Enhua Zhang
Columbia University
April 3, 2003

The Long March across the Twentieth Century and Beyond

"Someday someone will write the full epic of this exciting expedition"-thus predicted Edgar Snow in the "Long March" chapter of his Red Star over China in 1938. The following half century has given birth to hundreds of representations of the Long March, but the "full epic" which Snow expected is yet to arrive. Ironically the "epic" is transformed into a virtuoso lyric at Mao's hands, which could both write verse as well as charismatically wave towards people to lead a crusade:

The Red Army, fears not the trials of the Long March,
Holding light ten thousand crags and torrents.
The Five Ridges wind like gentle ripples
And the majestic Wumeng roll by, globules of clay.
Warm the steep cliffs lapped by the waters of Golden Sand,
Cold the iron chains spanning the Tatu River.
Minshan's thousand li of snow joyously crossed,
The three Armies march on, each face glowing. 1

Besides the unborn epic and the mighty lyric, we have plentiful representations of the Long March. By representation, I mean the cultural productions in different types of media and genres referring to some specific event. In this way, I emphasize the referential nature of representational works. With the help of Snow's book, the Long March served as an entry point for the world outside China to come to know Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist revolution which he led. In China, the Long March became a foundational myth for the nation of modern China. At the turn of millennium, it has been revived once again by a cultural industry in a global context. Readers today could hardly link the Long March with a military fiasco, as was the case actually the case. In this paper, I will examine several clusters of representations of the Long March over the past decades so as to see how a national myth came into being, and how it gets represented through words, voices, and images in the field of cultural production.
The questions I raise are: how was the hardcore military as well as political disaster transformed into a glorious national myth? What kind of mechanism operates in this myth-making in a Communist nation? Why does it succeed in being a drive for the national subjectivity within and continue to be a focus, or even an intended spectacle outside? What is behind the (inter)national fever of the Long March in recent years? This study will respond to these questions from four aspects: the historical reality, the formation of a national myth, its verbal and visual representations, and the feverish cultural phenomenon of the Long March.

(1) In Search of a Promised Land
From 1932 to 1934, the KMT (the Nationalist Party) attacked and destroyed most of the revolutionary bases of the Red Army led by the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party). The CCP was forced to move out of the territory which they had previously occupied. They began a journey to find a new Promised Land. 86,000 Red Army troops started marching from Ruijin, in Jiangxi province, on October 10, 1934. They traveled through eleven provinces and reached northern Shaanxi, in October 1935 with only 6,000 people surviving the journey.2 In Yanan of northern Shaanxi, Mao and his comrades built up the embryonic form of the Peoples' Republic, with Yanan thus becoming the revolutionary Mecca of China.

(2) The Birth of a National Myth
Beating down his political rivals in the struggle for Communist power during the Long March, Mao Zedong made his way to the central leadership within the Chinese Communist Party. The Long March became the earliest if not the most important credit for Mao to legitimize his Chairmanship in his later revolutionary career, until after the foundation of the People's Republic. The primary strategy in this sort of legitimization is to record the event and makes it part of Chinese history. In 1936, Mao organized the Compilation Committee for the History of the Red Army. Many leftist writers joined the committee, including the female author Ding Ling. She was also involved in compiling Record of the Long March (Changzheng ji 1936), which was collectively credited to the First Front Army and arguably the first written record of the Long March. 3
No sooner had the Red Army reached Yanan, than Mao designated Xu Mengqiu, 4the director of Sectary Sect of the Political Bureau of the Red Army, to write a history for the Long March, which appeared as The Experiences of Marching towards West (Suijun xizheng de jingli) in 1938. The year also saw the birth of the Chinese rendition of Snow's Red Star under the title of Random Records of Journey to the West (Xixing manji). The latter in translation became quite popular, though the former was lost in obscurity in later years probably, because its primary contributor, Xu Mengqiu, converted to the Nationalist Party after 1945. 5Excerpts from Xu's book, however, were republished in some other forms intentionally discarding Xu's involvement after 1949.
The CCP propaganda machine has repeatedly used and even abused the Long March to legitimize its own existence, and have it be perceived as a historical necessity. Every decade since the 1930s witnessed at least one historiography of this event controlled directly by the Communist Party. Even during the Sino-Japanese war, in which the CCP and the KMT united together, the Communist never forgot the lesson learned with bloody price from the Long March. Very possibly outraged by the Wannan Incident,6 the Propaganda Department of the Political Bureau of the Eighth Route Army compiled the Twenty-Five Thousand Li to refresh the memory of the KMT ruthlessly killing the CCP only a few years ago. The seizure of the Mainland in 1949 facilitated the CCP to glorify the Long March. Memoirs of the Red Army generals, biographies of veterans, and diaries of soldiers sprouted from time to time. 7Since they appeared as hardcore private witnesses and hence were believed to be undoubtedly true to historic reality, these writings further testify to the trial which the Communists eschewed. The hidden ideology inheres in its relevance to contemporary life: it is because the Communist Party, the Chairman Mao had led Chinese people stepping out of the sea of bitterness that China could embrace the sweetness today. That is, to write and rewrite history so as to make sense of today. This cluster of historiographical works including the institutional documents and individual records constituted a grand vista of the Communist self-sacrifice for the sake of mass happiness.
The power of words took effect, and what had been a military fiasco was depicted as being a certain military miracle, albeit with an enormous cost of life. The Long March was later transformed into a Party myth and finally a national myth. It is a spectacle in both Chinese geography and historiography. Thousands of individuals marched over hundreds of mountains and rivers along a route never having been traversed. Jeopardized by their military rivals and natural catastrophes, they explored the pristine Chinese landscape for a land of milk and honey. Meanwhile, this spatial exploration also functioned as a process of organizing a discursive collective body into a solid and orderly community, which established a pedestal for the formation of a nation. It further shaped a national solidarity and constructed the national identity.

