From Jinggangshan to Yan’an: the soviet bases and the Long March

The revolution goes to the mountains

When the Autumn Harvest Uprising failed before Changsha in September 1927, Mao Zedong led the survivors to the Hunan–Jiangxi border, where Nationalist power was weak, and entered Jinggangshan in October. In the mountains were two armed bands that had stayed with the Communists after the April 12 Incident, those of Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo. Both were former bandits with some sixty rifles each, but by robbing only the most hated landlords and merchants they had won the support of the poorer peasants. Mao allied with them and built a base that confiscated and redistributed landlords' land. In late April 1928 the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising under Zhu De, together with peasant forces from southern Hunan, joined Mao at Longshi in Ninggang (the Zhu–Mao meeting), and in May they formed the Fourth Army of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army, with Zhu as commander, Mao as party representative and Chen Yi as head of the political department. Renamed the Red Army on the Central Committee's instruction in June, the Fourth Army numbered some 6,000 men. 1 2 3 4 5

In "Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?" (October 1928) and "The Struggle in the Chingkang Mountains" (November 1928) Mao explained the base in theory. The long survival of small Red areas encircled by a White regime, he wrote, had never occurred anywhere else in the world; it was possible because China was a semi-colony under indirect imperialist rule, whose localised agricultural economy and division into spheres of influence produced "the prolonged splits and wars within the White regime". The guerrilla principles worked out in the base were later set down: "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." The Red Army also adopted the discipline of the "Three Rules and Eight Points for Attention" (at first six points), which made soldiers pay peasants for what they took. 6 7 8 4

Jinggangshan could not be held for long. The mountains were short of food, and Nationalist blockades and joint "suppression" drives followed one another. In January 1929 the main force left for southern Jiangxi and western Fujian, while Peng Dehuai with some 800 former Nationalist troops and the 32nd Regiment of Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo stayed to defend the mountain, finally breaking out through the encirclement. The base's tragedy came from inside the party. When Yuan and Wang opposed the adventurism of the Li Lisan leadership, local cadres in February 1930 fabricated intelligence that they had gone over to the Nationalists, obtained Peng Dehuai's signature and killed them. Both were rehabilitated as revolutionary martyrs after 1949. In the Jinggangshan years the Red Army first set out on the road of "surrounding the cities from the countryside and seizing power by armed force". 3 4 1

The party leads the army: the Gutian Congress and the spread of the bases

The CCP's Sixth Congress, held in Moscow in June–July 1928, made the worker Xiang Zhongfa chairman of the Politburo and Li Lisan its effective leader, while instructing rural cadres to organise soviet governments. A letter that Zhou Enlai sent to the Fourth Red Army on the Central Committee's behalf in September 1929 endorsed Mao's view of an armed worker-peasant regime: "First is the Red Army, and later urban political power." Acting on it, the Fourth Army held its Ninth Party Congress at Gutian, Shanghang county, Fujian, in December. The resolution Mao drafted ("On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party") condemned the "purely military viewpoint" that set military affairs against politics and defined the Red Army as an army that, besides destroying the enemy, bore the burden of propagandising, organising and arming the masses and helping them build revolutionary power and the party. Gutian's principle that the party's organs in the army must be "the central leadership" remains a founding principle of the People's Liberation Army. 9 10 11 12 13

To comrades growing pessimistic in the bases Mao wrote, in January 1930, the letter "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire": small as their forces were, the prolonged and tangled warfare among the ruling classes of semi-colonial China made the growth of the Red Army, the guerrillas and the Red areas not only possible but inevitable. Soviets did spring up from 1929: Zhang Guotao's and Xu Xiangqian's Eyuwan on the Hubei–Henan–Anhui border, He Long's forces on the Hunan–Hubei border, Fang Zhimin's Minzhegan on the Fujian–Zhejiang–Jiangxi border, rural Guangxi, and later Liu Zhidan's base in Shaanxi and Gansu. The Jiangxi base, where cadres from all over the country took refuge, became the largest and best administered, and although the Central Committee was still underground in Shanghai the centre of political gravity shifted steadily towards Mao in Jiangxi. 8 11 14 15 16 17

The Li Lisan line and the purge of the "AB League"

