China attempts to revive the spirit of Mao's long march

Beijing Letter: A few months ago, I interviewed a middle-aged teacher in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong who had gone to work for a pittance in an isolated mountaintop village so that its children would not be deprived of a basic education.

When I asked him why he was willing to take on such a hard and unrewarding job, the teacher, with an old Communist idealism, told me that when he thought of the sufferings of those who made the Long March in the 1930s, his own sacrifices seemed small.

The march, in which Mao Zedong's Red Army abandoned its base in Jiangxi in the south in October 1934 and retreated over 9,500 kilometres to Yan'an in the north, still inspired him in a simple, unambiguous way.

But for Mao's successors this month's 70th anniversary of the completion of the march, though marked with lavish celebrations, is not quite so uncomplicated.

One of the things that is not easy to understand from the outside is why the Long March is so central to the mythology and iconography of the state, rather than, for example, the Red Army's brilliant victories over their Nationalist enemies in Manchuria that led to the foundation of the People's Republic.

In his keynote speech at the official celebrations in Beijing, president Hu Jintao referred to "the victory of the Long March", but it was an odd kind of victory.

Harried by a much larger Nationalist army, Mao's ragged forces trudged across brutal terrain of high, cold mountain passes and freezing, boggy grasslands. The vast majority died in skirmishes or of altitude sickness, starvation, exhaustion and disease.

Of the 86,000 who set out on the march, an estimated 10,000 - some estimates are as low as 5,000 - reached Yan'an.

Yet there are good reasons why the Long March plays such an enormous role in Chinese consciousness. Veterans of the march remained a powerful presence in Chinese politics even a decade ago.

Not until the death of Deng Xiao Ping and the retirement of Politburo member Liu Huaqing, both in 1997, were the last direct links broken.

If this seems peculiar, it is worth remembering that veterans of the 1916 Rising, the Irish equivalent of the Long March, dominated Irish politics well into the 1960s.

More importantly, perhaps, the choice of the Long March as the iconic event around which to forge an identity for the People's Republic showed a superb judgment of the popular mentality.

Most Chinese people could identify with the crucial aspects of the Long March - suffering, hunger, loss, endurance - far more easily than they could identify with glorious triumphs on the battlefield.

Just as Christianity made its impact by replacing the conventional image of a god - powerful, haughty, vengeful - with a tortured body on a cross, the Long March wrapped the realities of power in a shroud of suffering. The parallel is not as farfetched as it might seem: both images emphasised the same value: self-sacrifice.

But that is precisely what gives the anniversary celebrations their tinge of discomfort. Self-sacrifice is not exactly the term that pops into most people's minds when they think of today's officialdom, especially since the anniversary coincides with the unfolding of massive corruption scandals in Shanghai, Chenzhou and other cities. With an astonishing 17,505 officials convicted of corruption in the first eight months of this year alone, the heirs of the Long Marchers are clearly not going hungry.

It was striking that Hu Jintao, who displays a sharp awareness of the public mood, used his speech to emphasise the lessons of the Long March, not as previous leaders have done, for the workers and peasants, but for the Communist Party leaders themselves: "The 70th anniversary of Long March is intended to be a lesson for our government leaders and officials, to be filled with the Long March spirit of putting the entire nation before themselves."

The new materialism, he acknowledged, meant that it was "not easy for government officials to stick to that spirit in this affluent and pluralistic society. Temptations of various kinds threaten to erode the will of those in power."

These obvious anxieties might have been assuaged somewhat by a poll in China Youth Daily which found that 74 per cent of young people agree that "the Long March spirit" is a "valuable legacy" for contemporary China.

A closer look at the poll suggests, however, that what young Chinese people mean by "the Long March spirit" may not be precisely the principle of self-sacrifice for the common good that Hu Jintao has in mind.

Among the values they associated with the Long March were "being independent and relying on yourself" and "blazing a new trail boldly" - values that would seem to be at least as much in tune with the individualism of the global market economy as with any sense of a collective past.

Any epic story broad enough to retain an appeal in a diverse society may also be too broad to have a single meaning.