History Archives - Friends of Socialist China

From organising in the US to teaching in China: the Long March spirit lives on

In the following article, which was originally published by China Today, Mark Levine, a veteran US socialist living and working in China, reflects on the enduring legacy and relevance of the Long March spirit, both in China and universally.

He recalls that: “I first heard of the Long March in the 1960s, as a college student in the United States… By 1976, I had earned my Ph.D. in sociology. Yet instead of pursuing an academic career, I spent the next three decades as a full-time volunteer labour organiser in impoverished American communities. It was during that period that I read Snow’s vivid account of the Long March [‘Red Star over China’ by Edgar Snow], which left a lasting impression on me… Today, after more than two decades living in China, observing the country’s dramatic transformations, speaking with people from remote villages to modern cities, and visiting revolutionary sites such as Zunyi in Guizhou Province and Xibaipo in Hebei Province, I have developed a far richer and more personal understanding of that Long March spirit.”

Mark recalls: “The original Long March (1934-1936), undertaken by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), was a journey of survival and hope. Facing harsh natural environments, rugged terrain, and constant military suppression, China’s revolutionary leaders chose faith over despair, unity over division, and the common good over personal gain. As Chairman Mao Zedong wrote in his 1938 treatise On Protracted War, victory would not come quickly, but it would surely come.”

He invokes the contemporary Long March spirit by detailing how villages, “once isolated by treacherous terrain and entrenched poverty are being rejuvenated, not by dramatic interventions, but by the persistent, grinding work of local people. Village teachers crossing rivers to reach a handful of students. Engineers building roads through mountains one metre at a time. Healthcare workers carrying medicine to communities that have never seen a doctor. There are no grand battles or dramatic heroics here, but there is the same perseverance and selflessness that carried the Red Army across China 90 years ago.

“I have also seen this spirit in China’s response to difficult times: the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the devastating winter storms of that same year, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I wrote songs about each of these events because I was watching a society respond to catastrophes not with panic, but with coordinated resolve.”

This spirit has relevance, too, to China’s ethnic policies: “For nearly two decades, I have taught at Minzu [Nationalities] University of China in Beijing, an institution dedicated to ethnic unity and educational equity. My students mainly come from the high plateau, deep mountains, and borderlands of western and southwestern China. Many are from ethnic minority communities in regions that were, not long ago, as isolated and underdeveloped as the terrain the Long March once crossed… They study not merely to escape their circumstances, but to return home as teachers, doctors, engineers, and cultural stewards. They talk about revitalising their villages, preserving their languages, and building bridges between their traditions and the modern world…

“My own work has been shaped by this same ethos. As a songwriter, author, and chief expert of the ‘Telling China Stories’ Workshop, I have worked to break Western stereotypes that often reduce China’s development to superficial headlines and biased political narratives.”

The Long March spirit, Mark concludes, “is not China’s alone. It belongs to anyone who has ever faced an impossible journey and kept moving forward.”

Webinar: Mao Zedong 50 years on – the revolution that continues to change the world (6 September)

📆 Sunday 6 September 2026, 3pm Britain, 10am US Eastern, 10pm China

Fifty years after his death, Mao Zedong’s portrait still looks out over Tiananmen Square, his face is on every Chinese banknote, and Mao Zedong Thought remains written into both the country’s constitution as well as that of the world’s largest communist party. Ordinary Chinese people travel in their millions every year to Shaoshan, the village in Hunan where he was born.

This webinar asks why Mao is still revered in China, and what were the achievements of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC) under his leadership.

In 1949 China was among the poorest countries on earth: life expectancy of around 35 years, adult literacy below 20 percent, a population stagnant at four to five hundred million for a century, and a hundred years of treaty ports, extraterritoriality and foreign concessions. By 1976 life expectancy had reached around 67 – a gain of more than three decades in less than three decades, the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Illiteracy had fallen to a third. Land was redistributed, famine ended, women emancipated, the country unified, and a complete industrial base built from a near-zero baseline.

That is the China the reform era inherited – not the backwater of Western myth. As Samir Amin put it, the take-off after 1978 “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period”. It is also how the CPC understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s formulation that the post-1978 reform era cannot be used to invalidate the Mao era, nor can the Mao era be used to invalidate the reform era.

Mao’s China changed the world beyond its borders too – inspiring millions and standing with Vietnam, with Korea, with the liberation movements of Africa and with Palestine.

Join us to discuss what Mao achieved, how China’s present successes rest on those foundations, why he is still revered in China, and how the socialist project has held its course after his death, through half a century of twists and turns.

This webinar is organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group.

Confirmed speakers

Senator Mushahid Hussain (Chairman, Pakistan-China Institute)
Ken Hammond (Professor of History, New Mexico State University)
Keith Bennett (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)
Jenny Clegg (Author and peace campaigner)
Tings Chak (Asia coordinator, Tricontinental Institute)
Ding Xiaoqin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Moderator: Radhika Desai (Convenor, International Manifesto Group)

Xi Jinping’s speech at the gathering commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Comrade Jiang Zemin

On the morning of August 17, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the State Council, the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission held a grand gathering at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Marxist, proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat, and outstanding leader of the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, Comrade Jiang Zemin. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the country, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, attended the conference and delivered an important speech.

The following is the full text of the speech. It was published in Chinese by the Xinhua News Agency and has been machine translated and then sub-edited by us.

Comrades and friends,

Today, we gather solemnly to commemorate the centenary of Comrade Jiang Zemin’s birth, deeply commemorate his great achievements, deeply study his noble character, and inspire the entire Party and people of all ethnic groups across the country to continuously advance the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Comrade Jiang Zemin is an outstanding leader recognised by the entire Party, the military, and people of all ethnic groups nationwide, enjoying high prestige and outstanding leadership, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat, a long-tested communist fighter, an outstanding leader in the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the core of the Party’s third generation central leadership collective, and the main founder of the important thinking of the ‘Three Represents’.