In October 1929 the Comintern sent instructions speaking of a "rising revolutionary tide", and Li Lisan, the party's de facto leader since 1928, drew up a plan for the Red Army to strike the great cities and set off a national revolution. The target was Wuhan, with Changsha, Nanchang and Jiujiang as preliminaries. In July 1930 Peng Dehuai's Third Corps beat a force under He Jian four times its size and took Changsha at the end of the month, but no workers' rising followed, and under bombardment by foreign gunboats it withdrew on 3 August. Mao and Zhu's First Corps made a symbolic attack on Nanchang and pulled back, and in September a second assault on Changsha by the combined First Front Army also failed. Moscow had already opposed urban insurrection in letters of July, and in November a letter arrived accusing Li of defying Comintern directives. Li was recalled to Moscow in December, and at the Fourth Plenum of January 1931 the "Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks" of Wang Ming and others, sponsored by Stalin's China specialist Pavel Mif, took over the party leadership. 18 12 19

In the same months a purge began inside the Jiangxi base. In autumn 1930 local cadres of south-western Jiangxi who supported the Li Lisan line opposed Mao's strategy of "luring the enemy in deep", and Mao moved against them on charges of links with the Nationalists' anti-Communist "AB League" (Anti-Bolshevik League). In December Li Shaojiu, head of the purge commission sent by Mao's General Front Committee, arrested more than 120 officers of the 20th Red Army and the Jiangxi Action Committee at Futian, tortured them and executed seventeen. On 12 December the 1st Battalion of the 20th Army's 174th Regiment mutinied, seized Li Shaojiu and others and withdrew to Yongyang, raising banners reading "Down with Mao Zedong!" and appealing to the Central Committee in Shanghai (the Futian Incident). The AB League had in fact been a Kuomintang group formed in 1926 to contest the Jiangxi party with the Communists, and it had already collapsed by April 1927. 20 21 22 18

The centre's verdict wavered. In January 1931 Xiang Ying, acting secretary of the Central Bureau of the Soviet Areas, called the incident an "unprincipled factional struggle" and expelled Li Shaojiu, but Wang Ming's new leadership sent Ren Bishi, Wang Jiaxiang and Gu Zuolin in March to declare it a "counter-revolutionary rebellion". Xiang was removed, and the 20th Army leaders who came to negotiate in April were arrested and executed. In July troops under Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao surrounded and disarmed the 20th Army, executed more than 700 of its officers from deputy platoon leader up and abolished its designation. The anti-AB campaign then spread across the Jiangxi Soviet, and in some areas 80 to 90 per cent of party officials were branded "AB" members. The toll has never been settled: one account has some 70,000 killed in the purges of 1930–1931 and the Red Army reduced from 40,000 to under 10,000, a figure many studies do not accept. Mao admitted in 1956 that "the first purge got the wrong people"; a re-investigation report of the 1980s went unpublished after 1989. 20 21 17 18

Four counter-encirclement campaigns and the fall of the Shanghai centre

The Li Lisan line's attacks on Changsha alerted Chiang Kai-shek. Having won the Central Plains War in October 1930, he made "suppressing the Communist bandits" a main aim of government and massed armies in Jiangxi. At the Luofang meeting that month the Red Army adopted Mao's strategy of "luring the enemy in deep" and fought from inside the base. In the first "encirclement and suppression" campaign, of December 1930–January 1931, it destroyed some 100,000 Nationalist troops piecemeal and captured Zhang Huizan, commander of the 18th Division. The second campaign, under He Yingqin in April–May 1931, and the third, led by Chiang himself with 300,000 men in July–September, also failed; the third ended when the Mukden Incident broke out in September. The fourth, in February–March 1933, was beaten not by Mao, who had already lost his command, but under the direction of Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. 23 24 25 26 27

Meanwhile the underground centre in Shanghai collapsed. In April 1931 Gu Shunzhang, head of the Central Special Branch, was arrested in Wuhan and went over to the Nationalists. Qian Zhuangfei, a mole inside the Nationalist intelligence service, sent warning first, giving Zhou Enlai time to move offices and change codes, but the underground suffered heavily, and Zhou had Gu's family and others in his house killed in reprisal. In June the general secretary Xiang Zhongfa was arrested and executed within twenty-six hours, and Yun Daiying and Cai Hesen were also caught and killed. Wang Ming left for Moscow, Zhou went to Jiangxi in December 1931, and the provisional centre under Bo Gu (Qin Bangxian) moved to Ruijin in early 1933. The relation between base and party centre was now reversed: the urban leadership had to shelter in the rural base. 28 29 17 13