(3) Writing with Shackles
Compared with the extent to which other historically influential events in modern China get represented in literary imagination, the Long March was left furthest behind. There was not one single novel ever written on this subject, even in the most conducive years. With historical context changing radically, one cannot expect an epic novel about the Long March any more. The few fictional works which do exist are attributed to one or two military writers. The foremost of these authors is Wang Yuanjian (b 1929), who is fully worthy of the title of the Long March bugler. The other one, Jiang Qitao (b ?), is highly obscure even though he contributed an artistic lyrical novella.
Generations since the 1950s could not be unfamiliar with Wang Yuanjian. His series of works depicting the Long March and the Communist revolution in the former Soviet area brought him nation-wide popularity. Because of his strict adherence to the Communist agenda, he was among the only few writers who would survive in the political upheavals without his writing career being interrupted after the People's Republic, despite of the fact that most of his peer writers whose writings later became the so-called "red classic of the Public" were ultimately purged during one of the many campaigns which ensued.
Wang's Party Membership Dues (Dangfei 1954) 8brought him to the front stage overnight. It is a story about how the underground Communists struggle with the Nationalists to support the guerillas in the former Soviet area of Jiangxi after the main body of the Red Army strategically retreated to the west. Seven Matches (Qigen huochai 1958) is a representative piece among Wang's writings. It is even included in Chinese textbooks for elementary education.
With no more than 2,000 characters, Seven Matches briefly relates that at the verge of his death, a left-behind Red Army soldier in the wild grassland passed his last seven matches to another soldier, Lu Jinyong. On a rainy evening, Lu was hurrying to catch up with the main body of the Army. Suffering from the chilliness and extreme starvation, he found a pinch of barley powder at the bottom of his pocket. This amount of food could have sustained him one more day. "Comrade!--" He heard a weak voice calling him when he was ready to send the powder to his mouth. Another soldier was trapped in the marshland. Lu offered him the barley powder but he declined:
"No. It is of n…no use." (Wang 194)
The soldier squeezed his last piece of energy to bring out a certificate of Party membership, packing the seven matches inside. "The red heads of matches clustering, at the heart of crimson signet of Party, look like a bunch of flames" (194). When the anonymous soldier fell down and died, his hands "held up, as if a road sign, pointing in the direction in which the Army marched" (195). What happened after that could not be briefer. Predictable enough, as in most similar stories, Lu obtained energy from nowhere and caught up to the main body of the Army before it got dark.
This text is apparently coded from official discourses of the Long March into figurative language in the format of narrative. The symbols here are very straightforward and the whole narrative is oriented teleologically, so much so that it does not leave much space for further interpretation. It is hard to find excess beyond what the author intends. Whatever is considered "unnecessary" is replaced with rhetorical ellipsis. It serves as a melodramatic illustration to what is written by the Communists in history.
The mini-story was acclaimed as a masterpiece immediately after its publication. The leading critics at that time contributed their review with equal exaggeration over its achievement.9 The glory of its subject matter preempts all of its artistic flaws. 10The dryness and flatness in the character is understood as plain, clear, and natural which accords to the Communist aesthetics of the mighty Real. It seems unfair to demand a reflexive depth upon a History which has already been inscribed and sublimated onto a holy super-text. What could be done with it is at most, as Wang Yuanjian tries hard to accomplish, to add a footnote to the already-established historical discourse. However, an observant reader could not lose sight of the intriguing as well as successful points in Seven Matches. The hardship which the Red Army underwent is concretized in the vivid picture. The anonymity of the dead soldier is highly allegorical: how many anonymous sacrifices have been paid for an anticipated victory? We don't know.
The contrast between the named Lu Jinyong and the anonymous sacrificed soldier further indicates the paradox of history. After all, History is written by those who are alive even though the silent dead ones contribute more with their lives to this History. The anonymous soldier could have sneered at his namelessness while the presumably witness, Lu Jinyong, is inscribed in the paper. Back to the title of the story, "Seven Matches," that is what matters. As the heroine Lu Chunhua pays her Party fees posthumously in The Party Membership Dues, the anonymous soldier not only leaves behind certificate showing his loyalty to the Party and pays his life for the Party cause, but more importantly, he contributes some certain kind of commodity form which inheres use value-the seven matches--at the last straw of his breath. It is in accordance with the materialistic outlook of Communism.

