# Long March (China) The **Long March** (October 1934 – October 1935) was the [[Chinese Communist Party]]'s year-long retreat from its Jiangxi soviet — encircled by [[Chiang Kai-shek]]'s fifth extermination campaign — some 6,000 miles across southern and western China to Yan'an in Shaanxi. Of roughly 86,000 who set out, fewer than 10,000 arrived. It was a military catastrophe that became the party's founding myth: at the Zunyi conference (January 1935) [[Mao Zedong]] took effective command, and the survivors — Mao, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Lin Biao, [[Deng Xiaoping]] — were the leadership of the People's Republic for the next half-century. Not to be confused with [[Long March Through the Institutions]], the Gramscian metaphor the right uses for cultural capture, which borrowed the name. > [!note] Stub > Created to resolve links from the [[Chinese Civil War]] and [[Deng Xiaoping]] pages. Expand: the five encirclement campaigns, Zunyi, the Luding Bridge legend and its critics, the march as propaganda (Edgar Snow's *Red Star Over China*, 1937). ## See Also - [[Chinese Civil War]] · [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Chiang Kai-shek]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Chinese History Hub]]