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Hello, in October 1934, around 80,000 soldiers of the Chinese Red Army broke out of a siege

in the southeast of the country hoping to find a place to regroup and rebuild.

This turned into the very long march to the west and then north for thousands of miles

across harsh and hostile territory, marshes and mountains pursued by forces of the ruling

coming tang for a year.

March the Dong was among the marches and emerged as the head of them.

And he ensured this long march would become a foundation story for communist China, some

of it true, some mid-propaganda.

When mid-discurs the long march are around the midter, Professor of the History and Politics

of modern China and fellow F.C.

College University of Oxford, Sorn Shuyan, Historian, writer and filmmaker and Julia Lovell,

Professor in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck University of London.

Ronda Mitter, how stable was China in the early 1930s?

In the early 1930s, China was just about stabilized but on the edge of breaking up.

It had been unified essentially in 1928 by the then leader of the Gwomin Deng or nationalist

party Chang Kai-shek with a new capital city set up at Nanjing.

But there were basically three things which threatened to undermine it.

...