ABSTRACT
During the past two decades, historians have made significant progress in discovering the facts of the Long March. Some formerly taboo areas have been explored and scholarship has begun to treat the march more as a historical subject and less as a myth or miracle. However, numerous other books related to the Long March have produced a boom in the study of the subject and have even created new confusion about already unclear facts. Therefore, in this chapter I will investigate the Long March legacy and explore how and why the Long March has had such a long-lasting influence. Unlike conventional assessments that highlight its historical weightiness, the chapter will emphasize the nature of the march’s spatial exploration within Chinese geography and the lasting impact of that exploration upon China and the world. As with Odysseus and his journey, Mao would not have attained the status of hero if he had not gone through the trials of the march; nor would the Long March have become the foundational myth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) without its large-scale grandeur. The Long March is a spatially significant event to begin with. First, the people of the new Soviet Republic of China were displaced from the revolutionary bases they had set up a few years earlier.2 This drove the Soviet government into retreat. Second, this journey to the west forced the Chinese Communists to traverse some of the most daunting natural barriers. Their enormous physical sacrifice was later transformed into symbolic capital that circulated through historiography and was necessary to justify the CCP’s legitimacy. Third, the Long March was also a process in which social relations were transformed. The political struggle involved redefining the power hierarchy in terms of upward versus downward movement, top versus bottom, and central versus marginal, a redefinition that continued to exert influence long after the founding of the PRC. Long March veterans were to form the nucleus of the national leadership in the following decades. Fourth, internationally, the march enabled the Chinese Communists to gradually wean themselves from Soviet influence and start on their own way as Mao rose to the center of power during and after the march and the Chinese Bolsheviks’ authority receded. Fifth, the Long March became an indispensable site of collective social memory for Chinese people to revisit and remember their revolutionary past across space and time. This chapter consists of four parts. The first describes the actual journey of the Soviet Republic of China as represented by the Red Army’s geographical route from the southeast to the northwest.3 The second demonstrates the formation of the Long March as a national myth in discursive space, particularly through historical narration. The third part analyzes various cultural products in the representational space of the Long March. Centering on its virtual space, the fourth part explores how and why the Long March evolved into a site of Chinese collective memory and continues to haunt people in China and beyond.
