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