It tookthree decades after the publication of Wang's works that we find another literary representation of the Long March-The Horse Hoofs (Mati sheng sui 1985?) 11by Jiang Qitao, also a writer affiliated to military institution. This novella focuses on the eve of the Red Army's entry into the grassland in west Sichuan with populated Tibetans for the third time. In order to keep crack troops, the Red Army headquarter decided to dismiss hundreds of wounded soldiers. Those repatriated would either die of lack of bare necessities or be killed by the Nationalist army following up, with little hope of survival. A seriously injured regimental commander, Chen Zikun killed himself when being informed that he was being discharged. In the meanwhile, the female squad of the transportation battalion was dispatched to send a wire to a troop station. No sooner than they accomplished the task, they found that this assignment was a contrived excuse to get them dismissed. These women soldiers were determined to catch up, but with only three out of eight surviving when being reunited with the main body of the Army.
Unlike Wang's Seven Matches, which promotes the self-sacrifice of the protagonist larger than human for a bright Party cause, Jiang's Horse Hoofs portrays humans in the most literal sense of the word, just for sheer survival. The toughest difficulty they faced was what to eat. The Deaf Sister in the squad had ever eaten the highland barley picked up from human excrement when she crossed the grassland for the second time. They tried every possible means to find anything edible. A dying horse was killed and its body was dismembered as food for the soldiers. The strong instinctual drive to live easily beat down one's esteem. Zhang Rongguang (nicknamed Big Foot Zhang) picked up the piece of hoof tendon vomited out by Shaozhi and swallowed it. The worse was yet to arrive. Tragic loss was cursed when they were driven by the instinct to eat. They found a body of a horse in the middle of rushing water. The prettiest girl in the group, Juanfen, a former actress in the propaganda troupe of the Army, was extremely delighted at the prey: "Wow, we couldn't finish this horse in one hundred years." She volunteered to drag it out of river but only ended up with being devoured by the torrents. Following her corpse was the horse's body.
It is a group of women marching ahead. They could forget about their gender but the biological features reminded them from time to time that they are women. They endured much more than their male counterparts especially when they underwent menstruation. The hardship that these women experienced during their periods was laid bare. Meanwhile, they ran out of food. The only thing with which they sustained themselves was whatever they got in the grassland. Very often they were poisoned, died or recovered. The grassland was peeling the last layer of their flesh and rotting their body into earth to nurture later generations. When Shaozhi's body was exposed to the sun: her vertebra, scapula, rib, and hipbone were covered with waxy skin. Her breasts caved in. Her lower belly was almost transparent, with dark green intestines being seen dimly (Jiang 61).
The Horse Hoofs is probably the only literary work depicting the Long March without apparent enculturation of the Communist discourse. It does not necessarily mean that it tells a story opposite to the Communist ideology. It is rich and problematic, not simply a dramatic compression of what the Long March is in the Communist propaganda. We hardly see anything sublime. If the sublime is understood as something more or less idealistic, something obtained at the price of repressing the most instinctual desire of human beings, what is delineated in The Horse Hoofs is anything but the sublime. Considering the gender of the author-man-and the penetration into the protagonist's most private part, one cannot help thinking the narrative is a bit aggressive. The lay-bare narrative strategy may well be interpreted as "brutal realism." The sympathy towards the characters could hardly be felt. It isalso hard to sense the identification of the narrator with the affect of the character. Nonetheless, the story is powerful. The power comes from the recognition of humans' primitive desire when nothing else but survival becomes a matter. If the sublime paves a way for catharsis, the down-to-earth struggle for survival cannot find any road to be redemptive.
The film version of The Horse Hoofs (1987) appears as a combination of an epic and a lyric under a talented director Liu Miaomiao's hand. The amazingly natural beauty presented in the movie reduces the brutality of natural monstrosity. To one's regret, neither the novella nor the film obtained its deserved attention. But when it came back under a new veil at the turn of century and the beginning of the new millennium, the Long March won overwhelming attention.

