BEIJING - More than 70 years ago, chairman
Mao Zedong decreed that "the Long March is
propaganda". If he were alive today, he would
doubtless be proud of the way in which the
official 70th anniversary of the end of the Long
March (1934-36) was marked on Sunday.
In
Beijing, bookstores boast special displays of
dozens of new books portraying the Red Army's
hardships and derring-do. Newspapers carry the
reminiscences of aging veterans. And Chinese
television is presenting a feast of Long
March-themed
entertainment, including a
20-part drama series, documentaries, and even a
song-and-dance extravaganza.
Under Mao's
direction, the Chinese Communist Party spun one of
the longest fighting retreats in military history,
stretching from Jiangxi province in the south to
Yanan in the barren northeast, into a heroic
victory over the CCP's Kuomintang (KMT) foes.
To this day, Chinese history textbooks
continue to bear the hallmarks of Mao in telling
the tale of the Reds' escape from certain
obliteration at the hands of KMT leader Chiang
Kai-shek. A textbook used in Beijing schools, for
instance, tells a classic tale of heroism
conquering enemy encirclement, "snowy mountains"
and treacherous marshes to regroup victoriously in
Gansu 25,000 li (one li is 500
meters) away. The chapter even kicks off with a
poem written by the Great Helmsman himself.
Indeed, two British writers who retraced
the Long March in 2002-03 and interviewed veterans
and witnesses, Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen,
conclude in their book The Long March
(2006) that "Mao and his followers twisted the
tale of the Long March for their own ends. Mao's
role was mythologized to the point where ... it
seemed he had single-handedly saved the Red Army
and defeated Chiang Kai-shek". Mao exaggerated,
perhaps even doubled, the length of the march,
they believe.
Given the contribution of
Edgar Snow in Red Star over China (1937) to
Mao's glorification of the march, it may be
appropriate that two foreigners should be among
the first to begin the demystification of this key
episode in modern Chinese history.
But, as
implied by another book of the same name also
released this year, written by Chinese-born,
London-based documentary-maker Sun Shuyun, the
importance of the Long March to CCP mystique means
that China is far from ready for a reassessment.
Long after the demise of the leader who set its
tone, communist China's "founding myth" continues
to serve its purpose. As she recounts, generations
of Chinese have been indoctrinated in the "Long
March spirit".
"If you find it hard, think of the
Long March; if you feel tired, think of our
revolutionary forbears." The message has been
drilled into us so that we can accomplish any
goal set before us by the party because nothing
compares in difficulty with what they did.
Decades after the historical one, we have been
spurred on to ever more Long Marches - to
industrialize China, to feed the largest
population in the world, to catch up with the
West, to reform the socialist economy, to send
men into space, to engage with the 21st century.
Through interviews with more than 40
Long March veterans, Sun sets out explicitly to
explode this myth, and try to piece together a
more realistic version of events. She finds that,
though the official version of the Long March may
make good propaganda, it is not good history.
While the evidence of these now-ancient witnesses
70 years after the fact must be treated with some
circumspection, the tale they tell collectively
points to large gaps and distortions in the
officially sanctioned account.
To begin
with, in contrast to the popular image of peasants
practically queuing up to join the Reds, the
recruitment of the rank-and-file was often far
from idealistic. Kidnap and blackmail appear to
have been common recruitment strategies. Female
officers sometimes even recruited men with sex
rather than be punished for not meeting their
quotas. With morale based on these shaky
foundations, it is no wonder that, despite orders
that deserters be shot, men left in droves: Sun
estimates that in a single battle at the Xiang
River, perhaps a majority of the 30,000
unaccounted-for men deserted.
And while,
in the popular legend, the Red Army is warmly
welcomed by common folk wherever it wanders, this
was far from always the case. As the desperate
"Red Bandits", harried by Chiang Kai-shek's KMT
troops and local warlords, passed through remote
villages and ever more hostile terrain, disease
and desertion took their toll and the Reds'
desperation mounted.
In China's
impoverished "wild west", where food was short and
the weather deadly, if opium could not bribe
villagers into giving the "Red Bandits" food,
soldiers often stole the peasants' livelihoods.
Indigenous Tibetans suffered especially badly,
many reportedly starving to death after the Red
Army confiscated their yaks and grain. Not even
vain promises of independence could overcome their
enmity: one veteran told Sun he remembers having
more battles with the Tibetans than the KMT
troops. Their suffering was so great that even Mao
and Deng Xiaoping later recognized the debt the
Red Army - renamed People's Liberation Army in
1946 - owed them.
However, one should not
underestimate the hardships endured by the Red
Army soldiers. In fact, says Sun, their experience
was, if anything, actually tougher than the
official history suggests.
Ill-equipped,
many froze to death in the winter, while others
were driven to eating their belts and rifle straps
to ward off starvation. In these conditions, the
sick and the young - including babies - were often
abandoned. Female soldiers had a particularly
harrowing time.
At a talk in Beijing this
year, a tearful Sun Shuyun related how the extreme
conditions caused many women to become infertile,
and some were left behind to be raped by warlord
troops only to be disowned later by the Communist
Party. You may be sure that these grim realities
will receive short shrift in the romanticized
version of the Long March shown on prime-time TV
this week.
But perhaps the most chilling
detail, pieced together from Chinese sources, to
emerge from Sun's book is how, even before coming
to power, in the 1930s the party and Mao in
particular showed early indications of a
ruthlessly oppressive streak in a series of
purges. One bloodthirsty cleanup in 1931 claimed
an estimated 20,000 lives. Indeed, Sun believes
that it was precisely because of these purges that
a severely weakened Red Army was unable to defend
its Jiangxi base in 1934 and was forced to flee.
She laments, poignantly:
The new long marches [Mao] drove the
Chinese people on for the next 40 years and were
longer and more painful than the [Long] March
itself. We suffered in part because we never
knew why they had to go on the original march in
the first place: the real reasons why the Red
bases collapsed. The lessons of the [Long] March
were eclipsed by the glory that was heaped on
it. That remains true to this day.
As
the 70th anniversary of the end of the Long March
approaches, it may be appropriate to reflect with
Sun on English playwright Alan Bennett's
observation that the best way to forget an event
is to commemorate it.
Martin
Adams is a Beijing-based freelance writer. His
credits include articles published in the Wall
Street Journal Asia, That's Beijing magazine and
That's Beijing Excursions Guide.
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