Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Long March

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Long March

The Long March

The 1934-35 massive military retreat of the Red Armies from the opposing Nationalist Party army was not one march but several, as various different Communist armies escaped from the south to the north and west. The best known of these is the journey taken by the 86,000 members of the First Army who started out from Jiangxi province in October 1934 and traveled approximately 6,000 miles (9,500 kilometers) over about 370 days (about 16 miles a day) through some of the most difficult of Chinese terrain. Only about 1 in 10 of those who started the Long March completed it. Map.

The propaganda team was integral to The March, churning out posters wherever they went. In one location the team produced 18,400 slogans in just two days! Through all the rigors of the Long March the one thing Mao never allowed to be abandoned was the printing press. Originally, this was a lithograph press that needed a dozen men to carry it, and later a wax-paper printer.

Over the course of the March, twenty-eight issues of Red Star, each 30,000 words long, were published, edited by Deng Xiaoping.


About the Author

Sun Shuyun was born in China in the 1960s. She graduated from Beijing University and won a scholarship to Oxford. A filmmaker and television producer, she has made documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, and the Discovery Channel. For the past decade, she has divided her time between London and Beijing.

Before The Long March she wrote Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud in which she follows in the footsteps of seventh century monk Xuanzang, who set out from China for India in search of Buddhist scriptures. Eighteen years later he returned, carrying 600 books of Sanskrit sutras and seven statues. For the rest of his life he presided over the resurgence of Buddhism in China's golden age, and the retranslation of the sacred canon.


Interesting Links:

• More about Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud and Sun Shuyun's motives for writing it at The Daily Telegraph.
• Listen to Sun Shuyun talking about The Long March on BBC Radio 3.

Filed under

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Long March. It originally ran in September 2007 and has been updated for the May 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.