With the centre's arrival Mao's standing fell. In December 1931 Zhou Enlai took over as general political commissar of the Red Army, and at the Ningdu Conference of October 1932, when Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai and others criticised his tactics, Mao lost his military command and was pushed into a figurehead role in the soviet government. His strongest supporters were Zhou and Zhu De, but they could not save his position. In autumn 1933 the German Communist Otto Braun (Li De), sent by Soviet military intelligence, reached Ruijin and took real power as military adviser; a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy, he had come by way of the Comintern's bureaus in Harbin and Shanghai. From then on the "three-man group" of Bo Gu, Braun and Zhou led the Red Army. 17 30 31 11

A state at Ruijin: the Chinese Soviet Republic

On 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the First National Soviet Congress at Ruijin proclaimed the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic. Mao Zedong became both chairman of the Central Executive Committee and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, head of state and of government. The republic bound together scattered bases around the Jiangxi Soviet, and communications were so poor that the second-largest, Eyuwan, could not even send delegates and held its own congress. At its peak in 1933 it governed more than 3.4 million people over some 70,000 square kilometres and ran its own bank, currency and tax bureau. Its regular army passed 140,000 in the early 1930s, larger than most warlord armies, and had telephones, telegraph and radio. 11 32

The most important policy was land redistribution. Deng Zihui's land reform experiments in western Fujian became the reference for the Jiangxi Soviet's land policy, and Mao's "How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas" (October 1933) set the criteria separating landlords, rich, middle and poor peasants and workers. Soviet law protected freely chosen marriage against arranged marriage, a model for later marriage laws in Communist areas, and the constitution endorsed the separation of religion and state; an Outline Constitution of the Chinese Soviet Republic was enacted in 1934. The republic ran schools and courts. Its economy did better than most warlord areas but trailed the Nationalist-held regions. 32 11 33

The state cast long shadows. To prevent defection to the Nationalists and to extract manpower and supplies, the Communists detained suspects, confiscated their property and sent them to labour brigades, and as the loss of the base approached there were mass executions at Ruijin, Ningdu and elsewhere; even the then party leader Zhang Wentian once called for restraint. Censuses show the population of the Jiangxi Soviet's fifteen counties falling by 700,000, about 20 per cent, between 1931 and January 1936. One work (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday) attributes all of this to the soviet regime, but the same years saw Nationalist campaigns, blockade and war, and the causes are hard to separate. In 1983 the Ministry of Civil Affairs ordered the rehabilitation of those wrongly purged in this period, and some 250,000 people in Jiangxi, purge victims and war dead together, were recognised as "revolutionary martyrs". 32

The fifth campaign and the loss of Jiangxi

The fifth campaign was unlike the first four. Opening a field headquarters at Nanchang in May 1933, Chiang mobilised nearly a million men, half a million of them against the Central Soviet, and under the slogan "three parts military, seven parts political" cut the base off from rice, salt and raw materials. On the advice of German advisers, including Hans von Seeckt, the Nationalists built dense lines of concrete blockhouses linked by fields of fire, the "blockhouse strategy", and on 17 October adopted "strategic offence, tactical defence" as their principle, tightening the ring step by step. When the 19th Route Army of Cai Tingkai, Chen Mingshu and Jiang Guangnai rebelled with Li Jishen and proclaimed the Fujian People's Government in November 1933 the campaign briefly halted, but the promised aid from the Jiangxi Soviet never came because the "Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks" opposed it, and the Fujian government collapsed in January 1934. Mao later argued that the Red Army's main force should then have broken out towards Zhejiang and gone over to the strategic offensive. 34 35 17 36

Bo Gu and Braun met it with positional and regular warfare to "stop the enemy beyond the gates" without yielding an inch of the base, and with "short, sharp thrusts" between the blockhouses. When eleven Nationalist divisions attacked Guangchang, the northern gateway, in April 1934, nine Red divisions met them "blockhouse against blockhouse, position against position", but Guangchang fell on 27 April and the Red Army lost more than 5,500 killed and wounded. In July the leadership dominated by the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks even shut Mao out of the Politburo and briefly placed him under house arrest. To open a way out of the base, Fang Zhimin's force broke through the ring in July and Xiao Ke's Sixth Corps in August. Fang's force was soon destroyed and he was captured and executed; Xiao Ke joined He Long but never returned to Jiangxi. 34 17 32