A hundred years ago today, Comrade Jiang Zemin was born into a patriotic intellectual family in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. From his youth, he was determined to pursue truth and actively participated in patriotic and progressive student movements. In April 1946, he joined the Communist Party of China, dedicating his life to the cause of the Party and the people.

After the founding of New China, Comrade Jiang Zemin worked successively in enterprises, research institutes, and national ministries, fulfilling his duties and working diligently in every position, dedicating his passionate years to the cause of socialist revolution and construction. In the early days of reform and opening up, Comrade Jiang Zemin served as Deputy Director and Secretary-General of the State Administration of Import and Export and the State Foreign Investment Administration Commission, and later as First Vice Minister and Minister of the Ministry of Electronics Industry, making extensive pioneering work in reform and opening up. At the 12th National Congress of the Communist Party, he was elected as a member of the Central Committee.

In 1985, Comrade Jiang Zemin was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Mayor. In 1987, at the First Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee, he was elected as a member of the Central Political Bureau and served as Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee. During this period, Comrade Jiang Zemin led the broad masses of cadres and people in Shanghai to boost morale and courageously explore, led the formulation of Shanghai’s economic development and urban construction plans, promoted Pudong’s development and opening up, and made outstanding contributions to advancing Shanghai’s reform, opening up, and socialist modernisation. At the turn of spring and summer in 1989, China experienced serious political turmoil. Comrade Jiang Zemin resolutely supported and implemented the correct decisions of the Party Central Committee, effectively maintaining stability in Shanghai.

In June 1989, at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee, Jiang Zemin was elected as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and General Secretary of the Central Committee. In November of the same year, the Fifth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee decided to make him Chairman of the Central Military Commission, forming the third generation of the Party’s central leadership with Jiang Zemin at its core.

Holding the line: Jiang Zemin at 100

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003 – the leader of the People’s Republic whom much of the Western left finds it easiest to write off as a “capitalist roader”.

The following article argues that the charge rests on a false premise: that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some purer or more advanced form of socialism. It was not. Jiang took office six months before the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe fell, and two years before the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the working assumption in most Western capitals was that China would be next.

The article weighs the real costs of the period – a Gini coefficient rising from around 0.32 to over 0.42, state enterprise employment falling from 77 million to 42 million, corruption and ideological decay – against what was achieved, and against what happened in Russia over the same decade, where economic output halved and male life expectancy collapsed to around 57. It also examines the admission of private entrepreneurs to the Party, the Theory of the Three Represents, and Jiang’s record of solidarity with Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam and Laos.

The following original article is by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez. It has been translated into Dutch by our friends at China Square.

Monday 17 August marks the centenary of the birth of Jiang Zemin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989 to 2002 and President of the country from 1993 to 2003. Of all the leaders of the People’s Republic, he is perhaps the one that many on the Western left find it easiest, at least according to their own paradigm, to dismiss as a “capitalist roader” and revisionist.

Such labels are applied because Jiang presided over a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth and integration into the global economy; the dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” of job security for life, steady income and public benefits; and because he allowed suitably qualified private entrepreneurs to join the Communist Party.

But the charge as usually made rests on the assumption that the realistic alternative available to China between 1989 and 2003 was some kind of pure or more advanced socialism. It was not. The alternatives on offer at that moment in history were rather more brutal, as we discuss below.

A revolutionary life

Jiang was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1926, into a country under warlord rule and, before he reached his teens, under Japanese occupation of much of China. His uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, died fighting Japan in 1939. Jiang took part in the anti-Japanese student movement, and joined the CPC in 1946 while studying electrical engineering – three years before liberation, at a time when Party membership under Kuomintang rule was an extremely risky business; in many instances a death sentence.

He then spent three decades as an industrial cadre rather than a politician. He organised the production of canned food for the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea. He trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in 1955, and also worked as an engineer in Romania for several years in the 1970s. He oversaw the design of China’s first domestically produced turbo-generator. He was Minister of the Electronics Industry, then mayor and Party secretary of Shanghai. He came to the leadership as an engineer who had spent his working life building things and making them work.

The Cypriot struggle and the Long March spirit

With the impending 90th anniversary of the victorious conclusion of the Long March undertaken by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the magazine China Today has been publishing a series of articles by international friends.

In the following article, Nikos Ioannou, a member of the Central Committee of the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL) of Cyprus, writes that:

“For a Cypriot communist, and a member of the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL), the Long March (1934-1936), a strategic military relocation undertaken by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, speaks not only of military endurance or strategic relocation. It speaks of the capacity of a people’s movement to survive under conditions of extreme danger, to reorganise its forces, to keep faith with its ideals, and to transform hardship into a source of moral and political strength.”

He adds: “This is why the Long March can be understood as a universal revolutionary metaphor. It represents the refusal to surrender when the balance of forces appears overwhelming. It represents discipline, collective courage, unity, sacrifice, and the belief that history is not made only by the powerful, but also by those who organise, endure, and struggle for justice.

“Mao Zedong captured this meaning in December 1935, in ‘On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism’, when he wrote that: ‘The Long March is a manifesto.’ He described it also as ‘a propaganda force’ and ‘a seeding-machine’, because it had proclaimed the heroism of the Red Army and carried to millions the message that the road of the Red Army was the road to liberation. This is a crucial point.”

