The Long March is embedded deep in the psychology of the Chinese communist party. Of the men who took power when the Communists finally won in 1949, almost all of them had been on the Long March in 1934.

Authors Avatar

CHINA

The Long March is embedded deep in the psychology of the Chinese communist party. Of the men who took power when the Communists finally won in 1949, almost all of them had been on the Long March in 1934.

In fact, the Long March was a long retreat from Chinese Communism's first experiment. The party, founded in the early 1920s, had siezed power in 1927 Jianxi province in the south east of the country, encouraging peasants to drive out feudal landlords and sharing out the land. Soon they controlled an area of 50 million people and represented a major threat to the Nationalist regime of the Guomindang of Chiang Kai Shek.

Nationalist forces surrounded Jianxi, which the Chinese communists had declared 'a Soviet'. In the subsequent siege, perhaps a million people died in the fighting and of starvation and disease brought on by the blockade.

After seven years, in 1934, the Communists realised the noose was tightening and they had to move or they would be crushed. In October 1934, 86,000 communist fighters set out from Jianxi. By the time they reached Zunyi about four months later, they had already lost half their number. By the time they finally reached Shanxi province in the north, in the autumn of 1935 little more than a tenth of those who had set out were still alive. But they had reached the sanctuary of the north, remote mountains and difficult terrain where they could regroup and launch new offensives.

The Long March was the making of Mao Ze Dong. In Jianxi he had not even been among the leaders of the party but by the end he had been elected Chairman of the party. Others made their names at this time - Lin Biao, who was to be prominent during the Cultural Revolution, Zhou En Lai and Deng Xiao Ping.

It was also the point at which Chinese communism started to forge its own path away from the Soviets. The Jianxi Soviet, from 1927-34, had been filled with Soviet advisers who had preached the orthodoxy of proletarian revolution. But Mao and his contemporaries had become fully aware that revolution in China could only happen if the peasantry - 90 percent of the population - were engaged. But as the Nationalists closed in, China's communists ignored advice from their Russian colleagues and forged their own tactics.

At the other end of the march, Mao spent time developing his own version of the theory of Communism in writings and pamphlets, leading to a further split with Moscow.

Around 7 percent of China's inhabitants are not ethnically Han Chinese. It's not a great proportion when you compare them to the minorities of other countries but nearly 80 million people in absolute terms - enough to form several states of their own.

Officially, China's constitution affords them national rights and privileges. But in practise, China's ethnic Han decision makers have usually regarded China as the only source of real civilisation and culture - the smaller nations and tribes within the state of China have in effect been offered little more than folklore rights, to sing their songs and dance their dances.

Most of the nationalities are relatively small groups that live in remote areas. They have traditionally faced a choice between the life of their ancestors back home or migration to the towns and cities - and integration into the Chinese culture and way of life. For most, that has not been a problem.

But there are two groups with their own developed sense of civilisation and nation - the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

China invaded Tibet in the 1950s and has annexed the formerly independent country as a province - sending the Dalai Lama into exile. There are about four million Tibetans.

The Uighurs are larger. They are Muslim and Turkic in culture, speaking a language that is derived from Turkish. Numbering some 40 million, their sense of nationhood is bound to have been fostered in recent years by the new independence of their Turkic cousins in the former Soviet Union. Uighur tribes extend over China's western border into the Central Asian countries of Kirghizistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.

As population pressures have grown, more Han Chinese from the south-eastern corner of the country have been moved - often against their will - into the emptier parts of the country to the west and north. Many non-Han nations see this as colonialism by the back door.

The living standards and quality of life of the nations on the western fringes of the Chinese state are much lower than in the industrial hubs to the east.

Join now!

Britain began to export opium to China from India at the end of the eighteenth century, where use of the drug quickly became a widespread social problem.

In the 1830s Chinese officers in the army wrote to Britain's Queen Victoria asking her to end the trade. When there was no reply, they confiscated and destroyed 20,000 large chests of opium which amounted to a whole year's supply.

At this stage, the British East India Company called in the help of the British army, which declared war on China and defeated them decisively in the war which lasted from 1839-1842.

As a result ...

This is a preview of the whole essay