The Long March in China was a military defeat, but a political victory. This statement, with supporting evidence that will be presented in this essay, is correct. Confirmation of their military defeat is the continuos military disasters, lack of weapons and the large amount of Red Army Soldiers" that died. The reasons for this was political victory is because Mao Zedong became the Chinese Communist Party Leader, all peasants after the long march favoured Communism and the news of Communism was spread throughout China.
The Long March started after Chiang Kaishek launched his fifth and biggest "extermination" campaign to eliminate the Communists. This involved the Guomindang surrounding the Red Army and slowly closing in causing the communists to starve of food, ammunition, weapons and fuel, and gradually losing the area they controlled. This was the Red Armies first military disaster; they lost around 60,000 soldiers and a lot of the area. Even though they were successful in breaking through the lines of the Guomindang in the end, this was still a military disaster.
On October 16th 1934 some 87,000 soldiers of the red army went out on retreat, which was planned by the trio of Bo Gu, Zhou Enlai and Otto Braun. The idea was to withdraw to the communist base on the Hunan-Hubei border where the second army group was positioned. But this turned out to be nevertheless another military disaster waiting, the soldiers left lacking of an adequate amounts of equipment considering the fact they had 87,000 troops. Only supplied with 33,243 guns, 1,801,640 cartridges, 76,526 grenades, 38 mortars and 25,000 mortar shells. .
The crossing of the Xiang River took five days until it was feasible for them to cross. Han Suyin compiled the following from interviews with long march veterans, "from the rear, from both sides as well as from the air, in front of them, the enemy attacked, "we were so tired" . Here this shows the intensity of which this battle was, an additional man described, "many wounded lay there in heaps dying" because they did no have enough stretches.