According to Ioannou, “From Cyprus, this symbolism has a particular resonance. Cyprus is a small island in the Eastern Mediterranean, but its modern history has been shaped by great international struggles. Colonial domination, the anti-fascism and anti-colonial movement, the fight for workers’ rights, the struggle for peace, and the continuing demand for freedom and reunification. AKEL was born and developed under these conditions. Its roots go back to the Communist Party of Cyprus, which emerged from the historical need of the Cypriot working class to organise itself politically and socially, to acquire consciousness of its role, and to connect the struggle for social justice with the struggle for national and democratic rights.”

He argues that the party’s internationalist tradition “was expressed with particular clarity during the years of the Second World War. Cyprus was then a British colony. The Cypriot people lived under colonial rule, without national freedom and with severe restrictions on political and civil rights. For the communists, repression was even harsher. Organisations were banned, leaders were exiled, and censorship and persecution were widespread. Yet when fascism threatened humanity, AKEL did not treat the struggle as someone else’s war.

“On June 16, 1943, the Central Committee of AKEL took one of the most important decisions in the history of the Party and of the Cypriot people. It called on its members and supporters to voluntarily enlist in the Allied forces, under the Cyprus Regiment, in order to fight Nazism and fascism. This was a conscious anti-fascist and internationalist act. AKEL understood that the defeat of Hitler-led fascism was necessary not only for the liberation of Europe, but also for the future of all oppressed peoples, including the people of Cyprus.”

As a result: “The anti-fascist experience became part of the anti-colonial struggle. It helped shape the generation that would demand democracy, workers’ rights, social progress, and the end of British colonial rule. This is where the symbolism of the Long March acquires deeper meaning for Cypriots. A revolutionary journey is not only the movement from one place to another. It is the transformation of people through struggle.”

He further notes that, “the internationalist tradition of the Cypriot left did not begin in the Second World War. Before that, in the 1930s, Cypriot anti-fascists had already taken part in one of the most moving expressions of international solidarity in the 20th century: the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Around 60 Cypriots, many of them from working-class backgrounds and having suffered from poverty, migration, unemployment and political persecution, travelled to Spain to defend the country against fascism. Among those Cypriot volunteers were figures who would later become central to the history of the Cypriot left, including Ezekias Papaioannou, who later became general secretary of AKEL.”

Updating the story, he writes: “Today, when China speaks of building a community with a shared future for humanity, this idea can be understood against the background of these long histories of internationalism. Humanity again faces dangers that no people can confront alone: war, militarism, poverty, climate crisis, inequality, racism, new forms of colonial domination, and the return of dangerous bloc politics. The answer cannot be the fragmentation of the world into hostile camps, nor the imposition of the will of the powerful upon the weak. The answer must be cooperation, mutual respect, peace, common development, and the recognition that the future of each people is tied to the future of all.

“For a small country such as Cyprus, this is not an abstract principle. Cyprus knows from its own experience what occupation, foreign intervention, and division mean… This is why the Cypriot left has always connected the struggle of Cyprus with the struggle of all peoples for freedom, peace, and justice.

“The vision of a community with a shared future for humanity can therefore be approached not as a diplomatic slogan, but as a historical necessity… From the perspective of AKEL, this idea resonates with the deepest meaning of internationalism. Internationalism is not the denial of one’s own country. It is the highest form of genuine patriotism, because it understands that the freedom of one people cannot be secured through the oppression of another. It understands that a small country’s independence is protected not by submission to powerful alliances, but by a world order based on peace, law, solidarity, and respect for sovereignty.

He concludes: “There are no identical histories. The mountains and rivers crossed by the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army are not the same as the colonial streets, villages, and battlefields that shaped the Cypriot left. Yet between them resonates a common echo of people who understood that liberation is never given as a gift. It is won through endurance, organisation, sacrifice, and solidarity.

“Today, as humanity searches for a path beyond war, inequality, domination, and division, that echo remains alive. From the Long March to the anti-fascist volunteers of Cyprus, from the battle against colonialism to the contemporary struggle for peace and social justice, internationalism continues to offer a compass. It tells us that the future cannot belong to hegemony and exploitation. It must belong to the peoples.”

Former premier Zhu Rongji passes away

Former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, a key architect of China’s economic reforms and of the country’s transition to a socialist market economy, died of illness on August 12 at the age of 98.

Zhu had served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 14th and 15th Central Committees of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An official obituary extolled him as an excellent Party member, a time-tested and loyal communist fighter, and an outstanding proletarian revolutionist, statesman and leader of the Party and the state.

Zhu was born in October 1928 in Changsha, Hunan Province. He studied in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University from 1947 to 1951. He joined the CPC in October 1949.

In March 1998, he was appointed premier of the State Council. Facing the impact of the Asian financial crisis and the catastrophic flooding in China, he implemented the plans of the Party Central Committee to shift from a moderately tight fiscal and monetary policy to a proactive fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy, expand domestic demand and deepen reforms in key areas, thereby sustaining steady and rapid economic growth.

Whilst a staunch proponent of economic reform, Zhu was always deeply concerned about the immediate as well as the long-term interests of the working class and the majority of the people.

He worked to establish the basic living security system for laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises, the unemployment insurance system, and the minimum living guarantee system for urban residents. He also made great efforts to address issues such as wage arrears and the re-employment of laid-off workers.

The obituary stressed that Zhu had deep affection for the people. He emphasised that government officials must always bear in mind that they are public servants and should have the courage to speak the truth, not fear giving offence, and refrain from seeking special privileges. He also stressed the need to take the initiative, with a strong sense of responsibility, to shoulder heavy burdens, take on tough problems and go all out to deliver real results for the people.

After retiring from leadership posts, he steadfastly upheld and supported the CPC Central Committee with Hu Jintao as general secretary, and then the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at its core. He continued to care about the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics and firmly supported efforts to improve conduct, promote integrity and fight corruption.

