Long March legends seen in harsher light

To some, survivors getting short shrift

Tu Tongjin, 94, was a medic during the Long March. He takes comfort recalling the camaraderie brought by hardship. (Doug Kanter/Los Angeles Times)

BEIJING - In his dreams, Tu Tongjin is back on the battlefield, a terror-stricken young medic wandering the Chinese countryside with Mao Zedong and his fledgling Red Army.

He is marching again, always marching. All around him are the bodies, including those of the 40,000 killed in one battle alone. He's starving, eating only grass. He feels the nagging cold and desperation of being hounded by death and pursued by a relentless enemy army.

"What I remember most," the 94-year-old says, "is the chaos."

Tu is a survivor of the Long March, the trek by Red Army soldiers who fled southern China in the face of certain defeat at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang forces.

Between 1934 and 1936, more than 300,000 men and women - divided into several armies - trudged inland through frigid mountain passes, freezing rivers, and watery marshes in search of a sanctuary to continue their nascent Communist revolution. Only one in 10 survived. Now, seven decades later, fewer than 500 are still alive.

For generations, their sacrifices have been considered legend, a Chinese version of America's Valley Forge, where grit and dedication drove a young revolutionary army to overcome unthinkable odds and help give birth to a nation.

An integral chapter of Mao's legacy, the plot line rarely has been questioned by older Chinese. Today, however, younger Chinese increasingly view march veterans as willing puppets of the Communist propaganda machine.

"I know people like my father have been used to further the government agenda," said Tu's 50-year-old son, Mike Tu, who lives in Ohio. "It hurts. I think it diminishes the great sacrifices these people made."

Several controversial new histories also have cast light on the watershed event, many of them critical of Mao. Historians now put the distance of the march at 6,000 miles, not the 8,000 Mao had long boasted. Some question whether it lasted into 1936 as legend goes.

New research also shows that desertion among Red Army troops was common and that peasants often didn't want to join. The army traded opium for supplies, and women were forced to leave their newborns with peasant families because a crying infant could endanger troops.

Struggles within parties and betrayal brought repeated rounds of purges. And several of Mao's critical blunders led to the bloody sacrifice of soldiers in hopeless battles.

"Still, Mao was a genius. He saw the propaganda value of the Long March - for the party and his own legacy," said Edmund Jocelyn, coauthor of the 2006 book "The Long March."

"But there's a huge amount of new research, some by the Chinese themselves, that helps separate fact from myth. . . . People are pushing for a more objective history."

For many older Chinese, however, the new insights strike at the heart of the national character. They are reluctant to view Mao, revered as the Great Helmsman, as merely human. He Li is one of them. Her mother, now 89, was a Red Army nurse during the march. No new revelation, He says, could diminish her mother's sacrifices or the ideals for which she fought.

Said Jocelyn: "Marchers recall the Red Army as like joining a new family. They fell in love with the Communist Party. That love carried them through the abusive relationship that was to come, even today."