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The Long March () was a massive Military retreat undertaken by the Red Armies of the Communist Party Of China (CPC), the forerunner of the People's Liberation Army , to evade the pursuit of the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party) army. There was not one Long March, but several, as various Communist armies in the south escaped to the north and west. The most well known is the march from Jiangxi province which began in October 1934. The First Front Army of the Chinese Soviet Republic , led by an inexperienced military commission, was on the brink of complete annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek 's troops in their stronghold in Jiangxi province. The Communists, under the eventual command of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai , escaped in a circling retreat to the west and north, which reportedly traversed some 12,500 kilometers (8,000 miles) over 370 days. The route passed through some of the most difficult terrain of western China by traveling west, then north, to Shaanxi . The Long March began the ascent to power of Mao Zedong , whose Leadership during the retreat gained him the support of the members of the party. The bitter struggles of the Long March, which was completed by only one-tenth of the force that left Jiangxi, would come to represent a significant episode in the history of the Communist Party of China, and would seal the personal prestige of Mao and his supporters as the new leaders of the party in the following decades. BACKGROUND TO THE LONG MARCH The Red Army in 1934 Although the literal translation of the Chinese ''Cháng Zhēng'' is “Long March”, official publications of the 1936 , when the three forces linked up in Shaanxi. The divisions of the "Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army" (紅軍) were named according to historical circumstances, sometimes in a nonconsecutive way. Early Communist units often formed by defection from existing Kuomintang forces, keeping their original designations. By the time of the Long March, numerous small units had been organized into three unified groups, the First Red Army (紅一方面軍/红一方面军/Hóng Yī Fāngmiàn Jūn), the Second Red Army (紅二方面軍/红二方面军/Hóng Èr Fāngmiàn Jūn) and the Fourth Red Army (紅四方面軍/红四方面军/Hóng Sì Fāngmiàn Jūn).Peoples Liberation Army Daily ( Some translations refer to these same units as the “First Front Red Army", “Second Front Red Army” and “Fourth Front Red Army" to distinguish them from the earlier organizational divisions. The First Red Army formed from the First, Third and Fifth Army Groups in southern Kiangsi under command of Bo Gu and Li De. When the Fourth Red Army under Zhang Guotao was formed in the Szechuan - Shensi border area from several smaller units, no standard nomenclature of the armies of the Communist Party existed; moreover, during the Chinese Civil War central control of separate Communist-controlled enclaves within China was limited. After the organization of these first two main forces, the Second Red Army formed in eastern Kweichow by unifying the Second and Sixth Army Groups under He Long and Jen Pi-shih. A “Third Red Army" was never established. The three armies would maintain their historical designation as the First, Second and Fourth Red Armies until Communist military forces were nominally integrated into the National Revolutionary Army , forming the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army , during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945. Civil war encircled the Communists in Jiangxi in 1934.]] The Communist Party of China (CPC), founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu with Soviet support, initially collaborated with the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT), founded by the revolutionary republican Sun Yat-sen . After the unexpected death of Sun in March of 1925, a power struggle within the KMT favored Chiang Kai-shek, whose Northern Expedition forces succeeded in wresting control of large areas of China from local Warlords , establishing a unified government in Nanjing in April 1927. Unlike other nationalist leaders, like Wang Jingwei , Chiang was hostile to continued collaboration with the Communists. This initial period of cooperation to unify China against the feudal Warlord s and the Japanese Empire ended abruptly in April of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek Struck Out Against The Communists . Unsuccessful urban insurrections (in Nanchang , Wuhan and Guangzhou ) and the suppression of the Communist Party in Shanghai and other cities finally drove many party supporters to rural strongholds such as the Jiangxi Soviet organized by Mao Zedong. By 1928, deserters and defecting Kuomintang army units, supplemented by peasants from the Communist rural soviets, formed the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. The ideological confrontation between the CCP and the KMT soon evolved into the first phase of the Chinese Civil War . |
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