China Witness

Renewal of their wedding vows, 1997.

MR CHANGZHENG, born in 1916, a witness to the Long March, interviewed in Beijing, capital of China. Mr Changzheng joined the Red Army when he was a teenager, set off on the Long March in 1934 and lost many of his comrades along the way. He describes the hunger and hardship, and how they crossed the Snow Mountains and walked through the 'marshes of death'. He cannot understand the new generation questioning the Long March. He and his wife have been married for almost sixty years and have five children; one of their grandchildren is in England.

2006 was the seventieth anniversary of the Long March of the Chinese Peasants and Workers Red Army, and once again the question of whether the Long March really happened became a matter of fierce debate.

I was born into a military family – both my parents spent their lives in the army. Stories about the Long March surrounded me, from the family histories of the senior officers on my father's side, to the stories of my childhood schoolfriends' parents and grandparents, to the history books in my classroom. Then there was the obligatory Long March Memorial Day every five years. It never occurred to me to doubt the existence of the Long March just as I never doubted records of my own life's milestones. However, when, in my early twenties, I began to search for my own identity and to trace our national identity through history, I got differing accounts of the same events – even the people involved, and the places and dates on which they occurred. Faced with these confusing 're-recordings' of history, I began to investigate the truth or falsehood of what I had believed.

The most interesting doubts I have heard concern the following three questions:

1. Was the Long March really 25,000 li [10] long?

2. What was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March?

3. Was the 'Long March to resist Japan in north China' a policy of the Chinese Communist Party at that time?

1. Was the Long March really 25,000 li long?

Having visited a number of Red Army fighters and Party historians of the older generation, and the new generation of researchers into Chinese history, I heard differing views expressed.

Most of the witnesses I interviewed believed that it was 25,000 li long, or even more. Old army chiefs said that they had marched back and forth, and made a number of long detours. After leaving the Central Soviet Area [11] in Jiangxi, no one knew where to go. It was not like the way things are currently presented, with leaders, plans and directions. In October 1933, the Guomindang (GMD) mobilised nearly a million troops to attack each of the rural base areas held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and another half-million to carry out a key attack against the Central Soviet Area. CCP chief Bo Gu (real name Qin Bangxian) decided to adopt the proposal of Li De (the German Otto Braun, a military adviser sent by the Comintern) [12] and make this into a decisive struggle between the GMD and the CCP. They decided on a pre-emptive strike against the GMD and committed the entire Red Army to a full onslaught. But there were only around 100,000 regulars in the Central Soviet Area together with a few tens of thousands of guerrilla troops, and these were comprehensively routed soon after the attack began. On 10 October 1934, as the Long March was about to begin, the Central Red Army was by no means clear about its destination, and even after they had left, most of the troops were none the wiser. They simply set off in blind flight.

Soldiers who had participated told me: 'We zigzagged back and forth along many different routes and constantly backtracked. We did this to confuse the enemy, so that they would not guess our route, especially in January 1935, after the Red Army had captured Zunyi [in the south] and the CCP Central Committee had called the Enlarged Politburo Conference.' The Zunyi Conference stripped Bo Gu and Li De of their leadership powers and resolved that Zhang Wentian would take over from Bo Gu his responsibility for Party and political affairs, and Zhou Enlai would become military commander, with Mao Zedong as second in command. (Shortly thereafter, the military triumvirate of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and Wang Jiaxiang was formed.) From then on, Red Army troops used outflanking tactics on their march westward, many of them crossing the Chishui River four times and the Daxue Mountains two or three times. In October 1935, the Central Red Army, making its way north alone, arrived at the town of Wuqi Zhen, now called Wuqi county, in Shaanxi province. It was the first to complete the Long March. The Second Front Army, formed at a later stage of the Long March in 1935, made a journey of nearly 20,000 li, joining up in 1936 with the First and Fourth Front Armies at Jiangtai Fort in Jingning county, Gansu (now Ningxia) province. Subsequently, Zhang Guotao, who opposed the Central Committee's 'Northward Route', led the Fourth Front Army southward at the end of 1936, renaming it the West Route Army. Zhang Guotao imagined he could break through to the Soviet Union but in the course of a long and arduous trek, suffered disastrous losses at the hands of local warlord Ma Bufang's Hui Muslim troops. They dared not stop to rest, and many died of exhaustion. Eventually the entire army was annihilated, and there were only 436 survivors.

Long March scholars say that it is entirely possible that the total distance was 25,000 li. Their reasons include the fact that the People's Liberation Army was not simply formed of the Red Army, the Eighth Route Army and the new Fourth Army, but was formed out of an amalgamation of diverse local and national minority armies and remnants of the GMD who surrendered and came over to the other side. So, they argue, the concept of the Long March should not be taken as limited to the route taken by the three main Red Army forces: the Central Red Army, that is the First Front Army; the Second Front Army, formed of the Second and Sixth Red Army Corps combined; and the Fourth Red Army on its own (there was at that time no Third Army). Instead, the concept and the distance of the Long March should also cover all subsidiary marches made, by the 25th Army and the Fifth and Sixth Red Army Corps and other troops.

2. What was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March?

I was very young at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but I remember seeing an old academic standing on a platform being 'struggled against' and nearly beaten to death by Red Guards for spreading the 'vile rumour' that the Long March had not been led by Mao Zedong. I don't know if the professor escaped with his life, but his 'crime' often recurred in my thoughts. Why would he dare to say that the glorious achievement of the Long March had not been led by Mao Zedong? During my years as a reporter in search of the real China, this question came into ever sharper focus as I discovered more. Academics and others had been denounced by Red Guards for questioning what were almost accepted as 'unalterable' historical facts, for example that Mao Zedong had led the Long March. However, if what that professor said was true, then what was Mao Zedong's involvement in the Long March? In recent years, memoirs, released by China's 'opening up' reforms, have appeared which shed fresh light.

Mao Zedong's bodyguard at that time was Wu Jiqing. In 1983, Jiangxi People's Press published his memoirs, At Mao Zedong's Side, in which he recalls not being able to commandeer supplies when the Long March set off because Mao Zedong's name did not appear on the Central Committee's list of columns or formations. Wu Xiuquan, Li De's Russian interpreter, in his Story of my Life, published by PLA Press in 1984, writes: 'At the beginning, they planned to leave Mao Zedong behind, and had actually expelled him from the core leadership of the Central Committee and sent him off to do investigative work.'

Another bodyguard, Chen Changfeng, in his With Chairman Mao on the Long March (PLA Literature and Arts Press, 1986), records: 'From the Gannan Conference of 1931 to the start of the Long March in October 1934, Mao Zedong was in a very difficult position. Even though he was Chair of the Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic, he was in very adverse circumstances, subject to continuous criticism and unjust treatment. He made many proposals which proved correct and effective, but which were condemned as 'ultra-empiricist', 'taking the rich peasant line', 'conservative retreating' and 'right-wing opportunism'. Within a short time, he was even stripped of his job.'

However, from the 1993 Memoirs of Kang Keqing comes the following extract: 'He [Zhu De] paced the room, and then came over to say to me in a low voice: 'They've now decided to let Mao Zedong come. Our only hope is to have him with us.' I asked about Chen Yi, and he shook his head: 'It's already been decided that he should stay in the Soviet Area to carry on the struggle, and that decision can't be changed.''

Finally, while conducting these interviews in China, I heard this report: 'Xinhua Network, Nanchang, 8 August 2006. Chinese Communist Party historians have now publicly confirmed the following: the first list of Long March participants did not include Mao Zedong's name. When key decisions were taken in September 1934 about which