The obituary concludes that Zhu’s life was a revolutionary, fighting and glorious one. His death is a great loss to the Party and the state.

Ningxia: the Global South meets to study China’s ‘Long March’ to abolish absolute poverty

Continuing our series of articles related to the ‘Path to Modernisation: Takeaways from China’s Theory and Practice of Poverty Alleviation’ conference which took place in Yinchuan, Ningxia, in July 2026, David Peat, Secretary of Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee, recounts his experiences in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, including local site visits, attending the conference, meeting local leaders, and highlighting how all of China’s regions worked together (in ‘paired assistance’ programmes) to achieve the goal of abolishing absolute poverty, and tying together the many ethnic minorities, varying geographical regions, and different levels of development in the Chinese nation.

David’s first article can be read here.

Our delegation continued overland, crossing the border from Gansu to Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China’s smallest autonomous region or province, and one equally known for its rugged terrain and (up until recently) persistent poverty. Even in this area, however, high-speed rail can be found and we enjoyed a journey taking in the changing landscapes. As its name also denotes, the region is an area with a relatively large ethnic minority population (38% Hui Muslim, with 62% Han) and as such it is one of China’s five designated ‘autonomous regions’, which have the ability to exercise certain additional rights, relative to standard Chinese provinces. China’s territory and population is enormous and extremely diverse, and, as will be seen below, its success has been due to a combination of finding solutions that work for local conditions, as well as cooperation between regions.

The delegation’s first stop in Ningxia was Minning Town, a flagship poverty alleviation project and moreover a case study of the ‘paired assistance’ model, which sees more developed regions of the country pairing with less developed ones in order to support their journey to achieve better living conditions for their residents. This particular partnership, which has been in place for 30 years, is revealed in the town’s name ‘Minning’, which is built out of the old name ‘Min’ for today’s Fujian, a relatively wealthy coastal province in China’s southeast, and ‘Ning’ from Ningxia. The story of the partnership, and Minning’s overall journey, is vividly portrayed in a popular Chinese television drama Minning Town, and the entire series is available to watch for free with English subtitles on YouTube.

This model was put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was then Deputy Party Secretary of Fujian Province. In 1997 he visited a site where the new town would be built (and would be populated by villagers who would relocate from their older, unsuitable residencies.) The paired assistance model involves the sharing of resources, expertise, funding and investment, and personnel, between the two regions. Those with technical knowhow were able to come from Fujian to improve the capacities of the rural residents, and alternately, those from Ningxia were able to share agricultural expertise with those in Fujian who could assist with wider rural revitalisation projects. Furthermore, financial support between the regions allowed for major infrastructural improvements to take place in the poorer districts. The evidence of the success of this long-term partnership can be seen in income levels: annual per capita disposable income for rural residents in Ningxia has risen from about 1,400 yuan in 1996 to more than 20,000 yuan in 2025. The model of East-West collaboration within China (such as that between Fujian and Ningxia) has shown huge success, as exemplified by Minning, and is set to continue to expand to support China’s ongoing development goals.

As seen in Gansu, any poverty alleviation project requires consideration of both the development of basic infrastructure to support wellbeing, as well as the development of ways of making a living for the residents. Minning is no different, and our delegation was able to witness (and even participate in) one aspect of its economic development: its e-commerce infrastructure, which has been put into place to assist residents to expand the market access for their (primarily agricultural) products. Local villagers reported how they had received vocational training, and how in particular this kind of work provided opportunities for those with disabilities, who represented 30% of the workforce in the company we visited. One villager remarked on their change of circumstances: “Previously we didn’t know how to use computers, but now we are able to become e-commerce influencers.” Delegates were given the opportunity to appear directly on a livestream and assisted the locals in selling their products (which, at that time, was goat milk). A local news report captured some opinions of delegates at the site.

A book launch event was held in Minning, which told its redevelopment story, alongside other such stories from the length and breadth of the country: Leaving No One Behind: China’s Stories of Poverty Alleviation, published by Contemporary World Press. The book is available in English and the launch was to celebrate its translation into Khmer language, for distribution in Cambodia.

Following the explorations of the rural regions on the road from Gansu to Ningxia, we arrived at the region’s capital of Yinchuan, which sits on the Yellow River, considered the “mother river” of Chinese civilisation. Several delegations, with over 120 representatives from more than 55 countries, who had inspected poverty alleviation projects in other parts of the country, all convened here for the conference on the theme of ‘Path to Modernisation: Takeaways from China’s Theory and Practice of Poverty Alleviation’, which took place on July 9, 2026.

The conference was convened by International Department of the CPC (IDCPC) Vice Minister Sun Haiyun, who remarked that Ningxia had been chosen as the location since it was so central to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s vision for poverty alleviation, as represented by the Fujian-Ningxia East-West paired assistance model, and stated that the purpose of the gathering was for all attendees to be able to apply some of the lessons learned in their own national contexts. Vice Minister Sun also noted the timeliness of the gathering, taking place not long after China had celebrated the 105th anniversary of the founding of the CPC.

George Bernard Shaw’s 1933 Shanghai visit recalled

The brief 1933 visit to Shanghai by the famed Irish playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw was the theme of the third Shanghai Public Relations Academic Symposium on Irish Literature, held on July 26.

An article published in this regard by the website Sixth Tone notes: “Before his arrival, articles about Shaw had been published in various newspapers and magazines. Some discussed his communist advocacy in Hong Kong, while others talked about how his satirical writing style had influenced European society.”

Shaw was welcomed to the city by Soong Qingling, the widow of China’s first president Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who remained true to his revolutionary ideals and ended her days as Honorary President of the People’s Republic of China and with her long-standing wish to be admitted to membership of the Communist Party of China granted.

