The Long March at 90: A Chinese epic that speaks to all humanity

A towering sculpture of a bugler stands outside the Red Army's western expedition memorial hall in Tongxin County, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Head tilted skyward, horn raised, he stands ready to sound the call.

The monument is modeled on the cover of Red Star Over China, American journalist Edgar Snow's landmark book – the first to bring the full story of the Long March to a global audience.

As Snow wrote, many of the soldiers he photographed during his 1936 field visit – like this bugler – endured the rigors of that trek. These young fighters, he said, embodied the living spirit of Red China.

A strategic retreat from 1934 to 1936, the Long March was far more than a narrow escape from desperate odds. It paved the way for the Communist Party of China's (CPC) victory over the Kuomintang (KMT) and the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

Strikingly, it was also a movement with global resonance, drawing foreign revolutionaries, observers and sympathizers like Snow, from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and beyond.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Red Army's victory in the Long March. Nine decades on, it has transcended national borders to stand as a monument to human resilience and moral fortitude.

'An odyssey unequalled'

In the 1930s, China was engulfed in its war of resistance against Japanese aggression. As cooperation between the KMT and the CPC collapsed, the KMT unleashed a bloody purge targeting the CPC, forcing the Red Army onto the Long March.

Despite encirclement and an information blackout, countless farmers, workers, students and soldiers still risked death to enlist in the Red Army. What carried them through blockades, salt shortages and epidemics? 

For Snow, then a journalism lecturer at Yenching University, these questions were a mystery. He concluded the only way to understand Red China was to go there himself. According to Sun Hua, director of the China Center for Edgar Snow Studies at Peking University, Snow reached Yuwangpu, present-day Yuwang Town in Tongxin,  in August 1936 and stayed nearly a month, one of his longest stops while traveling across the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region.

There, Snow interviewed commanders, rank-and-file soldiers and local villagers. His writings depicted the Red Army as a disciplined fighting force. "What discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed," he wrote. "When we passed private orchards, nobody touched the fruit in them, and the grain and vegetables we consumed in the villages were paid for in full."

Snow described a route that crossed some of the planet's harshest terrain, footpaths no wheel could follow, over Asia's snow-capped mountains and across great rivers.

Many dropped out, yet thousands more – farmers, apprentices, the enslaved, Kuomintang deserters, workers, the dispossessed – joined to fill the thinning ranks.

To Snow, it ranked among the great exploits of military history. "Adventure, exploration, discovery, human courage and cowardice, ecstasy and triumph, suffering, sacrifice, and loyalty, and then through it all, like a flame, an undimmed ardor and undying hope and amazing revolutionary optimism of those thousands of youths – all this and more seemed embodied in the history of an odyssey unequalled in modern times," he wrote.

'A universal story'

In Diebu County, northwest China's Gansu Province, towering, sheer cliffs flank Lazikou Pass, leaving only a narrow gorge through the rugged mountains. In 1935, the Red Army took this perilous natural barrier, breaking open a vital northward passage and keeping the Long March alive.

The heroism of the Battle of Lazikou has long been documented in classic works on the Long March. Rafael Zerbetto, a foreign expert at the Asia-Pacific Communication Center of the China International Communications Group, first learned of the battle from Edgar Snow and the American journalist Harrison Salisbury. In The Long March: The Untold Story, Salisbury hailed the trek as "a great human epic."

To mark the 90th anniversary of the Long March victory, Zerbetto joined a delegation retracing the historic route. Standing at Lazikou Pass, he said: "It was only when I actually stood at Lazikou that I truly grasped how extraordinarily difficult it was for the Red Army to scale those steep cliffs, cross the raging gorge, and breach this natural barrier relying on merely one narrow wooden bridge."

Zhavier Harris, marketing and communications manager at the Springfield Urban League in the US, also retraced the route – a 40-plus-day expedition that launched on June 15. He first visited China a decade ago for the 80th anniversary, and has long been moved by the spirit of the legendary trek.

"The Long March is a universal story of perseverance," Harris said. "My ancestors fought for freedom, just as the Red Army strove for a better future. Our struggles take different forms, but our core human pursuits remain exactly the same."

In a written account, Harris noted that the spirit of the Long March transcends national history. "It is not just a chapter of Chinese history," he wrote. "It serves as a reminder to all of humanity that perseverance, unity, compassion and hope hold the power to reshape nations and change the course of the future."

That cross-border resonance is widely recognized in global academia. According to Sun, the Long March has become essential course content in East Asian studies programs at universities across Europe and North America.

What resonates with young people, he said, may not be the ideology but the human spirit it embodies: the refusal to surrender in desperate circumstances and the resolve to hold fast to faith amid hardship.