(4) The Long March Fever at the Turn of the Millennium
The big hit TV series The Long March (Changzheng, released in 1999) does not tell a story different from that of the official discourse, but it does expand into an area which had been a taboo in previous literary or cinematic representations, despite the fact that it recounts some of the same facts, though for different reasons. In the year 2002, however, the narrative of the Long March took yet another turn of fate when a curator, Lu Jie, launched the Long March Foundation in New York. He organized a series of events along the route of the Long March titled "The Long March: a Walking Visual Display," which includes exhibits of avant-garde painting, performance art, statues, and workshops, etc. Almost at the same time, another Chinese artist Zhang Qikai based in Berlin designed another art event called "The Long March: Across Europe," which sought to revive European memory of the Long March. Its subtitle, "Red Star over Europe," intentionally resonates with Snow's Red Star over China sixty-five years ago.12

The original idea of "The Long March: a Walking Visual Display" came into being when Lu Jie studied art exhibit designing in London in 1998 but put it into practice in collaboration with Qiu Zhijie four years later. Holding the double status of curator and artist, Lu and Qiu are concerned more with the status quo of contemporary arts than what the Long March really is and means. They keep reminding us that this exhibit is open to all kinds of artistic conceptions and forms, not confined to the subject matter-the Long March. "The Long is a metaphor." Hence it does not necessarily respond to the historical reality and can be understood from the perspective of culture and ethos. 13
70 odd artists from China and abroad participated this event. Their works were designed to be exhibited at 20 spots along the actual route of the Long March but it was declared over after they reached Dadu river, the 12th site in the original plan. Lu and Qiu did not bring forth a clear manifesto for their action at the outset. However, they belatedly justified the rationale of the linkage between contemporary arts and the Long March from time to time while the exhibits were going on and after. Upon the completion of the event ahead of time, the chief curator denied the assumption of political intrusion. He thought this exhibit had achieved the expected results. It was out of question to achieve the same good as already done or better if they continue. But it is deviating from the concept to make the exhibit open and uncertain. The organizers believed every step of the Long March is an adventure towards an unknown universe. If the Long March is predictable, it is not THE Long March. 14
The innovation of a walking display initiated a hot discussion about the format of art exhibits, the existent art exhibit system, as well as the relationship of arts to audiences. According to the curators, "the Long March" was an exhibit about an exhibit (meta-exhibit, my formulation), not a display juxtaposing objects of arts in a static space traditionally. The spatial exploration with artistic works is also an archeological adventure of local arts along the route so that some unknown artists were brought out of sea surface, such as Jiang Jiwei, Luo Xu, and so on. 15
Despite the organizers stressed that it is not necessarily related to the actual Long March, the most powerful and excellent pieces are, without exception, inspired by the Long March and relevant memories of socialist experience. The banner Xu Bing designed for this event echoes the Chinese Communist Party flag, with cartoon-like sketches of axe and sickle. In addition to that, a Walking Display creates different versions of mapping the Long March. The series of exhibits composes a picture of an artistic and cultural Long March. The map of the Long March tattooed on the back of the body. In the proposal, they designed a Long March route in the US. Under the guidance of satellite navigation, the German artist Engel Ghandi would follow the same line in the US with what the Walking Display in China covered so that he could map out a visually same route with his Chinese counterpart. The result of this proposal has not been informed and the substantial piece of this work is not yet available.

In Europe, Zhang Qikai staged a modern live performance of the Long March in June 2002. The participants wore the Red Army uniform, marching from Berlin to Kassel. They did some art exhibits on site along the route. Without systematic promotion in mass media in China, Red Star over Europe did not shine long. It created a transient spectacle on the continent of Europe and a few online postings. While "A Walking Display," with its website as a base and efficient operation in networking with both serious and popular journals in China and even in the west, won quite a lot of attention.
Facing the revival a national myth in a global context, one cannot help asking: why the Long March? An immediate response may well be: it is a selling and catching point. It is true but not enough. Lu Jie has ever been frustrated in the failure to seek sponsorship from foreign organizations to support this plan. Interestingly, later discussion deviates from the event per se but is oriented back to the old issue of the relationship between China and the west. Lu Jie expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that contemporary Chinese artists accepted without reservation the influence of western avant-garde arts, or Chinese artists are aimed at exporting themselves to the west. He asked: "Is it a syndrome more or less shared by the areas other than the centered (supposed the west-my note) in a post-colonial era?" He called for returning the vision to our own selves: "We expect to start from understanding ourselves, to cultivate an instructive attitude: it is important that we find something from our own history and experiences to contribute to the world." 16Here we see the walking display is not merely a symptom of anxiety over the crisis of contemporary Chinese art in a global context. It is also an effort to find a piece of Promised Land for Chinese arts as well as a collective identity of being Chinese. Where is it? It has to go back to where it is from. For modern China, more precisely, the socialist modern China, it is the Long March. But the title itself, a walking display, symbolically and symptomatically indicates the difficulty of this search for the origin or the aim. The incompletion of the whole plan, albeit actively, inauspiciously betokens the incapability to keep itself being authentic Chinese.

