Eight Thousand Arrived: The Long March, Japan's Invasion, and the War of 1937

Part I: The Long March (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 445–446. Reading-guide sentence (p. 445): "In the fall of 1934, with the German-planned fifth 'extermination campaign' of the Nationalists encircling them with a million-man force, the Communist Party leadership, without consulting Mao, decided to give up the Jiangxi Soviet."

Why they left

The deck opens at the Yudu River in October 1934 (slide b) and then steps back to explain the decision. Ebrey's "German-planned" fifth campaign (slide c) needs the same caution as in Lecture 2: German advisers under Hans von Seeckt and Alexander von Falkenhausen helped, but William Wei shows that the blockhouse strategy grew out of Chinese commanders' own experience of the failed earlier campaigns, and that its success depended as much on economic blockade and local militia as on soldiers.¹ The deck stresses the Red Army's own choice to fight positional battles, culminating in the defeat at Guangchang in April 1934, because that is the hinge of the Zunyi argument later.

Slide d corrects a date. Ebrey says the Central Committee "joined Mao in the Jiangxi Soviet" in 1932; the leaders left Shanghai over the winter of 1932–1933 and Bo Gu reached Ruijin in January 1933, as Chinese party chronologies agree. Otto Braun's own memoir, written in East Germany decades later and self-serving, is still the best view of how the newcomers saw Mao: a rustic guerrilla with no grasp of modern war.² Instructors may want to warn students that "Mao was right and Braun was wrong" is itself part of the later party story; historians debate whether any strategy could have held the Soviet against the fifth campaign.

Who went and who stayed

Slide e uses Ebrey's figures (thirty-five women, fifteen thousand troops left behind) and adds He Zizhen's story. Helen Praeger Young's interviews with women veterans are the best source on the women of the march and will interest students; she found about thirty women in the First Front Army and many more in the Fourth Front Army that marched separately.³ The fate of those left behind, including Qu Qiubai, captured and executed in 1935, is a sobering counterweight to the heroic version.

Zunyi

Ebrey counts "seventeen veteran party leaders" at Zunyi (slide f); party records list about twenty, including Braun and his interpreter Wu Xiuquan, who attended without a vote, on 15–17 January 1935. The deck says "about twenty" and keeps Ebrey's number in the notes. Benjamin Yang's survey of the Chinese literature is the key correction to the myth of Zunyi as the moment Mao took over: Zunyi made him a member of the Standing Committee and gave him a voice in military decisions, but Zhang Wentian replaced Bo Gu as party head, and Mao won full military command only gradually over 1935, as his tactics kept the army alive.⁴

The march and its numbers

Slide g softens Ebrey's "almost 10,000 kilometers." The official figure is 25,000 li, about 12,500 kilometers; in 2002–2003 Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen walked the main route and measured about 6,000 kilometers. Their book is also the most readable modern account of the Luding bridge, where the evidence suggests a much smaller fight than the legendary charge across the chains.⁵ Harrison Salisbury's older account, based on interviews with survivors in the 1980s, is vivid and sympathetic, and closer to the party's version.⁶ Ebrey's eight thousand survivors of the main column (slide h) is a common estimate; the overall survival rate is what students should remember.

The founding myth

The concept slide (i) gives students a vocabulary for Ebrey's own phrase, "much mythologized." The point is not that the march did not happen, but that its meaning was made: by Mao's speech of December 1935 calling it "a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding-machine," by Edgar Snow's book (slide y), and by decades of paintings, songs and textbooks after 1949. The checkpoint (slide j) asks students to answer both halves of the question; the strongest answers will see that Mao's rise was gradual, and that others' failures did as much for him as his own skill.

Part II: Japan and the Second United Front (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 448–450. Reading-guide sentence (p. 450): "In 1936 troops that had been driven out of Manchuria by the Japanese were ordered by Chiang to blockade the Communists in Yan'an."

Manchuria

The recap (slide k) links back to Shimonoseki, the Russo-Japanese War and the Twenty-One Demands. For the Mukden Incident (slide l), Louise Young's study of "total empire" explains why Japanese at home cheered an army that had defied its own government: Manchuria had become, in the press and popular culture, Japan's "lifeline."⁷ Rana Mitter's book on the Manchurian resistance and collaboration is the best guide to Manchukuo (slide m) as more than a puppet show: its officials, many of them Chinese, worked hard to present it as a modern state.⁸ Slide m points students to The Last Emperor. The film follows Puyi's own heavily edited memoir and the official story of his "re-education"; it compresses his Manchukuo years and shows him as more passive and less willing than his own ambitions suggest, which is worth raising in discussion.

Unity before resistance

Slide n sets out Chiang's dilemma. Parks Coble's Facing Japan is the standard account of how the policy of "first internal pacification, then external resistance" cost him support among students, merchants and his own officers as Japan pressed into north China in 1933–1935.⁹ John Israel's older study of student nationalism remains the best on the December Ninth Movement of 1935.¹⁰ Instructors may wish to note that Chiang's reasoning was not foolish: his German-trained divisions were few, and he was buying time.

