cadres should go and which should stay, Bo Gu and Li De, who were the decision-makers, were at first against allowing Mao Zedong to set off with the Central Committee and the main forces of the Red Army, and in the middle of September dispatched Mao to do investigative work. On the eve of the Long March, whether Mao should stay or go was not merely a matter of his individual safety, but was also connected to the fate of the CCP and the Red Army. Mao Zedong only joined the Long March after Zhou Enlai had argued strongly in his favour, and succeeded in persuading Bo Gu and Li De.'
3.
That the 'Long March to resist Japan in north China' was a Chinese Communist Party policy became an immutable tenet both of my school books and of media propaganda, and in fact was a source of national pride to generations of young Communist Party members. However, I later realised that where 'north China' was concerned there was a difference between northeast and north-west, and the Japanese came south from the north-east, while the Long March of 1934-6 went to Shaanxi province in the north-west.
On the night of 7 July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao) incident occurred just south-west of Beijing. All-out war broke out as Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. On 17 July, Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Guomindang's military committee, issued the Lushan Declaration: 'Once war breaks out, every person, young or old, in the north or in the south, must take up the responsibility of resisting Japan and defending our homeland.' On 12 December 1937, 50,000 Japanese troops entered Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, the then headquarters of GMD resistance against Japan, and began the week-long Great Massacre in which around 300,000 Nanjing troops and civilians were killed. It took until the spring of 1938 for the Japanese Army to advance to the western part of Shanxi province, and by the end of that year they had reached the riverbank opposite northern Shaanxi, the neighbouring province, although they could not muster the strength to cross the Yellow River.
Looked at from another angle, the aim of the 'Long March to resist Japan in north China' was to allow CCP members to rest and recoup their strength, and provided a reliably safe and self-sufficient base area in the north- west for the armed resistance against Japan which came later. This, I believe, was one of the reasons why, in the years after 1940, the CCP was able gradually to become the main force in China resisting Japan.
In 1940, the Eighth Route Army under General Peng Dehuai launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive against 40,000 Japanese and their puppet troops, resulting in losses for the Japanese of over 20,000; in 1941, the GMD's General Xue Yue, who had already inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army, annihilated 50,000 Japanese in the Third Changsha Campaign. These victories boosted the morale of the Chinese in their struggle against the Japanese invaders, and there was a gradual increase in strength of other forces not under direct control of either the CCP or the GMD, for instance the Mongolian Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Forces.
Nonetheless, Mao Zedong was most unhappy with Peng Dehuai's Hundred Regiments Offensive because, as a result, the Japanese invaders turned their attentions to the rear, where hitherto they had been militarily weak – that part of north China controlled by the CCP. The Japanese countered the CCP forces' guerrilla tactics, cutting the latter off from local militia, by means of the old imperial Neighbourhood Administrative System, tightening local government controls over the population. In order to restrict Eighth Route Army activity, they established areas of no-man's-land and adopted a triple scorched-earth policy of 'Kill All, Burn All and Loot All'. The result was a massacre of soldiers and civilians alike in north China. The Eighth Route Army suffered severe losses; the commander of its HQ, Zuo Quan, lost his life, while Deputy Chief of Staff Peng Dehuai made a daring breakout of the encirclement and the Eighth Route Army was forced to withdraw from north China.
Different factions may rehash the motives for the Long March for their own political ends, but its results are not in dispute: in the process of the Long March and all the benefits which resulted from it, the CCP acquired a newly formed self-confidence, put its organisation on a firm footing and had the time to train up regular army units. All the People's Republic of China's main leaders, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping, were on the Long March, as were nine of the army's ten field marshals, the exception being Chen Yi.
During the two years of the Long March, various forces that make up the Red Army fought their way through fourteen provinces, and covered a total distance of around 25,000 li. They crossed a number of remote regions inhabited by national minorities as well as Han Chinese, and faced natural hazards such as great rivers, snow- capped mountains and grasslands, they also evaded encirclement by hundreds of thousands of GMD and local armies, and succeeded in avoiding splits caused by the struggles between the Mao and Bo Gu factions, and between the First Front Army and Zhang Guotao. Out of it a new nucleus of CCP leaders, with Mao Zedong at their head, was gradually formed.
In August 1980, Deng Xiaoping said in an interview with the Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci: 'The Zunyi Conference of 1935, called during the famous Long March, established the leadership position of Comrade Mao Zedong within the Party and the army. This marked the formation of the first real leadership of the CCP. Previous leadership structures had been both immature and unstable.'
And when Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Maomao, asked her father what the Long March had been like, he replied: 'We kept marching!' I believe that this is the instinctive, most truthful and commonest view of the Long March.
One of my ambitions was to find a Red Army survivor of the Long March who had 'gone the distance'. I was looking for someone who had done it on foot, not a general who had ridden the route on horseback. This was no easy task – of the tens of thousands who had taken part, few were still alive, while even fewer had done the whole march.
I was very lucky. Yan, a Chinese girl studying in the UK, came to see me asking for my help in drawing up a bibliography on Chinese history and culture for her dissertation. When she heard me talk about
On 2 September 2006, we visited Yan's grandfather in Beijing. I chatted to the old man and his wife, and then their two daughters, the eldest one Yan's mother. Mr Changzheng was an imposing figure, with a round face and rosy cheeks. He talked volubly and punctured our interview with bursts of laughter and occasional renderings of snatches of revolutionary songs from his youth. No wonder people say that music is one of the repositories of memory.
I had not had enough time to do background research on the old soldier, and so I started by putting the safest and commonest Chinese question.
XINRAN: Have you eaten?
CHANGZHENG: Yes, I have.
XINRAN: What did you have to eat today?
CHANGZHENG: I had noodles – Beijing noodles with minced pork and bean sauce.
XINRAN: What is your favourite food?
CHANGZHENG: I eat anything.
XINRAN: So what was your favourite food as a child?
CHANGZHENG: As a child? I am from the north of Sichuan province. When I was a child, we were poor, and I didn't get a lot to eat.
XINRAN: Could you tell me how old you are, sir?
CHANGZHENG: On 10 November this year, I'll be ninety-one years old. I was born in 1916, in the mountains of northern Sichuan.
XINRAN: Did you go to school?
CHANGZHENG: When I was in Sichuan I did. I got a year and a half of primary school. My school was far from my home and the teacher was very strict. If you didn't have your satchel on straight, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you didn't know your characters, he hit you on the back of the hand. If you were disruptive, you had to go
