Customer Reviews

The Long March

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Whether you approve of Communism or not, the fact that the people who led the Long March survived and went on to head one of the world's largest and most populous countries makes this book important. The Long March has become a legend for today's mainland Chinese, just as Washington's time at Valley Forge has become a legend for Americans.

This book takes a close look at the events that gave rise to the legend and, as such, should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand modern China. It includes first-person interviews with participants of the March and anecdotes previously unpublished. The narrative is told largely from the vantage of Long March military commanders and commissars at the division, regiment and brigade levels. These soldiers are the ones who, after 1949, became China's generals, ministers and top provincial officials, and who specifically set Chinese policy for the next 30 to 40 years.

Salisbury (1908-1993), a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, well conveys the drama of the Long March and its three struggles: 1. the Red Army with the Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai-shek 2. the Red Army with the elements and terrain of western China 3. the factions within the Red Army with each other. The latter struggle was primarily between the Mao Zedong faction and the Comintern faction led by Otto Braun, but there was also power struggles between the First Army led by Mao Zedong and the Fourth Army led by Zhang Guotao. Salisbury is sympathetic to Mao but his book is objective and well worth reading.

Rather than an "unbiased history book" as another reviewer wanted this work to be, this volume is an important compilation of primary information about a period that shaped the development of a country on the verge of being one of the most powerful in the world. As Americans, who have long felt our country held that spot, we need to understand China so that we can hope to retain our own position as China becomes more influential.

This book covers an event about which most people know little, and of which there is little to none in the way of formal record.

Salisbury attempted to piece together some form of an account of the events which took place in the Long March with the only real information that could be gathered about the event: personal accounts, journals, and the like.

As another reviewer states, it's an excellent compilation of this disparate information that would take a person a great deal of time to find separately (if one could at all, especially since most who participated in the event died years ago).

If you came here looking for a formal textbook on the Long March, you're not going to find it here, or anywhere. If you came looking for what little is known about it (and some facts where the few were available), then you've come to the right place. It's not a perfectly observable world, and as a result a lot of pieces of history get lost. What information we have about the Long March would surely have been lost if not for the efforts of Salisbury, and it is good to have at least his imperfect compilation as an alternative to losing the event in the morass of ill-documented historical events.

This is not a very good book. Salisbury does not give any background so that a new reader can understand the political situation in China which led up to the Long March. Additionally, Salisbury appears to be quite biased towards the Chinese Communists - according to him, Mao can do no wrong while he denigrates Chiang Kai-shek at every turn. He completely ignores the logistics of the march and the effect it must have had on the peasants of the areas the communists went through. According to his statistics, the communists began the march 80,000 strong, living off the land. They claim to have expropriated food and other materials from "landlords" but they must also have taken grain and animals from the peasants in order to support their force. This likely devastated the communities the march went through.

He also does not indicate how the communists replenished their arms and ammunition, since they couldn't get that from the landlords or peasants. Military supplies must have been sent to the Chinese Communists from the Soviets but that issue is never even mentioned. He also never explains why Chiang's vastly superior forces, which included air power, could not destroy the communists.

This book is mostly a paean to the communists - something that might have been written by the communists for a "Long March" reunion - not an unbiased history book.