Just one year after 86,000 Chinese Communist troops began to retreat from government forces, only 4,000 survivors completed the “Long March” that entered the nation’s realm of legend and cemented the position of the ragtag group’s leader and incipient dictator, Mao Tse-tung.
Let’s do a little calculation from the above figures: Less than 5% of the original force Mao had at the start of his desperate retreat from Chiang Kai-shek made it to the end in Shensi Province in northwest China on October 20, 1935.
But here are other figures that make this statistic understandable, and the eventual ascension of the Communists to power inevitable:
* 700,000 – the amount of troops that Chiang had at hand in 1934 when he decided, after four unsuccessful attempts, to destroy Communists in China once and for all.
* 368—the number of days it took Mao and his troops to make the journey.
* 6,000—the number of miles on this trip—nearly twice the distance across the continental U.S.
In other words, you had to be pretty tough for this journey. It helped if you were ruthless, as Mao turned out to be over the last 40 years of his life.
How ruthless? I don’t think that the number of deaths blamed on Mao by biographers Jung Chan g and Jon Halliday in Mao: The Unknown Story—70 million, more than any other 20th-century leader—really conveys this, even if you’re inclined to accept this awful statistic.
These facts might help make a little more sense of all this:
* A bitter power struggle broke out in China after Mao’s death because while he was alive, he preferred to have any potential replacements imprisoned, murdered or exiled.
* Mao refused to alter the death sentence of a doctor falsely accused of disloyalty, even though the physician had saved his life. He could get plenty of others without any bother, he reasoned.
* One of his favorite maxims in his infamous “Little Red Book” was “Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself”—a catch-all term for his all-encompassing influence, used to cover virtually any major bloodbath in his reign, including during the "Cultural Revolution" (a misnomer if there ever was one, along with "People's Republic of China").
For the rest of his life, Mao undoubtedly must have felt that if the Long March didn’t kill him, nothing could. Weapons and supplies weren’t conveyed by motorized vehicles, but on men’s backs and horse-drawn carts, frequently done at night so the Nationalists couldn’t see them, across 24 rivers, 18 mountain ranges and who knows how many swamps. (The crossing at the Tatu River was particularly perilous, as the troops came under nearly continuous fire from Chiang's forces.)
Every day Mao looked around, he saw his line of marchers shorten, falling victim to starvation, aerial bombardment, and constant skirmishing. With his own ideological cadre narrowing, he and his forces were forced to ally themselves with minority groups—and in one infamous instance, drank chicken blood to impress them.
Under normal circumstances, losing 95% of your men is enough to make you an ex-military leader. Before the Long March began, that thought had crossed the mind of Chinese’s Communist Party committee, which actually voted to replace Mao. But the new leaders had proven just as bad as Mao on the battlefield, so he’d been reinstated.
Chiang had been able to virtually annihilate Mao’s forces, but Mao himself had escaped. In time, Chiang would have reason to rue this failure on his part.
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