With help from Soong, Shaw met and talked with several leading left-wing Chinese intellectuals, including Yang Xingfo, a social activist and patriotic democrat, former Peking University president Cai Yuanpei, literary icon Lu Xun, writer and linguist Lin Yutang, and the American journalists Harold Isaacs and Agnes Smedley. He also met Mei Lanfang, the renowned Peking opera artist and founder of Shanghai’s Left Theatre Club.

According to Sixth Tone: “Although Shaw spent just over eight hours in Shanghai, his visit sparked considerable discussion and reverberations among the city’s left-wing intellectual circles. The writer and poet Yu Dafu wrote in Free Talk, a supplement of the Shun Pao newspaper, that he hoped Shaw could tell the world, in his own sarcastic tone, about Japanese imperialism and its invasion of China.”

Following the visit, a group of left-wing writers and cultural workers, including Lu Xun, began compiling reports from various newspapers and periodicals about the Irish writer’s short visit. The collection was published in March 1933 by Yecao Shudian, or Wild Grass Bookshop, under the title ‘George Bernard Shaw in Shanghai’.

In his preface, Lu Xun wrote: “Those who truly welcomed him were the Chinese people, as well as the literary and artistic circles that stood by the people. The Chinese people did not regard him as a ‘revolutionary leader’ or a ‘thoroughgoing socialist writer,’ much less as an idol. They regarded Shaw as a loyal friend of the oppressed people of the world, and of China.”

In a video address to the symposium, Chinese Ambassador to Ireland Zhao Xiyuan said that despite the great distance between China and Ireland, the two countries share long histories, splendid cultures, and rich literary traditions. He emphasised that three years ago, President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI), highlighting the need for civilisations to live together in harmony.

“As long as the two countries remain committed to openness, inclusiveness, and mutual learning, and continue to transcend estrangement through dialogues, overcome conflict through exchanges, and transcend superiority through mutual respect and inclusiveness, we will further strengthen the public foundations of China-Ireland friendship. In doing so, we will make new contributions to the sustained and sound development of China-Ireland relations, and to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity.”

Former president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins also made reference to Shaw’s visit to Shanghai during his state visit to China in December 2014.

In a speech delivered at the Sun Yat Sen Museum on December 11, he noted:

“A Nobel Prize winning playwright and novelist, Shaw was also an essayist and polemicist, a free-thinker and a stout defender of the rights of the working classes and the marginalised.

“George Bernard Shaw continues to inspire us as the epitome of the engaged public intellectual, somebody who put his talent to the service of emancipatory change. Indeed, Shaw was an astute observer of his times but never a bystander – he consistently sought to translate his ideas into actual, public realisations. For example, he was a co-founder of the distinguished London School of Economics, and he helped to establish the New Statesman magazine; two ‘institutions’ which have been handed on to us.

“Shaw’s visit to Shanghai coincided with an era of great turbulence globally – a period when foreign powers were pushing rival claims onto China, as the Chinese people struggled to assert national sovereignty and define both an appropriate form of government and a new model of society for themselves.

“As a Fabian, Shaw was undoubtedly alive to the possibilities of a wider socialist awakening in China. As an Irishman he would have been sensitive to the Chinese calls for national sovereignty. At the same time, he was mindful not to be prescriptive in his conversation with his Chinese counterparts – conscious as he was of the travails of Europe’s own economic and political affairs.

“In the message he addressed to the Chinese people on the occasion of his visit, Shaw thus wrote:

“‘It is not for me, belonging as I do to a quarter of the globe which is mismanaging its affairs in a ruinous fashion to pretend to advise an ancient people striving to set its house in order.’”

Higgins concluded by, “by saluting all the academics and students in the Irish Studies Network who are here with us this afternoon. Shaw recognised no boundaries in the commitment to international solidarity. I believe that your interest in our culture and language, as well as the revived interest in your great civilisation currently manifest in Ireland, offer a robust and fruitful base for the future of Irish and Chinese relations.

“May the relations between our two peoples, Irish and Chinese, continue to be infused by the spirit of cross-border friendship and mutual curiosity which animated George Bernard Shaw’s visit in 1933.”

Caring for the Tangshan earthquake survivors half a century on

July 28 this year marked the 50th anniversary of the devastating Tangshan earthquake. Measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, it struck the city in north China’s Hebei province in the early hours of the morning claiming more than 240,000 lives, injuring over 160,000 and leaving 3,817 survivors paralysed while hundreds of buildings were destroyed.

Marking the 50th anniversary of this terrible tragedy, Chinese Premier Li Qiang visited the city entrusted by General Secretary Xi Jinping. He commended the collective endeavour of the people of Tangshan to rebuild a modern city from the ruins of a devastating earthquake, saying that its transformation is a vivid example of the Party leading the public in overcoming great difficulties and challenges. He described the disaster as unforgettable and the relief efforts as deeply moving and inspiring, adding that on the city’s new journey, it is important to carry forward the spiritual strength derived from battling a disaster and rebuilding lives.

During his inspection tour, Li called for continuously improving mechanisms for disaster monitoring and early warning, emergency response, rescue and relief, and post-disaster reconstruction, enhancing disaster prevention, mitigation and relief capabilities, and effectively safeguarding the lives and property of the people. He also called for strengthening support for emergency response equipment and using technology to enhance the precision and safety of rescue operations and for vigorously carrying out science promotion to enhance the awareness and ability of the public to escape danger when a disaster strikes.

Touring a rehabilitation centre for quake survivors he called for improving medical rehabilitation and daily care services as well as strengthening the application of technological innovation in rehabilitation to constantly enhance the services for the disabled.

