At Lazikou, I found a new way to understand China's Long March

BEIJING, Oct. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by chinadiplomacy.org.cn on the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army's Long March:

Ninety years after the victory of the Red Army's Long March, its lessons of conviction, adaptation and closeness to the people guide China's path and speak to the wider world.

Not long ago, with my son beside me, I stood in the gorge at Lazikou, in southern Gansu province, and looked straight up. The pass is a crack in the Min Mountains. It narrows to less than eight meters, and the rock walls rise roughly 100 meters. You cannot take in such a place without craning your neck until it hurts.

In September 1935, a column of exhausted young soldiers of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army found this gorge held by enemy troops in fortified positions. Frontal assaults failed. A Miao soldier, remembered only by a nickname, went up the cliff with a long pole and an iron hook, and ropes followed him, and the defenders found grenades falling from above into their blockhouses. I tried to imagine the climb and could not. What I could do, standing there with my son, was feel how young a revolution can be, and how steep its road can become.

Last week in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood before a gathering marking the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army's Long March. All present observed a moment of silence for the fallen heroes. Xi called the Long March an "earth-shattering revolutionary feat" and said that "only by remembering history can we create a brighter future."

His remarks did more than commemorate. He asked what had made the victory possible. He named the correct leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the establishment of Mao Zedong's core position, firm conviction, and the support of the people, who are, he said, the source of strength for the Party and the people's armed forces. He described the Long March spirit as a precious treasure, one that shows the power of loyalty, truth, justice and unity.

I want to dwell on what outsiders most often overlook: the insistence on applying the basic tenets of Marxism to China's specific realities.

The Long March was a military withdrawal that became a victory. It was also a school. The Party that set out in 1934 had been taught, at terrible cost, what it meant to follow a template written elsewhere, by advisers who did not know the rivers or the people. The turn at Zunyi, in January 1935, was a decision to see the ground on which the Party actually stood. Marxism became, on the road, a way of reading China rather than a script recited over its head. Crossing the Chishui River four times, doubling back, feinting, refusing the battle the enemy wanted: this was dialectics as practice. It is also, I would argue, why Marxism itself was strengthened in China, not merely applied there. A theory that must find its way through a gorge eight meters wide learns to ask the facts first.

Hadapu offers a quiet coda to Lazikou. As my son and I came into the village, after the mountain road, I thought of Lu You's couplet: mountains upon mountains, rivers upon rivers, and you doubt there is a road; then the willows deepen, the flowers brighten, and a village appears. For the CPC and the Red Army, the village was Hadapu. A few days after the pass fell, they found local newspapers that told them of a Communist base in northern Shaanxi. The road suddenly had a destination. It is a small, almost bookish moment in a story of cliffs and rivers. The Red Army that scaled that rock face also read, and thought, and decided.

Xi made the same point at the 80th anniversary, in 2016, when he said that every generation has its own Long March. No inherited glory can be spent twice. The young soldiers of the Red Army at Lazikou did not know how their story would end. They knew only that the road in front of them was shut, and that someone had to find a way up the rock. Each generation must find its own way up its own cliff, with the facts as its guide and the people as its source of strength.

That, in the end, is how I understand Xi's remark that the road of the Long March continues to extend. He tied it to the new journey: the Second Centenary Goal of building a great modern socialist country in all respects and advancing national rejuvenation on all fronts along a Chinese path to modernization. The Chinese text calls it a long expedition full of glory and dreams.

Confucius said that one who revisits the old comes to know the new. The Long March is where the revolution does exactly this, because it holds all three tenses at once. In it we find the past: the sacrifice, and the lesson learned at Zunyi. We find the present, in which each generation must decide again what to carry forward. And we find the future, already marching toward the Second Centenary Goal. The principle that joins them has become central in the Party's language: to hold to what is right and break new ground. Holding to what is right keeps faith with the past. Breaking new ground is a promise to the future. The present is the climb.

The phrase deserves the attention of foreign readers as more than a domestic slogan. The cliffs ahead are not China's alone. The sea is rising on every coast. Rivers are failing, forests are burning, and the countries least responsible for our carbon are the first to drown. The Long March teaches a lesson that reaches beyond China: a movement under overwhelming pressure can survive and win by refusing to copy another's plan, by seeking truth from facts, by staying close to the people and by holding fast to its conviction while it adapts its method.

The marchers wanted others to follow, and others did, by the millions. Xi asks the same today, and he asks for something more: that others understand why this path was taken. That request is an invitation to examine the reasoning, not to copy a template. In ecological civilization, in development that does not hand the bill to the poor and in security that is common rather than zero-sum, China is walking a road and inviting others to consider it on their own terms.

Lu Xun, writing long before the march began, said that hope is like a road across the earth: where there was no road, many feet made one. The Red Army walked that thought into history. Ninety years later, a country of some 1.4 billion people is still marching, and the question for the rest of us is whether we will march beside China, watch from the roadside or stand at the foot of the cliff and decline to look up.

Josef Gregory Mahoney is a professor of politics and international relations and director of the Center for Ecological Civilization at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and a senior research fellow with the Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics at Southeast University in Nanjing.

At Lazikou, I found a new way to understand China's Long March https://en.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/2026-10/27/content_118751138.shtml 

SOURCE chinadiplomacy.org.cn