Non-Fiction Review: The Long March Remembered by Edward Stourton

 The Long March Remembered was very short and very basic introduction to Communist China's founding myth, the Long March. The information provided was good, but it almost felt like the author was constrained by a word count or something. He'd touch on something really interesting for a page, and then flit on to the next thing. Nonetheless, starting with a base knowledge of a) the Long March happened and b) it had something to do with the Communist Party and the Civil War, this book helped fill in the blanks. 

Nominally, The Long March Remembered looks at the differences between the official, founding myth of Communist China, the historical record (what little there is of it) and oral and physical sources. It throws up some interesting contradictions in the process, but they are only dealt with very superficially. 

Another focus of Stourton's is how the historical representation of the Long March has been constructed from the top down, with the focus on its significance for Mao Zedong, the Party and the brewing Civil War, rather than centralising the experience of the everyday men and women in the Red Army. 

He relates some personal stories that are heart-rending: the female soldiers who were left barren because of the toll the March took on their bodies, families who never found out the fate of their loved ones, marchers who were so hungry that they would search through faeces for pieces of undigested grain. However, once again, he doesn't really delve into these stories very deeply, almost as though they are incidental to his main point (although his main point is supposedly how the Average Joe is forgotten in The Long March mythology, so that's a bit of a problem). 

Supposedly, the reason so little personal history is included is due to a lack of sources, since the Marchers were mostly illiterate, and are now almost all deceased. But one of the most interesting parts of the whole book was Stourton's discussion with the child of two veterans of the March, who retells her parents' experiences. I would have liked to see more of this intergenerational reminescence and memory, especially to see how these families reconcile the 'official' version of the March with what they have heard from their parents or other family members. Or, if their parents didn't speak about it, as many people don't after such things, to what extent the spectre of the March was present in their upbringing anyway. 

Ultimately, I think The Long March Remembered was trying to do too many things in too little space. But, because it glancingly covers so many disparate aspects of the March and the Civil War, it is useful as a primer.