In a feature article for China Daily, Zheng Jinran writes movingly about the care needs of survivors half a century on:

“Born in an emergency medical team’s field tent just two hours after the devastating 1976 Tangshan earthquake struck, Yang Zhensheng’s destiny was bound to the tragedy. His parents named him Zhensheng, which literally means ‘born after the earthquake’, and in 2001, he started working at the Tangshan Paraplegic Rehabilitation Centre.

“For a quarter of a century, Yang has witnessed the courage and determination that have enabled the survivors to endure.

“‘When the rehabilitation centre first opened, many residents had lost not only the use of their legs, but also the courage to live,’ said Yang, who is now the centre’s director. ‘We soon realised that treating injuries alone was not enough. Before helping them recover physically, we had to help them regain the confidence to live.’”

Gao Qingfeng, 69, is among the more than 130 paraplegic survivors of the Tangshan earthquake who still live at the centre.

After being pulled from the rubble and sent to Beijing for treatment as a 19-year-old, he was told by the doctors that there was a chance he might walk again. He had faith, and took his physiotherapy seriously, but never walked again.

“‘The hardest time was right after the earthquake,’ Gao recalled. ‘I didn’t even know what paraplegia was. I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life this way. When I moved into the rehabilitation centre in 1981 and saw so many people living the same life, I no longer felt I was facing it alone. We trained together, lived together and encouraged one another. Their companionship helped me gradually accept reality.’”

During a visit to the rehabilitation centre in July 2016, Xi Jinping encouraged its residents by saying: “If people in sound physical condition can live fulfilling lives, people with disabilities can do so as well.”

To take one example: “Li Dongmei remembers little about the day the earthquake struck. She was 13 when the disaster left her a paraplegic. Li also suffered a brain trauma injury and did not regain consciousness until more than a month later.

“In 1984, she learned about China’s first National Games for Persons with Disabilities. ‘It was as if I suddenly saw hope again,’ she recalled… Li trained for wheelchair racing by wearing gloves and wrapping black tape around the push rims of her racing wheelchair to improve her grip. Within days, both her hands were covered in blisters that later hardened into thick calluses. Three years later, she earned a place on Hebei’s team for the second National Games for Persons with Disabilities, launching a sporting career that spanned decades… Over the following decades, Li won dozens of medals in domestic and international competitions.”

Zhao Lili, a rehabilitation physician, said: “The biggest fear isn’t illness. It’s wondering who will be there when you need help.”

She has spent nearly three decades watching Tangshan’s paraplegic survivors grow older. “When I joined the centre in 1998, rehabilitation was about helping them return to society. Today, our focus is on managing the complications of long-term paraplegia and aging, so they can maintain the best possible quality of life.”

Centre director Yang said the institution represents a promise carried across generations. “From the day it was established, it has embodied the Party and government’s commitment to people affected by the disaster. The survival of 3,817 people left paraplegic by the earthquake — and their ability to go on living meaningful lives — was itself extraordinary. That achievement did not come from one medical breakthrough. It came from a commitment that no one would be left behind.”

Tang Yandong, dean of the School of Emergency Technology and Management at the Institute of Disaster Prevention and vice-chair of the Earthquake Emergency Rescue Committee under the China Association for Disaster Prevention, said Tangshan’s experience has broadened the understanding of what post-disaster recovery means.

“From the perspectives of sociology, psychology and emergency management, recovery is a long-term, systematic process that often lasts a lifetime,” he said. “The most valuable experience is not what happened immediately after the earthquake, but what happened over the following decades.”

He added that the experience has also helped shape China’s approach to post-disaster recovery by shifting the focus from rebuilding infrastructure to improving survivors’ long-term quality of life.

Why the Western left misreads China: capitalism, imperialism, and the socialist difference

In the following article, Karim Pourhamzavi – an Iranian lecturer specialising in global political economy and West Asian and North African politics at Beijing Foreign Studies University – takes aim at a strand of Western left thinking that treats Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and US capitalism as equivalent. Drawing on the history of capitalism, imperialism and uneven development, he argues that there is no equivalence in power between imperialism and its victims, even when the victim is a rising power like China.

Because the commanding heights of China’s economy remain in public ownership and its socialist state answers to the people rather than to the market, he contends, China is structurally incapable of the imperialism that has defined the West for five centuries – which is why, for the Global South, China’s rise represents the most constructive development since the birth of capitalism.

I recently attended a conference on the critique of global capitalism and possible global reordering in a renowned European city. My paper focused on critiquing imperialism and its expansion in West Asia. However, several presentations from European and North American scholars were unnecessarily and inaccurately Sinophobic in sentiment. Their thesis was astonishingly simplistic: capitalism is just capitalism, whether practiced by the United States or China. Therefore, they believed both are equally exploitative and destructive. This thesis suffers from both epistemological and empirical flaws. Such Sinophobic interpretations, coming from significant sections of the Western left, appear to abandon their emancipatory methodologies aimed at “changing” the world for the better, instead losing themselves in a positivist interpretation of the world. Yet there is no equivalence in power relations – or even sameness – between imperialism and its victims, even when the victim is a rising power like China.

Capitalism is not a universal condition

The aforementioned claims came from scholars in a city whose infrastructure is at least fifty years behind that of Beijing, where I live. These scholars have often never visited China, nor do they intend to, and they possess an ahistorical understanding of the Chinese political economy. Understanding socialism with Chinese characteristics requires revisiting the very term “capitalism.” Capitalism strictly refers to a political-economic system that emerged in Western Europe and expanded by imperial means to the Americas – precisely from 1492 onward. By the early 20th century, some 85 percent of the world’s land surface was under the colonial or semi-colonial domination of the Western powers and Japan. Therefore, China, like the rest of what we now understand as the Global South, was forcibly incorporated into global capitalism – compelled to cope with the enforced uneven development resulting from this historical process and to clean up the mess it left behind, a legacy that persists to this day.

