The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth [Hardcover]

Sun Shuyun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2007

The Long March is Communist China’s founding myth, the heroic tale that every Chinese child learns in school. Seventy years after the historical march took place, Sun Shuyun set out to retrace the Marchers’ steps and unexpectedly discovered the true history behind the legend. The Long March is the stunning narrative of her extraordinary expedition.

The facts are these: in 1934, in the midst of a brutal civil war, the Communist party and its 200,000 soldiers were forced from their bases by Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist troops. After that, truth and legend begin to blur: led by Mao Zedong, the Communists set off on a strategic retreat to the distant barren north of China, thousands of miles away. Only one in five Marchers reached their destination, where, the legend goes, they gathered strength and returned to launch the new China in the heat of revolution.

As Sun Shuyun journeys to remote villages along the Marchers’ route, she interviews the aged survivors and visits little-known local archives. She uncovers shocking stories of starvation, disease, and desertion, of ruthless purges ordered by party leaders, of the mistreatment of women, and of thousands of futile deaths. Many who survived the March report that their suffering continued long after the “triumph” of the revolution, recounting tales of persecution and ostracism that culminated in the horrific years of the Cultural Revolution.

What emerges from Sun’s research, her interviews, and her own memories of growing up in China is a moving portrait of China past and present. Sun finds that the forces at work during the days of the revolution—the barren, unforgiving landscape; the unifying power of outside threats from foreign countries; Mao’s brilliant political instincts and his use of terror, propaganda, and ruthless purges to consolidate power and control the population—are the very forces that made China what it is today.

The Long March is a gripping retelling of an amazing historical adventure, an eye-opening account of how Mao manipulated the event for his own purposes, and a beautiful document of a country balanced between legend and the truth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Long March—the 8,000-mile trek by 200,000 Communist soldiers in 1934 while fleeing the Nationalists—is still legendary in Chinese Communist Party lore, but there are a lot of myths surrounding it, as the Chinese-born author discovers when she retraces the march's steps. Meeting wizened march veterans, the author, raised on the heroism of the march, is shocked to discover the reality: stories of starvation and desertion, violence against women and unnecessary deaths. For years afterward, some of the veterans didn't receive full pensions. A filmmaker and television producer who divides her time between London and Beijing, she also finds that Mao made strategic mistakes attributed to others, and used the march ruthlessly to defeat his rivals and cement his hold on Communist power. Her interviews with veterans are among the book's highlights, but just as fascinating as the interviews and archival research is her travel through China. She colorfully describes the countryside, which in her eyes maintains its ancient beauty even amid creeping 21st-century modernity. Some readers may need to do a little background reading on 20th-century Chinese history, but the rewards make it worthwhile. Map. (June 12)
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From The New Yorker

In 1934, surrounded by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in the south, Mao’s Red Army marched more than eight thousand miles to a new base, in the northwest. The march, completed by only a fifth of the original army, was a defeat in all ways but one: it returned Mao from the political wilderness to power. Mao transformed the march into the founding myth of modern China and, in doing so, created a new narrative around victories that never happened. Shuyun, a Chinese-born BBC documentary producer, retraces the route and interviews the few remaining survivors, in an account that shows the human cost of Mao’s revisionism; along the way are huge memorials to spurious victories and countless unmarked graves of those who died in defeats that Mao later denied.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1St Edition edition (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385520247
• ISBN-13: 978-0385520249
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picking through the dustbin of history, July 18, 2007

By 

Victor C. Shih "Zhengzhi Jingji" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth (Hardcover)

The Long March by Sun Shuyun is simply the most moving book on China that I have ever read, and I have read a great many of them. She sets out to collect the memories of the last survivors of the Long March, and along the way, she exploded or cast serious doubts on a great many myths that have been created around the Long March. While this task sounds dry, the way she accomplishes it is simply unlike anything on China I have ever read. She begins every chapter with a narrative directly from one of the survivors in first person. She then moves to more narratives or the fruits of her extensive archival research or passages from official history. Immediately, the reader is moved by the first person narratives, which are often gut-wrenching. Then the mind is hit with her often incisive analysis and skepticism. One's heart and mind are both deeply challenged throughout the book.

I don't want to spoil it for the readers, but there are some real highlights in the book, including the chapter on the mass defections in the early stages of the March, the so-called Battle of the Luding Bridge, and the fate of the Fourth Army in the Western March (Western Legion). While some of these themes have been explored by Western scholars, her interviews and discussion about those left in the dust-bins of history were simply unparalleled and more haunting than anything I have every read. We read about a young boy from Hunan who was left among the Tibetans in Western Sichuan, the "crazy woman" who stands on the road waiting for her Red Army husband who never returned from the March, as well as those in the women's brigade who were deserted by their party and left to fend for themselves in the middle of hostile Muslim territory. These were the rough edges around the polish sheen of the official history that were shaved off decades ago. Sun has done a great service, to historians and to these people, by bringing their stories to light.

