Quick questions on Mao and the Long March 1934 to 1935: HSC Modern History Personality

Chiang Kai-shek launched five encirclement campaigns against the Jiangxi Soviet between 1930 and 1934. The first four were defeated by Mao and Zhu De's mobile guerrilla tactics. The fifth campaign (1933 to 1934) used Hans von Seeckt's blockhouse strategy, building thousands of fortified posts that compressed the Soviet to starvation. The Comintern adviser Otto Braun (the German Manfred Stern, known in China as Li De) and the 28 Bolshevik Bo Gu insisted on positional defence.

On 16 October 1934 about 86,000 troops, with around 35 women including Mao's third wife He Zizhen, broke out from Ruijin to the west. Mao was politically marginalised at the moment of departure. The column carried printing presses, gold reserves, and the apparatus of a state.

The KMT had three blocking lines across Hunan. The crossing of the Xiang River at Daoxian and Quanzhou in late November and early December 1934 broke the Red Army. Estimates vary, but the force was reduced from about 86,000 to about 30,000. The disaster discredited Braun and Bo Gu.

At the captured Guizhou town of Zunyi the CCP Politburo held an enlarged conference. Mao, allied with Zhou Enlai, Wang Jiaxiang, and Zhang Wentian, accused Braun and Bo Gu of "left adventurism" and "purely defensive" doctrine. The conference removed Braun and Bo Gu from military command; Zhang Wentian replaced Bo Gu as General Secretary; Mao was elected to the Standing Committee and shortly after to a new three-man military command with Zhou Enlai and Wang Jiaxiang. Zunyi is conventionally dated as the moment Mao took command of the CCP, though formal supremacy was completed only at Yan'an.

From Zunyi, Mao led a series of feints and forced marches:

The Long March made Mao the leader of the survivors. The Comintern's influence, severed by the loss of radio contact for much of 1935, declined. Wang Ming, the Comintern's preferred CCP leader, was discredited. At Yan'an from 1936, Mao consolidated authority through the Rectification Campaign (1942 to 1944) and the Seventh Party Congress (1945) elected him Chairman of the Central Committee with Mao Zedong Thought enshrined as official doctrine.

Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937) gave the original Western narrative of the Long March, based on interviews at Bao'an in 1936. Snow's narrative is heroic and broadly accepted in outline.

Zunyi gave Mao a place on the military command and the Standing Committee; formal supremacy came at the Seventh Congress in 1945.

The 25,000 li figure refers to the longest column (the First Front Army) and includes loops and detours; some columns marched much less.

The conflict with Zhang at Maoergai in 1935 was as politically significant as Zunyi.