Therefore, China’s modern history is not one experienced by the developed capitalist nations. Nor, at the philosophical and developmental planning levels, does revolutionary China share similarities with the core of capitalism or with those unevenly developed states that unsuccessfully tried to copy them as a way out of their underdevelopment. The first three hundred years of capitalist plundering in the world were based on a mercantilist political economy. This system sought to take everything from conquered nations and leave them nothing, while maintaining a balance of power among European rivals. It was centuries of plundering that enabled the Industrial Revolution – first in England, and then across the rest of Western Europe.

Chinese People’s Volunteers remembered

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) marked the 73rd anniversary of victory in the Fatherland Liberation War on July 27, the day in 1953 when US imperialism was forced to sign the armistice agreement after three years of genocidal war, with a wide range of celebrations and commemorative events.

Among them, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reports that, on July 26, DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un visited the Cemetery of the Fallen Soldiers of the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Hoechang County of South Phyongan Province and paid high tribute to them.

Following the main commemoration, he visited the grave of Mao Anying, placed a flower there and paid homage. Mao Anying was the son of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

KCNA commented that: “The ennobling soul and self-sacrificing spirit of the brave CPV soldiers, who shed their blood to assist the DPRK people in the war of justice in the most difficult and fateful years, are clearly associated with the victory won by the DPRK people and they are shining as the foundation for the DPRK-China friendship with socialism as its core.

“The DPRK people will never forget the merits and heroic feats of the excellent sons and daughters of the Chinese people who unsparingly dedicated their hot blood and precious lives, fighting shoulder to shoulder with our army and people in the same trench of the unprecedented death-defying struggle for repelling the imperialists’ invasion.”

The following day, Kim Jong Un attended an art performance to mark the anniversary together with war veterans and persons of wartime merits, members of the Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Central Committee and other senior officials of the Party, government and armed forces organs, officials of the WPK Central Committee, leading officials of ministries and national agencies, service personnel of the People’s Army, officials and lecturers engaged in the administration of revolutionary relics associated with the victorious war, Pyongyang citizens including descendants of war heroes, students of revolutionary schools and other youth and students, as well as diplomats from the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.

KCNA reported that: “The audience were deeply touched by videos showing the matchless self-sacrificing spirit, heroism and brilliant feats of excellent sons and daughters of the Chinese people who shared life and death, fighting shoulder to shoulder with our people in the same trench of the struggle of repelling the invasion of the imperialists, and Chinese songs such as ‘Battle Song of Chinese People’s Volunteers’.

“The performers artistically and superbly depicted the DPRK people’s eternal thanks to the brave fighters of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, who assisted our people in their sacred and righteous war under the uplifted banner of resisting America and aiding Korea even in the difficult days of building the country and made an important contribution to the war victory and the defence of global peace and security, and the truth that the DPRK-China friendship based on the shared ideal and militant fraternity will be immortal along with the history of the great war victory.”

Celebrating a different form of modernisation

The following article by Sara Flounders marks the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Long March, reflecting on China’s distinctive path to modernisation – one achieved “without colonialism, without enslavement, without wars of conquest” – and on what the CPC’s record means for the countries of the Global South.

Sara is a member of the Friends of Socialist China US committee and a longtime anti-imperialist organiser with the International Action Center.

This article first appeared in Workers World.

The 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the 90th anniversary of the victory of China’s Long March on July 1 were barely noted in the U.S. media. However, there were big celebrations in hundreds of Chinese cities. The focus was on reinforcing the “socialist direction of China in building Socialist Modernization in all aspects.”

The anniversary was celebrated as a confident assertion of the way forward. Events were organized to focus on the strong vitality of Marxism and socialist planning and as a preparation for and warning of future global upheavals.

President Xi Jinping’s major address on July 1 underscored the importance of meeting the goal to fully realize socialist modernization by the middle of the 21st century. President Xi cautioned: “We must be prepared to withstand major tests involving high winds and rough waves, or even stormy seas.”

The CPC has grown from a small group of just over 50 founding members — meeting secretly in 1921 in Shanghai, China — into the world’s largest governing party, a workers’ party with 101 million members that has tremendous global influence.

In 1921, China was fragmented and impoverished. It was reeling from the collapse of the feudal Qing Dynasty, carved apart by foreign imperialist exploitation into zones of colonial control and weakened by the British and U.S.-imposed Opium Wars to enforce the sale of opium. China was confronted with the chaos of contending factions of oppressive warlordism.

China was overwhelmingly a peasant country in 1921, 85% to 90% rural, with millions of landless, impoverished and illiterate peasants living in undeveloped areas and relying on subsistence farming.

From its founding the CPC declared that its goal was to overthrow imperialist domination and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat — the organization of society by workers and peasants.

Wang Quanying, last surviving female Long March veteran, dies at 105

Wang Quanying, who has died at the age of 105, was the last surviving woman to have taken part in the Long March – the epic fighting retreat of 1934–36 that saved the Chinese Red Army and laid the deepest foundations of modern China.

Born Wang Guixiang in 1921 – the very same year the Communist Party of China was founded – into a poor Tibetan family in Jinchuan county, Sichuan, she was orphaned as an infant and sent to labour for a local landlord. In 1935, aged just fourteen, she joined the Fourth Front Army’s Women’s Independent Regiment, serving as a battlefield medical orderly: guiding troops, carrying grain, cooking, and nursing the wounded with the herbal remedies she knew.

Separated from her unit in fierce fighting near Danba in 1936, she crossed the snow-capped mountains on foot, surviving on wild plants and losing a toe to frostbite, before settling anonymously in Wenchuan county, where she lived quietly for decades. Her service was only officially recognised in the 1980s.