Sun Shuyun, being a product of the Long March heritage, is surprisingly even-handed in her treatment of history. She does not pander to official history, nor does she go over board in denying everything we say about the Long March. Clearly, the manipulation of the Long March myth was a stupendous feat of propaganda by Mao, and she acknowledges it as such. Clearly, many Long Marchers, especially those who stayed on after the first part, were sincere believers of some notion of communist justice, even if that ideology was a vague concept to most of them. Clearly, the purges of the 30s produced a highly disciplined core in the Red Army which went on to numerous suicide missions when called on to do so. I would add that this core of "true believers" was a key to the CCP's later success, although luck, the support of Zhang Xueliang, and the Xi'an Incident also had something to do with it.

Throughout the book, Sun conveys a sense that after the Red Army passed through Guizhou, Mao increasingly asserted control over the party. Toward the end of the book, we see a Mao beginning to play the part of a sadistic director who manipulated his actors every which way toward one goal: power for Mao himself. This picture fits very nicely with an emerging body of work (for example by Mao's Last Revolution and Mao: The Unknown Story) portraying Mao as a ruthless political, yes, genius who pulled every trick in the book to obtain and retain power. Regardless of the debate surrounding Mao, I think the power-hungry core of Mao is quite beyond dispute. We can debate whether the CCP could have emerged victorious in the bitter struggle against the KMT and (less so) the Japanese without such a power-hungry and devious man at its head. I tend to think the CCP would have failed with a "lesser" helmsman.

The book opens many doors for us "professional" scholars to explore. I believe some of my colleagues are indeed busy constructing alternative histories of the Chinese revolution. Sun's book shows us even more promising avenues of research, especially with oral history (though one must hurry!) and provincial archival research. I thought about doing a review for this book in a journal, but I simply couldn't wait. This book is an important one, and it will surely find itself into my syllabus this year. Victor Shih, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing and Deeply Moving, July 5, 2007

By 

Tom Shi (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth (Hardcover)

The phrase Long March conjure up a variety of stock images colored by the massive amount of propaganda that have obscured it ever since its occurrence. In The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth, the author uncovers the human story behind the propaganda, and find it so much more haunting and heartbreaking than any air-brushed propaganda can conceive.

Though the structure of the book is framed by the macro view of the movement of armies and history-making moments of political machinations, the substance and the strength of the book come from the individual interviews conducted by the author with the surviving veterans of the Long March, both men and women, now old and gray, living quiet, often poverty-stricken lives in remote parts of country. They had joined the Red Army as teenagers, naive, idealistic and hoping for food and freedom. What they received was the incredible deprivations and sufferings, death of friends, constant threat of hunger and enemy attack, captivity, torture, and finally, the abandonment by the very Party to which they had pledged their youth and life. All they had to cope with these tribulations were the strength of their convictions and the hardiness of spirit.

It is particularly touching to see how brightly those distant and often painful memories burn in the mind of these men and women in the twilight of their lives. One senses that the Long March was the defining story of their lives. It is told very well here.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A historical "must read" about China, May 21, 2008

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth (Hardcover)

I've long been fascinated by the Chinese and their history, so the opportunity to read Sun Shuyun's account of the 1934 Long March was intriguing. The author graduated from Beijing University, and is a filmmaker and television producer.

When one thinks of the Long March of 1934, there are scenes that immediately come to mind. But thinking about an event and reading about it are, however, two different things. It's especially jarring because there is the myth that has been offered to the world and then there is the reality. The reality is horrific and one can understand the Chinese desire to soften that reality.

In 1934, 200,000 Chinese soldiers were fighting a civil war. Chiang Kai-skek and his Nationalist troops forced the soldiers to flee. The soldiers were led by Mao Tse Tung, and the plan was a retreat to northern China, thousands of arduous miles to the north.

The author tells the story of the march vividly through interviews with men and women who survived the experience. These people are now old and often live lives of abject poverty. The stark contrast of then and now is that the survivors were once young idealists who wanted freedom. The march gave them sickness, death, hunger, torture, captivity and finally-the ultimate abandonment by the very ideal they believed in.

It's the human story that makes Shuyun's book brilliant. The human suffering, the strength and spirit, the conviction and determination for a cause believed in. The harsh time was life changing for everyone.

Armchair Interviews says: The Long March: The True History of China's Founding Myth is a must read.