Xi'an

Slides o and p tell the kidnapping as a story. Ebrey places the blockaded Communists in Yan'an; in December 1936 their headquarters was still at Bao'an, and the deck places them "in the northwest." Jay Taylor's biography, based on Chiang's diaries, argues that Chiang was already negotiating with the Communists through 1936 and that Xi'an hastened a deal he was moving toward; Rana Mitter's Forgotten Ally stresses Stalin's role and Chiang's refusal to sign anything.¹¹ Zhang Xueliang's half century of house arrest, and his death in Hawaii in 2001 at the age of one hundred, usually makes an impression on students.

The concept slide (q) contrasts the two United Fronts. Lyman Van Slyke's chapter in the Cambridge History of China is the clearest account of how the Communists used the second to expand behind Japanese lines, and how the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 ended real cooperation.¹²

Part III: The War of 1937–1938

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 450. These slides finish Question 7 and begin Question 8, which the next lecture takes up.

The Marco Polo Bridge and Shanghai

Ebrey writes that "the Japanese staged another incident" in July 1937 (slide s). Most historians now distinguish the Marco Polo Bridge from Mukden: the first shots were probably not planned, and what turned a skirmish into war was the decision of both governments to escalate. The deck makes that distinction in the notes. For Shanghai (slide t), Peter Harmsen's military history is accessible and well documented; Ebrey's casualty figures are kept and attributed.¹³

Nanjing

Slide u carries no checkpoint, because no review question asks about it, and no photograph of violence; it shows instead members of the International Committee for the Safety Zone, among them John Rabe. A placeholder on the slide awaits the embed of the documentary The Rape of Nanking. The notes give Ebrey's range (40,000 to 300,000) and the main competing figures: the Tokyo tribunal's "over 200,000," the Chinese government's 300,000, and the denials of some Japanese writers. Joshua Fogel's edited volume and Takashi Yoshida's comparative study explain how the numbers became a contest of national memory in China, Japan and the United States, and are the best preparation for questions students may bring from Iris Chang's popular book.¹⁴

The Yellow River

Slide v softens Ebrey's "some three hundred thousand" drowned. Diana Lary's article and Micah Muscolino's environmental history, counting the famine and disease that followed, put the deaths at well over 400,000, perhaps 500,000 or more; a postwar Nationalist estimate was 893,000. The deck says "hundreds of thousands." The photograph is a Japanese press picture of soldiers "rescuing" flood victims, and the notes ask students to read it as propaganda.¹⁵

Pierian Spring: Bao'an and Yan'an

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 446–447.

Slide y corrects a small but telling slip: Edgar Snow "visited Yan'an in 1936" (p. 447). He spent July to October 1936 at Bao'an, the Red capital before Yan'an; his interviews with Mao were first published in the China Weekly Review in November 1936 and then in Red Star Over China (London, 1937). John Maxwell Hamilton's biography is good on how much the book depended on Snow's hosts, and on its enormous influence, including in Chinese translation.¹⁶ Slide z gives the exact dates of the Yan'an period (13 January 1937 to 18 March 1947) in place of Ebrey's "1936 to 1946." Mark Selden's The Yenan Way, revisited in 1995, is the classic account of Yan'an's reforms; the revised edition takes in the rectification campaign that Lecture 4 covers.¹⁷

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. William Wei, Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). ↩

2. Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–1939, trans. Jeanne Moore (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982). For Mao's own writings in these years, see Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vol. 4 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). ↩

3. Helen Praeger Young, Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). ↩

4. Benjamin Yang, "The Zunyi Conference as One Step in Mao's Rise to Power: A Survey of Historical Studies of the Chinese Communist Party," China Quarterly 106 (1986): 235–271. ↩

5. Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen, The Long March: The True Story Behind the Legendary Journey That Made Mao's China (London: Constable, 2006). ↩

6. Harrison E. Salisbury, The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). ↩

7. Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). ↩

8. Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↩

9. Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1991). ↩

10. John Israel, Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966). ↩

11. Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). ↩

12. Lyman Van Slyke, "The Chinese Communist Movement during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, ed. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 609–722. ↩

13. Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2013). ↩

14. Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). ↩

15. Diana Lary, "Drowned Earth: The Strategic Breaching of the Yellow River Dyke, 1938," War in History 8, no. 2 (2001): 191–207; Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ↩

16. Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937); John Maxwell Hamilton, Edgar Snow: A Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). ↩

17. Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen, The Long March (2006). Two walkers retrace the route and test the legend.

Helen Praeger Young, Choosing Revolution (2001). The women of the Long March in their own words.

Benjamin Yang, "The Zunyi Conference as One Step in Mao's Rise to Power" (1986). The correction to the Zunyi myth.

Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire (1998). Why Japanese at home embraced the conquest of Manchuria.

Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan (1991). Chiang's policy toward Japan and its political costs.

Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally (2013). The best one-volume history of China's war, from Xi'an to 1945.

Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (2000). How the massacre has been remembered and argued over.

Micah S. Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China (2015). The Yellow River flood and its long aftermath.