More on long march

More on long march

I would like to add to the article in the March 16 edition of
The Jakarta Post, titled Ailing 'Little Mao' seeks paternity
truth after 68 years. Bill Smith wrote that Ed Jocelyn and Andy
McEwen are following the same 368-day, 9,000-kilometer route as
the 4,000 survivors of 80,000 communist troops who left Yudu in
the eastern JiangXi province in October 1934.

The total number of Central Communist Party (CCP) members and
followers mobilized to evacuate the JiangXi Soviet government on
Oct. 16, 1934 were generally accepted as about 100,000 and of
which only about 20,000 survived and arrived in Yenan on Oct. 20,
1935, in the epic 9,000-km long march in 368 days, or averaging
almost 25 km a day.

The long march crossed 12 provinces, 24 rivers and 18 mountain
ranges, with five perennially snowcapped, including the almost
impassable terrain in the mountains of GuiZhou, Yunnan, Tibet and
Sichuan, fighting beside one million KMT soldiers and also 10
enveloping warlords in 10 provinces, averaging a skirmish a day.

American journalist Edgar Snow, in the book Red Star over
China, commented that Hannibal's march over the Alps looked like
a holiday excursion beside it. Also Lin Yutang, possibly the best
Chinese essayist, who died in Taiwan in 1976 and who was very
critical of the CCP, if not anti-communist, wrote of this in his
book My country and my people, saying that the Long March was a
superhuman effort.

Indeed it was.

SIA KA-MOU, Jakarta