ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a background to the Long March which, after all, represents the low water mark of the Soviet revolution's confrontation with the Nationalist government in one sense, and the high drama of it in another. The fermenting peasant movement in Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Hunan provinces, for example, supplied the expedition with an inexhaustible source of recruitment; and the uprising workers made the seizures of big cities such as Changsha, Wuhan, and Shanghai look more like political demonstrations than military engagements. The labor unions and peasant associations sponsored by the CCP, which at one time claimed to have several millions of members, were virtually extinguished in a few months. The assumption that the destruction of its collaboration with the Nationalist Party was for the Communist Party but a downward curve along a general line of growth would by no means excuse Chen Duxiu, the Party's General Secretary, from being a lost politician.
