ABSTRACT
After the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the Northeast Army under the command of the young marshal Zhang Xueliang was still 200,000 men strong when it was dispatched to Shaanxi to fight the Red Army, which had just completed its seven-thousand-mile Long March in October 1935. Despite its initial victory over the Northeast Army, the Red Army and the newly established Soviet base remained far from secure, because Chiang Kaishek was determined to eradicate the Red Army before taking up the struggle with Japan in pursuance of his policy of domestic pacification before external resistance (annei rangwai).
