🇨🇳 | The last believed survivor of the “Long March” during the Chinese Civil War celebrated her 105th birthday.
Her name is Wang Quanying, she joined the Red Army as a medic when she was only 14 years old.
Born into a Tibetan family in 1921, Sichuan province, she lost both parents by age one. From age five, she was forced into harsh labor.
When the Red Army entered her hometown, Wang was attracted by their policy of protecting the poor and joined the Women’s Independent Regiment.
The one-year-long march starting in 1934 under the leadership of Mao Zedong is viewed as one of the most daring military manoeuvres in modern history.
The Chinese Communist Party defied all odds, including total defeat, by what is often described as sheer revolutionary willpower.
Starting with about 100,000 people, only around 8,000 survivors eventually made it to their destination in Yan’an.
>During battles with the Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Quanying was cut off from her unit and went into hiding in 1936. Authorities verified her as a veteran in 1984.
Established in 1921 in Shanghai with about 50 people.
Nearly wiped out by Chiang Kai-Shek’s death squads in the cities.
Only the handful of rural circles survive (Mao was advocating for deeper organizing among the peasants even before he had any prominence). They proceed to establish “revolutionary base camps” all over Southern rural China.
Chiang Kai-Shek organizes 5 “extermination campaigns” between 1930 and 1934 to destroy them, ranging from 100 000 to 500 000 troops. The fifth and largest one is what prompts the Long March.
All the while, in the North-West there’s a whole parallel development of their own Base Areas and Red Armies under the CPC banner.
After a year of the Long March, with most of their forces perished, to core leadership of the CPC arrives at Yan’an and links forces with the North-Western communists.
Whole bunch more of history happens and then the Communists establish the People’s Republic of China.
The pivotal moment was the Zunyi Conference when Mao’s faction threw out the then faction in charge who thought that urban workers should be the focus of organizing efforts and who thought Mao’s peasant talk was just him trying to be the next Liu Bang/Zhu Yuanzhang. Their failures, culminating in the necessity of the Long March that almost destroyed the CPC, all stem from their inability to adapt Marxism to the conditions of China. That and thinking some random German dude would somehow help.