What was the Long March?
The Long March was a walk across China organized by Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse Tung (1893–1976) in 1934. (Communism is a system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single party holds power.) With the Nationalist (Chinese government) army in pursuit, 100,000 Communist men, women, and children marched 6,000 miles (9,654 kilometers), crossing eighteen mountain chains and twenty-four rivers. Most of the women and children died along the way. In 1935, 20,000 to 30,000 marchers finally reached Shaanxi (Shensi) Province in the north, where Communist forces, called the Red Army, established a stronghold. As one of the first members of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao had formulated his own philosophy, which was known as Maoism. He had adapted the theories of German socialist Karl Marx (1818–1883), called Marxism, to conditions in China. Marx advocated a revolution that…
