This Day in History: Mao’s Long March concludes

On October 20, 1935, Mao Zedong arrives in Shensi Province in northwest China with 4,000 survivors of the ‘Long March’, and sets up Chinese Communist headquarters there.
The epic flight from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces had lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles.
Civil war in China between the Nationalists and the Communists had started in 1927, and four years later Communist leader Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the newly established Soviet Republic of China, based in Kiangsi province, in the southwest.
Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists had launched several encirclement campaigns against the Soviet Republic until Chiang managed to raise 700,000 troops to make a successful siege that claimed hundreds of thousands lives among peasants and troops killed in clashes or starved to death.
With defeat imminent, the Communists decided to break out of the encirclement at its weakest points and escape. The Long March began on October 16, 1934. Secrecy and rear-guard actions confused the Nationalists, and it was several weeks before they realized that the main body of the Red Army had fled. The retreating force initially consisted of 86,000 troops, 15,000 personnel, and 35 women. Weapons and supplies were borne on men’s backs or in horse-drawn carts, and the line of marchers stretched 50 miles. They crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges, mostly snow-capped.
The Communists generally marched at night, and when the enemy was not near, a long column of glowing torches could be seen snaking over valleys and hills into the distance.
The first disaster came in November, when Nationalist forces blocked the Communists’ route across the Hsiang River. It took a week for the Communists to break through the fortifications and cost them 50,000 men. After that debacle, Mao steadily regained his influence, and in January he was again made chairman during a meeting of the party leaders in the captured city of Tsuni. Mao changed strategy, breaking his force into several columns that would take varying paths to confuse the enemy. There would be no more direct assaults on enemy positions, and the destination would now be Shensi Province, in the far northwest, where the Communists would fight the Japanese invaders and earn the respect of China’s masses.