The Long March

- The long march was a heroic chapter in the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the long March sketches at the Hoover Institution. Librarian archives give us unique insights into this formative experience. So from 1927 to 1949, China was in the midst of a civil war that pitted the KMT or the Nationalist Party against the insurgent Chinese Communist Party or the CCP. And in 1934 in the fall, there was a moment when the KMT forces had surrounded the CCPs Red Army, but the Red Army managed to break through the fortification lines and begin a strategic retreat that then turned into a 6,000 mile trek, beginning in the southeast part of the country, traveling west and heading north, ultimately landing in Yunan in the northern province of Xi. And that 6,000 mile trek was in fact the long march of the roughly, you know, 80 to 90,000 people that participated in the long march. Only 10,000 ultimately survived. But those survivors then forged, I think, a sense of common purpose and organizational unity that really became the heart of the Communist Revolution for the next decade and a half. And many of the leaders of the long march, including Ma Zong, then became leaders in the post-war government of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The Hoover Library and Archives houses really an extraordinary set of 25 original blacking sketches that were done by one of the survivors of the long march. The artist Huang and the sketches depict really the life of the people who participated in the long march. Some of the sketches are really about ordinary life, an ordinary day. You know, one sketch for example, portrays a man just sitting against a wall smoking a pipe. Another one is of three pots and kettles, right? Just the ordinary implements that you use to cook food. But other sketches really give you a sense of the adversity that the participants in the long March faced. So one in particular is of the Red Army climbing up the Jain Mountain, where they were coming to a 14,000 foot high pass, right? That's as high as the Rocky Mountains. When the survivors of the long March talk about their experience, they will often refer to this particular period as the most difficult. It's a time when many of the participants died. They became very sick. Mao himself had recurrent bouts of malaria and had to be carried for part of the trek. Another sketch portrayed members of the Red Army carrying sacks of barley for two weeks at a time, some of which weighed as much as 15 pounds through the grasslands and these swampy marshes and the survivors told of how horses and mules would sometimes sink into these marshes and disappear after the Chinese Communist victory. In 1949, the artist Huang went on to have a, an incredible career as an ambassador to Hungary, to Indonesia, to France, and and ultimately ended up in the United States as the Chief Liaison Officer for China. In 1977, he returned to China where he then became the Minister of Culture. By the end of the long march, Mao had cemented himself as a hero of the long march, and as sort of the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party taken as a whole, these 25 sketches really give you a much more visceral sense of what it was like to be part of the long March than you would have if you were simply reading words in a book.