A Remembrance of China’s Long March . . . Then and Now

A hastily assembled pontoon bridge carried a battered Communist army across the river at Daoxian, in China’s Hunan Province, in the early stages of a headlong retreat from Nationalist attack that turned into the epic Long March of 1934 to 1936.

That bit of history was on the mind of British photographer Adam Woolfitt when he stood by the river bank last year as part of an international team producing a book marking the 50th anniversary of the 6,000-mile march, which took the Communist forces to a secure base and laid the foundation for modern-day China.

“He said to his guide, ‘I understand this is where the army crossed . . . on a pontoon bridge,’ ” Mary-Dawn Earley, project director for “China: The Long March,” said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “And his guide said, ‘Yes, would you like to see it?’ ”

Earley laughed as she visualized the scene: “Adam’s standing there at the river, looking out, and there’s no sign of a pontoon bridge.”

But the guide, pointing out some small boats that would serve as pontoons, suggested that they break for lunch. The bridge could be in place when they returned.

It was.

“Certainly,” Woolfitt recorded later in his diary, “this is the first time I have had a bridge built for me in an hour!”

The project in which Woolfitt took part--a joint venture between Hong Kong-based Intercontinental Publishing Corp. and the China National Publishing Industry Trading Corp.--produced a 320-page oversized volume, published in six languages, that provides a concise history of the Long March and a view of life today along its remote route.

At a Sept. 26 reception in Peking held to mark publication of the book, Chinese Vice Premier Li Peng, according to a report by the official New China News Agency, declared that “the album would surely produce a great impact in China and the world as a whole.”

The reception helped kick off a month of celebrations and rallies in China commemorating the October, 1936, gathering of all major Communist forces in the relative safety of northwest China.

The Long March “reaches far beyond time and national boundary,” Yang Shangkun, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and a Long March veteran, declared to 6,000 people at an Oct. 22 rally in the Great Hall of the People in Peking, according to the New China News Agency. “It is an unparalleled monument to the heroic possibilities of humankind.”

In providing the book’s historical narrative, British writer Anthony Lawrence focuses on the yearlong march begun by a group of 80,000 people, including Mao Tse-tung, that broke out of encirclement by the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek in October, 1934. Suffering heavy losses along the way, this First Front Army, as it was called, fought and marched from its original base in a mountainous area of southern China through 11 provinces to the remote northwest. The struggles of other Communist armies that set out from different bases and joined Mao’s forces in 1936 are covered more briefly.

Important Leader

Although Mao was an important leader, he was not part of the top command when the Long March began. He rose to preeminence during the epic journey, especially at a key meeting held in the town of Zunyi while the Communist forces were battling their way west across southern China.

Under Mao’s leadership, the First Front Army continued west, crossing a major tributary of the Yangtze River, then raced hundreds of miles north to the Dadu River. There, in the most celebrated incident of the march, Communist soldiers fought their way across the historic 230-year-old swinging bridge at Luding, made of 13 thick iron chains and wooden planks. The Nationalist defenders had stripped off the wooden planks for about 80 yards from the south bank, leaving only the iron chains swaying over the river, which Mao’s men crossed in the face of machine gun fire.

Once past the Dadu River, the marchers’ fiercest enemy was nature--the Great Snowy Mountains and then the marshy Great Grasslands. Of the 80,000 who set out with Mao, only a few thousand reached the journey’s end in northern Shaanxi Province, which then served as Communist headquarters for more than a decade.

Historic photographs, some never before published, and romanticized paintings of Long March scenes illustrate this portion of the book.

The section on today’s China, which comprises most of the volume, includes about 350 color prints, with captions, and brief descriptions by Lawrence of the different regions that the marchers passed through.

Five Citizens

The pictures were produced by a team of 20 photographers that included five Chinese citizens and 15 others from around the world, many with international reputations. Earley assigned each photographer, accompanied by a support team, to a different section of the Long March route for about 10 days of shooting in September, 1985.

Three months earlier, a reconnaissance team had traveled the entire route by “train, minibus, car, donkey, foot--everything,” Earley said. “We had to do that. It was very expensive to bring photographers from all over the world, and I couldn’t see doing that without being properly prepared.”

In association with the book project, an Australian film crew accompanied the survey team and some of the photographers, producing a 52-minute Long March documentary that may eventually air on public television in the United States.

Earley acknowledged that “you hear some real horror stories” about delays and other problems with joint ventures in China. But the Long March project, reflecting the Chinese determination to finish the book in time for 50th anniversary celebrations, generally moved forward smoothly, she said.

Joint Venture Contract

Corporate sponsors, which are listed in the back of the book, provided equipment and financial support that helped make the project possible.

In negotiating the joint venture contract, the Australian-owned publishing firm received a commitment that photographers could take pictures of anything along the route, as long as the people being photographed did not object, Earley said.

“One of the things that surprised the photographers more than anything else was the amount of freedom they had when they got to their areas,” she said. “It was something they all talked about.”

But the crowds drawn by the sight of foreign photographers in out-of-the-way places often made candid photography extremely difficult, she added.