Rethinking its fate across the twentieth century and the twist at the dawn of a new millennium in China and outside, I myself was shocked to see the Long March beyond representations. By beyond representations, I mean two extremes of representation: deficit and surplus. The Long March is either under-presented as its absence or too little in Chinese literary history shows, or over-presented in the recent high fever which is in the name of the Long March and without necessarily signifying what the Long March embodies. As the organizers of "A Walking Display" claimed: The Long March is a super-text (my italics), which links the writings of art anthropology and sociology, connecting the rural and the urban, relating the reality and imagination.17

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1 Mao Tsetung Poems. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976.
Chinese text goes: 《长征 七律》红军不怕远征难，万水千山只等闲。五岭逶迤腾细浪，乌蒙磅砣走泥丸。金沙水拍云崖暖，大渡桥横铁锁寒。更喜岷山千里雪，三军过后尽开颜。
This poem is adapted into a song, still popular in China today. Quite a few lyric songs recounting the Long March are put together as a special collection "Songs of the Long March."
2 The figure of causalities should be much bigger than this since the Red Army kept recruiting new soldiers from local along the route and many of them died in battle or withdrew with little hope to survive. But these people are hardly counted in. See Salisbury, Harrison. Chapter 5. The Long March: the Untold Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
3 Snow referred to this book when he wrote the Red Star.
4 Mao first tried to get Lu Xun to do it, but he refused.
5 Xu paid a price for his betrayal of Communism-he died as a prisoner silently, if not mysteriously, after being captured by the Communist in Nanjing 1949.
6 In January 1941, the Nationalist Army induced and killed nine thousand people of Communist New Fourth Army, including high military officers such as central commander Ye Ting, and their familial affiliations.
7 To name only a few: Zhongguo gongnong hongjun diyi fangmianjun changzhengji. Beijing, 1958. Cheng Fangwu. Changzheng huiyilu. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1977. Xiao Feng. Changzheng riji. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1979. Tong Xiaopeng. Junzhong riji. Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1986.

8 This story became a blueprint for the film The Party's Daughter (Dang de nüer 1958).

9 For instance, Mao Dun, "On the Recent Short Stories." People's Literature (Renmin wenxue), No. 6,
1958. Hu Jingzhi, "Brief Analysis of Seven Matches." Reading and Appreciation, Vol. 2. Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1962.
10 A study of Wang Yuanjian in the early 1980s points out the flaw that protagonists in Wang's works have much more in common than being distinctive. Zhu Bing. "To Have a Bigger Vision, Step One More Flight Upwards-On Wang Yuanjian's Writing." (Yu qiong qian li mu, geng shang yiceng lou) Journal of Beijing Normal University, No. 1, 1982.
11 The title is a quote from Mao Zedong's verse In Memory of Qin'E-at the Pass of Loushan. The whole text is: 《忆秦娥 ·娄山关》西风烈，长风雁叫霜晨月。霜晨月，马蹄声碎，喇叭声咽。 雄关漫道真如铁，而今迈步从头越。从头越，苍山如海，残阳如血。

12 Refer to websites www.longmarchfoundation.org and http://arts.tom.com/Archive/1001/2002/8/23-81302.html respectively for further information about these two events.
13 "Archiving 'The Long March: A Walking Visual Display' and Related Artistic Innovations." Horizons. Vol. 8.
Unless noted, the references for "A Walking Display" are from the website: www.longmarchfoundation.org.
14 "'The Long March:' on the Passive 'Completion' and the Active 'Incompletion'." Archiving: Art Today. Vol. 11, 2002.
15 The art works displayed in this series of exhibit will be discussed in a full version of this paper.
16 Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie. "On 'The Long March: A Walking Visual Display'." Museum of Art. No. 3, 2002.
17 Ibid.