In late September Chiang issued his "Iron Bucket Plan": thirty blockade lines and barbed-wire fences within 150 kilometres of Ruijin, with a mobile force of more than a thousand trucks to stop any breakout. Mo Xiong, Zhou Enlai's mole in the Nanchang headquarters, passed it on, and the courier Xiang Yunian, who knocked out four of his own teeth and disguised himself as a beggar, carried it hidden in his bag to Ruijin on 7 October. The leadership ordered the general retreat on 10 October. Who would leave and who would stay was kept secret to the end. Xiang Ying, Chen Yi, Tan Zhenlin, Qu Qiubai and some 16,000 troops stayed as the rearguard and began the "three years' guerrilla war in the south"; after Ruijin fell in November 1934 Qu Qiubai and Mao's youngest brother Mao Zetan were among those captured and executed. Only on 5 November, seventeen days after the main force had left, did the Nationalists enter an empty Ruijin and learn that the Red Army had gone. 32 17 37

The Long March (1): from the Xiang River to Zunyi

On 16–17 October the Central Red Army's 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th and 9th Corps and two Military Commission columns crossed the Gong River at Yudu. The "Statistical Chart of Field Army Personnel, Weaponry, Ammunition and Supply" drawn up on 8 October listed 86,859 combatants, 25,317 rifles, 618 machine guns and 38 mortars; with non-combatants and porters the column approached 130,000, and the bank's staff carried its currency and even its minting machines. Zhou Enlai sent Pan Hannian to negotiate passage with the Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang, whose blockhouse line was crossed without fighting. But at the fourth line, which Chiang had built with twenty-five divisions along the Xiang River between Xing'an and Quanzhou in Guangxi, the Red Army was caught from 27 November to 1 December between He Jian's Hunan troops and Bai Chongxi's Guangxi army. The 1st Corps lost 6,000 men at Jueshanpu alone, the 18th Regiment of the 3rd Corps and the 34th Division of the 5th Corps were wiped out, and the 8th Corps was disbanded. 32 17 37 38

Across the Xiang the Red Army numbered some 30,000 to 40,000. The sources differ (30,000-odd, 36,000, 40,000-odd), and how many were killed and how many deserted cannot be known. The disaster broke Bo Gu's and Braun's authority. When Chiang massed troops on the route to join He Long in western Hunan, Mao proposed turning towards weakly defended Guizhou, and on 12 December the Tongdao meeting adopted the idea with Zhou Enlai's backing. At Liping Braun's plan for eastern Guizhou was again overruled in favour of Zunyi in the west. Reaching the Wu River on 1 January 1935, Zhou carried a rule that all military plans must be approved by the Politburo, in effect stripping Braun of command, and the Red Army soon took Zunyi, the weakly defended second city of Guizhou. One account puts its strength by then at little more than 10,000. 17 37 38 39

From 15 to 17 January an enlarged Politburo meeting at Zunyi examined why the base had been lost. Bo Gu, the first speaker, blamed "objective" causes, above all the enemy's overwhelming superiority; Zhou Enlai admitted the leadership's wrong decisions and named himself one of the three most responsible. Zhang Wentian then attacked Bo and Braun head on, and Mao criticised a positional war that had squandered the Red Army's strength to hold every inch of the base, arguing that territory given up for a time could be regained so long as the army survived. Wang Jiaxiang backed Mao, and Peng Dehuai likened Braun to "a prodigal son who had squandered his father's goods". Seventeen of the twenty participants, all but Bo, Braun and He Kequan (Kai Feng), sided with Mao. Mao joined the Politburo Standing Committee but did not take full power at once. Afterwards Zhang Wentian replaced Bo Gu as the party's overall head, and in March a three-man military group of Mao, Zhou and Wang Jiaxiang was formed, with Zhou making the final military decisions and Mao as his assistant. 39 17 40

