Q&A: How the Long March shapes the CPC and China's modernization today

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army's Long March.

From October 1934 to October 1936, the Red Army, the forerunner of today's People's Liberation Army (PLA), carried out the historic Long March – a massive strategic retreat and military maneuver undertaken amid intense fighting during the Chinese civil war.

How did the Long March shape the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the country's revolutionary history? And how can its experience and spirit help understand China's pursuit of modernization today? To explore the historical significance of this epic journey and its enduring influence, CGTN spoke with Josef Gregory Mahoney, a professor of politics and international relations and director of the Center for Ecological Civilization at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

CGTN: How did the Long March shape the CPC, and what aspects of that experience continue to influence the Party today? Josef Gregory Mahoney: The Long March did not only save the Party; it changed how the Party thinks.

In October 1934, the Central Red Army left Jiangxi following a template, a strategy directed from outside and fought by the book.

The battles at the Xiang River and the subsequent retreat took a devastating toll, reducing the Central Red Army's ranks from some 86,000 to about 30,000.

At Zunyi, in January 1935, the Party let hard experience correct doctrine.

Then came the Four Crossings of the Chishui, where Mao Zedong, judging the enemy by the actual situation rather than by military manuals, changed course, crossed back and evaded an encirclement by some 400,000 troops.

In my own work, I argue that this is where Chinese Marxism finds its character.

Marxism brought China a materialist science of history and a way to organize against exploitation.

China brought back to Marxism a habit of holding unity together with contradiction, and a practice that does not wait for a template before acting.

Mao wrote this into theory in 1937, in On Practice and On Contradiction , but the Party lived it first, on a river in Guizhou.

Three things endure.

The first is seeking truth from facts, the same instinct behind the reform-era image of crossing the river by feeling the stones.