The End of the Jiangxi Soviet and The Beginning of The Long March
While it was difficult to find sources pertaining solely to The Long March of 1934-1935, many sources are available that give information on the end of the Jiangxi Soviet and the beginning of The Long March. It is the intention of this essay to give the reader a better understanding of the sources and authors thoughts about the important issues concerning this historic time period. The sources cited in this essay were written during two different academic periods of spelling Chinese words; the period up to 1979 using the Wade-Giles spelling, and the period from 1979 to the present using the accepted Pin-Yin spelling. This essay will use the modern Pin-Yin spelling when possible.
The books researched for this essay are: The Long March to Power, by James Pinckney Harrison; The Long March, by Sun Shuyun; The Long March 1935, by Dick Wilson; and The Long March: The Untold Story, by Harrison E. Salisbury. The authors vary in both background and writing style while generally keeping with the same factual information.
All of the books exceed 300 pages, with the exception of The Long March by Sun Shuyun which is 267 pages, and contain much of the same historical data. They all give some account of the events that led to the Communist Party embarking on The Long March. The views of the authors, however, differ in many ways. All of the authors pay tribute to the epic journey taken by the Communist Party during The Long March and give considerable credit to the revolutionary drive of the men who made the heroic journey evident in Sun Shuyun's book when she says in the prologue, “Every nation has its founding myth. For Communist China, it is The Long March” (4).
Sun Shuyun was born in Chine in the 1960’s to a veteran father of the Peoples Liberation Army and the Korean War. She graduated from Beijing University and won a scholarship to attend graduate school at Oxford University where she graduated...