New York-based French photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont recalled in a telephone interview how in the Shaanxi Province town of Wuqi, at the end of the Long March route, local authorities kept about 1,000 curious onlookers at bay while he worked to capture the antique flavor of a rural general store.

“It was a set-up picture,” Laffont said. “I could not do anything else.”

Laffont also commented that he grew tired of being taken to houses that Mao had lived in.

“Everywhere, each day, those people wanted me to see ‘the house of Mao,’ because Mao stayed in this area for 11 years,” Laffont said. “I photographed six or 10 of them. After a while, I was asking in a very cruel way, ‘How long did he stay there?’ I didn’t want to offend them, but I’d say ‘How long did he stay?’ and they’d say ‘Three months,’ and I’d say, ‘Sorry, I have no time.’ ”

Mary Ellen Mark, a New York-based American photographer, spent much of her time traveling on rough mountain roads in the southwestern province of Yunnan, passing several nights in the homes of village leaders.

“Some of the towns we stopped in I know had never seen a foreigner before,” Mark said. “That’s what made it so great.”

The book includes stark black-and-white pictures by Mark of a funeral procession along a country road. Mourners are shown prostrating themselves under the coffin in a mark of respect as pallbearers carry it to the burial ground.

Cooked for Mao

Italian photographer Enrico Ferorelli, who covered the Jiangxi Province base area where the Long March began, stopped one day for lunch near a house that Mao had lived in and discovered that the grandmother helping cook for him had prepared Mao’s meals many decades before.

“She did indeed cook for Mao when he was in that area,” Ferorelli said. “She brought him food often. They said he would work late, with his light on, while everybody else was asleep.”

Ferorelli said he found traveling on Chinese roads to be a “horrendous experience” because of heavy bicycle and cart traffic through which trucks and cars drive “like mad.” “Instead of stepping on the brakes, they blow the horn,” he said.

He also has strong memories of too much good food.

“Even on location, they had arranged for a farmer to have a meal for us, and the farmer prepared a banquet,” he said. “You could not turn it down. We had food coming out of our ears . . . It was one banquet after another.”

Photographers got dramatic aerial shots in several locations through use of a hot-air balloon, which drew huge crowds of gawkers wherever it landed.

Peasants in fields and villages “were just awe-struck by the sight of this balloon,” Earley said. “On one occasion they crowded in and trampled on the balloon.” Fortunately, it was not damaged, she said.

The first balloon flight ended in a rice field, making the unfortunate farmer “very upset,” Earley said.

Attitude Changed

But by the time the balloon-and-photography team spoke with him to apologize and pay for the damage, his attitude had changed.

“I think the local authorities had gotten to him and said, ‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ ” she said. “At the end he was saying ‘No, no--it was a great honor for you to wreck my paddy field.’ ”

When plans for the project were being made, it had looked like balloon flights might not be allowed, but permission came just in time, Earley said. Apparently Chinese authorities had not understood how well balloons can be controlled, and were afraid that balloon-riding foreign photographers would “go wafting all across southern China,” she said. “They were frightened it would go over militarily sensitive areas.”

The misunderstanding was typical of problems that “were very easily solved once the communication got through accurately,” she said.

“Any disappointments that we might have had in terms of the cooperation was caused never by sloth on their part, but because this was the first time they had done anything like this,” she added.

One recurring problem, she said, was that the Chinese side did not seem to understand the necessity of adhering to a time schedule in the book-production phase of the project. “They kept sending changes after deadlines were long past,” she said.

Close cooperation on things such as the writing of captions was necessary because “the potential for error was enormous,” she said. Guides and interpreters were not always local people, and neither side wanted to have any inaccurate information in the book, she said, even if “the rest of the world probably wouldn’t know any difference.”

Not every potential error was caught. One misleading caption that slipped by identifies an apprentice watchmaker behind a shop window “bright with scarlet propaganda.”

The red characters in the window, however, refer to clocks and the repairing of watches.

There also were difficulties with a large map showing the routes taken by the various Communist armies that marched and fought their way from south or central China to the northwest.

Major Point

While the text makes a major point about the horrors endured as Mao’s forces crossed the Great Snowy Mountains, the map appears to show only the crossing of those peaks by another Communist army, not by the forces Mao led.

“With hindsight, it (the map) is one of the things we should have discussed more fully at the beginning, and our Chinese partners could have put the map together more expertly than we did,” Earley said.

The Chinese were careful, however, to ensure that a small outline map of the whole country included small islands claimed by China east of Vietnam.

“We had prepared the overall map originally not showing the islands in the South China Sea,” Earley said. “And we were requested to include them, which we did.”

A high point in preparation of the book came when one of the Chinese photographers, Yang Shaoming--the son of Yang Shangkun, who helped lead the commemorative festivities in Peking--was with Earley in Hong Kong viewing historic photographs. One picture showed eight men posing for the camera.

“I pointed to Deng Xiaoping (China’s top leader) in the back row,” Earley recalled. “He . . . pointed to (a man) in the front row and said, ‘My father.’ That caused great excitement.”

The book, which sells for $45 and has been printed in English, Chinese, German, French, Italian and Japanese, will be sold throughout much of the world. The North American distributor is Cupress of Toronto.