The Long March The Long March (Changzheng) was a massive strategic retreat and redeployment of the main forces of the Chinese Red Army between 1934 and 1936, which became a turning point in the Chinese Civil War and laid the foundation for Mao Zedong's ascent to absolute power within the Communist Party. By the early 1930s, the Chinese Communists held the extensive Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi province in the southeast, but Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek launched massive campaigns aimed at their encirclement and annihilation. While the Communists had successfully repelled the first four encirclement campaigns using mobile guerrilla warfare, the fifth campaign in 1933–1934, devised with the assistance of German military advisers (notably Hans von Seeckt), trapped the Red Army in a suffocating blockade of reinforced concrete pillboxes and trenches. Faced with overwhelming enemy forces and rigid positional defense tactics imposed by Comintern adviser Otto Braun (Li De) and party leader Bo Gu, the Soviet base was doomed, forcing the CPC leadership in October 1934 to break through the blockade: approximately 86,000 soldiers, officials, workers, and porters broke out of the encirclement and headed west. The opening weeks of the march turned into a disaster: burdened by an enormous bureaucratic and technical supply train, the army moved sluggishly and suffered a catastrophic defeat in late November and early December 1934 at the Xiang River, losing more than half its strength to combat, capture, and drowning. This debacle triggered a profound crisis of confidence in the pro-Soviet leadership. In January 1935, at the historic Zunyi Conference in captured Zunyi, Guizhou province, the proponents of positional warfare faced fierce criticism; Otto Braun and Bo Gu were stripped of military command, and operational control effectively shifted to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu Дэ (Zhu De). Mao immediately abandoned the cumbersome baggage train and returned to rapid, unpredictable maneuvers, exemplified by the 'Four Crossings of the Chishui River', where red forces repeatedly outmaneuvered and confused Kuomintang forces that outnumbered them three to one. The remaining trek became an agonizing test of endurance against brutal terrain, extreme weather, and constant clashes over more than 9,000 kilometers (officially commemorated as 25,000 li, or roughly 12,500 kilometers). The Red Army crossed the raging gorges of the Jinsha River (the upper Yangtze), executed the storied assault on the Luding Bridge suspended by iron chains over the torrential Dadu River under Kuomintang machine-gun fire, and crossed the snow-capped Jiajin Mountains at elevations exceeding 4,000 meters, where thousands of lightly clad southerners froze to death or succumbed to altitude sickness. Equally fatal were the notorious Songpan Grasslands in Sichuan—vast, roadless quagmires devoid of shelter and food, where soldiers sank into bogs, ate wild herbs and boiled leather belts, and died in droves from dysentery and starvation. The crisis was deepened by internal division: 4th Army commander Zhang Guotao clashed openly with Mao over strategic direction and leadership, marching a major portion of the forces south (where his group was subsequently crushed), while troops loyal to Mao pressed northwest, breaching the formidable mountain pass at Lazikou. In October 1935, the exhausted vanguard of the 1st Front Red Army led by Mao Zedong reached Wuqi County in Shaanxi province, linking up with local Soviet guerrillas led by Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang. By the autumn of 1936, the remaining isolated columns had converged there, marking the official conclusion of the Long March. Of the tens of thousands who had departed Jiangxi, only some 7,000 #маппинг #хой #тно #тфр #mapping #mapp #hoi4 #hoi #tno #tfr #china #thelongmarch #loji - @matritza4.0