The Long March (2): from the Chishui to Lazikou

Leaving Zunyi, the Red Army tried to move north into Sichuan to join Zhang Guotao's Fourth Front Army, but the way was barred. Caught between Nationalist forces closing from three directions, Mao slipped out of the encirclement by crossing the Chishui River four times, feinted at Guiyang while Chiang was there and, when Chiang called in his troops from Kunming, swung into lightly guarded Yunnan. From 29 April to 9 May 1935 the Red Army crossed the Jinsha, the upper Yangtze, and shook off its pursuers. In February Mao's wife He Zizhen gave birth to a daughter on the march who had to be left with a local family. On 22 May the army made an alliance with the Yi people to pass through their land, and on 29 May the vanguard 4th Regiment of the 1st Corps seized the Luding Bridge over the Dadu. The story of the twenty-two volunteers who crossed it became a central scene of the revolutionary narrative. 17 41 37

In June the Red Army crossed the snow-covered Jiajin Mountain and on the 12th met the vanguard of the Fourth Front Army at Dawei near Maogong. Zhang Guotao had 84,000 men in relatively good condition and used that strength against the leadership of a much-reduced Central Red Army. On 26 June the Lianghekou meeting resolved to advance north and build a Sichuan–Shaanxi–Gansu base in southern Gansu, but Zhang demanded that his subordinate Chen Changhao become general political commissar of the Red Army and that he himself replace Zhu De on the Military Commission. On 18 July Zhou Enlai gave up the commissar's post. When the Maoergai meeting of August reaffirmed the march north, the army split into left and right columns to cross the Songpan grasslands, a marshland where many died of bog, hunger and cold. 17 42 43 37

The quarrel over going north or south ended in a split. On the night of 10 September the centre slipped away north with only the 1st and 3rd Corps of the right column, and on the 12th the Ejie meeting condemned Zhang Guotao. Xu Xiangqian, who argued that the two armies must not part, in the end led his remaining troops back across the grasslands to Zhang in the south. On 5 October at Zhuomudiao Zhang set up a separate "Central Committee" with himself as chairman and declared Mao, Zhang Wentian, Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu "wanted"; Liu Bocheng, who objected, was demoted. The northern force, reorganised as the "Shaanxi–Gansu Detachment", forced the Lazikou pass on 17 September and at Hadapu learned from newspapers of Liu Zhidan's base in northern Shaanxi, which became its destination. When it reached Wuqizhen in Bao'an county on 19 October, fewer than 8,000 men remained. Zhang's army, marching south, was beaten at Baizhang in late autumn with heavy losses. 37 17 44 45

In northern Shaanxi: the union of the three armies and the turn to a united front

In northern Shaanxi lay the Shaanxi–Gansu base built by Liu Zhidan, Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun, and in September Xu Haidong's 25th Red Army had arrived and joined Liu's troops in a 15th Corps of some 7,000. In November the Central Red Army formed a new First Front Army with them and destroyed the Northeastern Army's 109th Division at Zhiluozhen. Mao became chairman of the Military Commission in November, taking over the Red Army's supreme command from Zhou Enlai. On 1 August 1935 Wang Ming, attending the Comintern's Seventh Congress in Moscow, drafted and issued in the name of the CCP Central Committee and the soviet government the "August First Declaration", proposing an end to civil war and a "National Defence Government" and "Anti-Japanese Allied Army". When Lin Yuying (Zhang Hao) arrived from Moscow with the new line, the Wayaobao meeting of December resolved on an "anti-Japanese national united front" and renamed the "workers' and peasants' republic" a "soviet people's republic". 37 17 46 47 48 49

On 27 December, in "On Tactics against Japanese Imperialism", Mao first summed up the Long March: "it is a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding-machine." For twelve months, bombed and watched from the air and encircled and pursued on land by a force of several hundred thousand, the army had walked more than twenty thousand li across eleven provinces and so announced to some 200 million people that the Red Army's road was their only road to liberation. In February 1936 the Red Army crossed the Yellow River on an Eastern Expedition against Yan Xishan in Shanxi. The Korean Yang Lim (Bi Shiti), chief of staff of the 15th Corps' 75th Division, led the assault team across the river on the night of 20 February and was killed in the fighting; Liu Zhidan was killed on 14 April. Of the ten or so Koreans on the Long March, Mu Chong (Kim Mu-jong) is said to have been the only one to reach Yan'an alive. 50 16 51 52

