouse lines, the KMT forced the Red Army into a defensive posture it was ill-prepared to hold. Food, ammunition, and recruits were running out. Command disputes within the CCP made coherent planning harder: some leaders favored conventional defense after Soviet advisors pressed for fixed lines; Mao Zedong’s ideas about mobile, peasant-based guerrilla warfare had been sidelined. Faced with increasing losses and the real threat of annihilation, the party chose withdrawal. The retreat was meant to save the revolution by preserving its core forces.

Rivers of bodies: the Xiang River disaster and early fragmentation

The early weeks of the retreat were the most catastrophic. The Red Army tried to cross rivers while under pressure. At the Xiang River, punitive pursuit and superior KMT firepower turned a crossing into a slaughter. Columns were cut off, routed, and in many cases destroyed. Men died in the water, on the banks, in ambushes. Those who survived found themselves in smaller groups that could not easily rejoin.

By late 1934 the march had already ceased to be a single march. The army fragmented into multiple routes — the First Front Army, the Fourth Front Army, and other route armies each taking different courses through Hunan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan. Communications were intermittent. Some groups moved north; others skirted west. The decisions that followed were often local improvisations rather than centrally coordinated strategy.

"Zunyi": the meeting that changed command and strategy

In late January 1935, in the mountain town of Zunyi, leaders of the party and the army held a bitter, urgent conference. The Zunyi meeting is often remembered less for its minutes than for the shift in authority it produced. The Soviet-trained commanders who had favored rigid defensive tactics lost ground. Within the cramped rooms and by the warmth of stoves, Mao Zedong and his allies argued for a different approach — flexible command, guerrilla tactics, and political work among peasants.

The conference did not declare a sudden dictatorship or a dramatic public coup. It rearranged command in ways that mattered: those who had pressed conventional tactics were marginalized, and the new line emphasized mobility and integration of political and military work. For a party whose survival depended on living to fight another day, Zunyi was decisive. It marked the beginning of Mao’s rise inside the PD­P’s leadership and the pivot from a doomed attempt at conventional warfare to the irregular strategies that would sustain the movement.

Luding Bridge and the making of legend

By late May 1935 the marchers reached terrain that would feed popular memory: the Dadu River and the chain suspension at Luding Bridge. Communist histories recount a dramatic seizure of the bridge under heavy fire by a handful of soldiers, a crossing that saved the column and let it push on. The image is cinematic: men shimmying across chains, bleeding and barefoot, while artillery booms.

Historians have debated the finer points ever since. Eyewitness accounts differ. The scale of enemy resistance, the number of casualties, and the exact sequence of events are contested. The larger truth remains: the Luding crossing — however it unfolded — allowed a major force to keep moving. It became a foundational story, retold and amplified in later years, part heroic memoir and part political mythology. Whether every detail of the tale is accurate matters to historians; what it shows for the Red Army was endurance under extreme pressure and the power of narrative to convert survival into meaning.

Walking through hunger and weather: landscapes of attrition

After Luding the columns did not find peace. The march took them through mountain passes, marshes, and high plateaus. Men who had once been relatively well-fed cadres became skeletal walkers. Supply lines evaporated. Horses and mules died or were abandoned. Disease — dysentery, typhus, fever — took more than battle. Remoteness meant minimal local resources and little chance to rest.

The geography itself was an enemy: steep trails, fog-shrouded valleys, snow at high altitudes. Troops navigated unfamiliar ethnic borderlands where language differences and suspicion sometimes made resupply and recruitment difficult. Civilians suffered too. Villages had food requisitioned, some people were displaced, and in places skirmishes left collateral damage. Scholars note that the record on civilian casualties is fragmentary, but the human cost beyond the army was real and uneven.

The numbers that matter — and what they obscure

Numbers try to make a story legible, but they also flatten it. Roughly 80,000–90,000 men from the First Front Army are commonly cited as starting the most famous Long March column; historian estimates identify around 6,000–10,000 who reached the Yan’an area in northwestern Shaanxi a year later. Across all columns that undertook long retreats, survival rates varied, but a large majority who began did not complete the journeys.