The other two armies also came north. The Second Front Army of He Long, Xiao Ke and Ren Bishi left the Hunan–Hubei border on 19 November 1935 and came round by Lijiang and the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in Yunnan and the Tibetan plateau of western Sichuan. Zhang Guotao cancelled his "second Central Committee" in June 1936 and marched north with the Second Front Army, and on 9 October at Huining in Gansu the Fourth Front Army, and on the 22nd at Jiangtaibao the Second, joined the First, ending the Long March (the "union of the three armies"). That month 21,800 men of the Fourth Front Army crossed the Yellow River westward as the West Route Army to open the Hexi Corridor to the Soviet Union, but while the centre's strategy shifted again and again they were destroyed within five months near the Qilian Mountains by the Hui cavalry of the Ma clique. The West Route Army's defeat ended Zhang's power, and after being purged at an enlarged Politburo meeting in 1937 he defected to the Kuomintang in 1938. 17 37 53 44

In June 1936 the American journalist Edgar Snow, carrying a letter of introduction from Soong Ching-ling, came to Xi'an, passed the Northeastern Army's blockade and spent four months interviewing Mao and other leaders at the Communist headquarters in Bao'an. Red Star Over China, published in London in 1937, told the world that Mao was alive and made the Long March known. Meanwhile the Northeastern Army, driven from its Manchurian homeland, had secretly allied with the Communists, and when Chiang ordered Zhang Xueliang either to attack them or be removed, Zhang and Yang Hucheng seized Chiang at Xi'an on 12 December and demanded an end to the civil war and resistance to Japan (the Xi'an Incident). Stalin, holding that without Chiang China would lose the leader it needed against Japan, called for his release, and after Zhou Enlai's mediation Chiang was freed on the 25th. The incident led to the second united front of 1937, and on 22 September 1937 the Chinese Soviet Republic was formally dissolved and became the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region. 54 55 11 56

Assessment: myth and numbers

Almost every figure of the Long March is disputed. The distance of "25,000 li" (12,500 kilometres) was Mao's estimate as given to Snow; Mao himself spoke of "20,000 li" in a poem and a speech of 1935. In 2003 the Britons Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen retraced the route in 384 days and estimated the true distance at about 6,000 kilometres, while the Beijing Daily replied that even the First Front Army, which walked least, covered some 9,375 kilometres. The army set out with more than 86,000 combatants (some 130,000 with non-combatants), fewer than 8,000 of the First Front Army reached northern Shaanxi, and by one estimate fewer than 7,000 of those had been there from the start. Party membership fell in these years from 300,000 to about 40,000. How much of the loss was due to combat, hunger, disease or desertion cannot be separated. 17 37 32 50

The battle narratives too have been rewritten. The real commander of the Luding assault was not Lin Biao, as usually told, but Yang Chengwu, political commissar of the 4th Regiment; only five of the twenty-two volunteers are known by name, and survivors' testimony that no one died on the bridge itself conflicts with another account of seventeen dead. The decisive second battle fought outside Luding town became known only in the 2000s. Deng Xiaoping reportedly told Brzezinski that Luding was presented that way in propaganda but was in fact an easy operation against warlord troops armed with old muskets. The Zunyi Conference was not publicly acknowledged until the 1950s and detailed accounts appeared only for its fiftieth anniversary in 1985; even its dates, long given as 7–9 January, were corrected to 15–17 January. Mao's leadership was not established at Zunyi at a stroke but hardened in stages: the three-man group of March 1935, the chairmanship of the Military Commission in November, the party chairmanship in 1943. 41 39 17

Even so, the experience of 1927–1936 changed the grammar of the Chinese revolution. Where urban risings had failed again and again, the party found its way in rural bases, an army led by the party, guerrilla and mobile warfare and peasant mobilisation through land redistribution, later formalised as the strategy of "surrounding the cities from the countryside". The Gutian principle and the "Three Rules and Eight Points" became the way an army won peasant support. The shadows of the same years must be remembered as well: the anti-AB purge and the Futian Incident, the mass executions and forced labour in the Jiangxi Soviet and the killing of Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo show that the base-area state carried from early on a violence that manufactured internal enemies. The Long March itself was a rout, but the party made it a narrative of survival and the justification of a change of leadership. As the Vietnamese Truong Chinh ("Long March") took the name for his own, the story was engraved deep in revolutionaries far beyond China. 17 4 20 32 3 9