These figures carry caveats. Different columns left at different times; records were incomplete; later party accounts sometimes adjusted numbers for political purposes. Accurate KMT casualty figures specifically tied to pursuit operations are not reliably compiled in the sources available. Material losses — weapons, animals, tents, and depots — were massive, but historians have not produced a credible, authoritative dollar valuation of property damage. Attempts to put a modern-dollar price on the material losses are speculative and not accepted as firm historical fact.

Beyond statistics, the human stories resist quantification: men who froze on a pass, women and children displaced from homesteads, commanders who argued and then reconciled. The Long March was a catastrophe and a rebirth; both truths coexist.

Arrival in Yan’an: survival as foundation

By October 1935 the surviving columns converged in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. The broken army that arrived in the Yan’an area was smaller, poorer in arms, but reorganized and politically refocused. From that base the CCP rebuilt. They established schools, consolidated political work, and began to train new recruits. The party’s narrative of endurance — the story of a remnant surviving against the odds — became a cornerstone of legitimacy.

The immediate military picture, however, was not one of triumph. The Red Army had lost most heavy equipment and much of its experienced cadre. But survival had preserved the party’s leadership and its ability to fight on. Over the next years, the CCP used this base to expand influence, refine guerrilla doctrine, and attract new adherents — actions that, in the aggregate, had decisive implications for the civil war that would follow.

What the Long March changed — and what stayed the same

The Long March reconfigured China’s revolutionary actors in several concrete ways. Within the CCP, the leadership and doctrinal shifts after Zunyi allowed an emphasis on mobile warfare and political mobilization that proved effective in the decades to come. The party rebuilt its organizational capacity in Yan’an and developed methods of governance and propaganda that increased its reach.

For the KMT, the failure to destroy the communists despite numerical and material superiority exposed limits to conventional counterinsurgency. The broader national crisis — and the looming Japanese threat — shifted priorities in the late 1930s and led to the temporary KMT-CCP United Front against Japan. Nationalist attention diverted away from total annihilation of the CCP, a reprieve in strategic terms.

Locally, the passage of armies disrupted economies, requisitioned food, and displaced civilians; those wounds were unevenly recorded but countless on the ground. Historically, the Long March’s symbolic power grew in public memory far beyond the actual numbers involved, shaping narratives of legitimacy for the CCP that played an important role in the party’s later political ascendancy.

Memory and history: myth, revision, and continuing debates

The Long March has two lives: the lived experience of suffering and tactical retreat, and the retelling that made it a national myth. Early PRC histories emphasized unity, heroism, and near-miraculous survival. Later historians, with greater access to archives and local records, have complicated that portrait. They stress high casualty rates, disputed episodes like Luding Bridge, and internal conflicts within the CCP. Scholars now prefer to describe the Long March as a prolonged strategic retreat marked by contingency rather than a single heroic march toward destiny.

Debates continue. Historians argue over the proportion of casualties from battle versus disease and desertion, over the specific decisions that led to catastrophic losses at river crossings, and over the degree to which the Long March was an avoidable strategic failure or an unavoidable forced movement. Micro-histories from villages along the routes have added texture about civilian experiences, while memoirs and documents have clarified internal party debates. The broad consensus holds that the Long March preserved the party and remade it politically — but it did so at enormous human cost.

A final reckon­ing: endurance written in hardship

When we look back at the Long March, we confront a story of choices made under pressure, of men and women who walked into an uncertain future, and of leadership reborn in the middle of retreat. It was not a single, united epic but a collection of desperate movements across a brutal landscape. The survivals were partial; the losses were staggering. Yet out of those losses came a reconstituted party able to continue a struggle that would reshape China.

History keeps both the hardship and the consequence in tension. The Long March remains, in equal measure, a retreat of near-ruin and a turning point that afforded the CCP the time and space to survive. That duality — catastrophe and foundation — is its enduring, uneasy legacy.