After the founding of the People’s Republic she changed her name to Quanying, to express her conviction that “all Red Army soldiers across the nation are heroes”. She died just months before the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Long March, which falls later this year.

DPRK’s solidarity with China and Cuba has socialism as the core

The following is the text of a speech given by Keith Bennett to a recent public meeting on the theme of ‘The Importance of Solidarity with the DPRK and its People in Today’s Global Situation’.

Keith concentrates his remarks on two aspects of this question. First, the recent developments in the comradely relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China, which Kim Jong Un stresses have socialism as their core, as illustrated by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the DPRK in June 2026 and subsequently by Kim Jong Un’s greetings on the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

Second, Keith analyses a 1968 article written by DPRK founding leader Kim Il Sung marking the first anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, noting in particular its continuing relevance to understanding the vital need to defend the Cuban revolution and its relationship to the situation in Latin America as a whole.

Amy Yang: Paying tribute to the red flag of the hammer and sickle by learning from the Long March

The following essay by the writer Amy Yang, who publishes on China and socialism on Substack, was written to mark the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Taking the red flag of the hammer and sickle – its yellow standing for the faith of workers and peasants in a communist future, its red honouring the more than 3.7 million martyrs who died between 1921 and 1949 – as her starting point, Yang argues that the party is best understood through the enduring lessons of the Long March.

She highlights two of these lessons. The first is that Marxism is a scientific method rather than a fixed dogma, and that no single development path suits every country: the early communist movement failed when the Comintern imposed Soviet, city-first strategies on a society that was overwhelmingly based in the countryside. It was Mao Zedong’s strategy – restored at the Zunyi Conference of 1935 – that corrected the error.

The second is that popular support decides victory: the poorly armed Red Army prevailed because it treated ordinary people, and especially China’s ethnic minorities, with discipline and respect.

Yang carries both lessons forward – to China’s reform and opening up, and to its insistence on non-interference and the people’s well-being as the measure of global governance. Each generation, she concludes, faces its own Long March.

Chinese Embassy in Canada marks the 105th anniversary of the CPC

On July 3, 2026, the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Ottawa, Canada, organised a Roundtable Discussion to celebrate the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, under the theme, ‘Working Together to Build the China-Canada New Strategic Partnership’. In his opening remarks, Ambassador Wang Di highlighted that throughout its 105-year history, the CPC has been and remains the backbone of all advances in China. This includes the period of reform and opening up. As part of the development of modern China based on socialism with Chinese characteristics, the CPC, he continued, has changed the future and life of all Chinese people and has always stood on the right side of history. On the international stage, the Ambassador highlighted, among other points, the Chinese notion of a shared future for world peace. He stated that this gathering is taking place in the context of the new China-Canada Strategic Partnership, an important milestone since China and Canada first established diplomatic relations in 1970. The following guests participated in the roundtable:

Victor Oh: former Canadian Senator;
Warren Bethune: President of the Canada-China Friendship Association in Toronto and a relative of the legendary Canadian internationalist Dr. Norman Bethune;
Arnold August: author and journalist, who is a contributor to this website and active participant in the work of Friends of Socialist China in North America;
Dan Donovan: Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Ottawa Life Magazine;
Julian Karagusian: Visiting Lecturer, McGill University, Montreal;
Claire Citeau: Senior Vice-President, Trade and Global Relations, Canadian Meat Council;
Miguel Figueroa: former President of the Canadian Peace Congress;
Maxime Proud: Co-Founder and President, China Canada Futures Foundation;
Alex MacDonald: Member of the Executive of the Ottawa Club of the Communist Party of Canada;
Lu Hongmin: Chairman, Board of Directors, Federation of Ottawa Chinese Canadian Community Organisations;
Deng Jun: President of the Canada China Chamber of Commerce;
Chen Chen: Chinese student representative, the University of Ottawa.

In his concluding remarks, Ambassador Wang mentioned the important role of Norman Bethune, about whom everyone in China knows. Other speakers also noted that Bethune was the most famous member of the Communist Party of Canada.

Chinese Embassy in London holds symposium on the CPC and the world

On the morning of July 6, 2026, the Chinese Embassy in the UK held a symposium entitled “The Communist Party of China and the World”, marking the CPC’s 105th founding anniversary.

The event was chaired by Minister Zhao Fei and Ambassador Zheng Zeguang delivered a keynote speech entitled ‘Reviewing the Glorious Journey, Creating New Historic Success, and Jointly Promoting the Building of a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity’.

In his presentation, Ambassador Zheng elaborated on General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important speech at the rally celebrating the 105th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, held in Beijing on July 1.

He described the speech as a political declaration for Chinese Communists to uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics and continuously achieve new victories in Chinese modernisation on the new journey in the new era. It also serves as an important window through which friends from around the world can better understand the CPC.

He said that on the journey ahead, China will study and implement Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building, uphold a correct view of governance performance, persist in exercising full and rigorous self-governance of the Party, and carry forward the Party’s outstanding qualities, thus ensuring that the Party always maintains strong creativity, cohesion and combat effectiveness. Although the road ahead is full of risks and challenges, requiring constant readiness to withstand high winds, strong waves, and even turbulent storms, the CPC has strong confidence and firm resolve, and will remain steadfast and forge ahead with courage to create new historic successes.

Ambassador Zheng noted that while the CPC is committed to seeking happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation, it is also dedicated to advancing human progress and promoting harmony for the world.

He stressed the CPC’s readiness to engage in dialogue and exchanges and strengthen mutual learning with political parties and governments of all countries on the basis of mutual respect and equality and also briefed the participants on the development of China-UK relations since the beginning of this year.

Following the ambassador’s keynote report, contributions to the discussion were made by the following guests:

Alex Gordon, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB)
Andy Brooks, General Secretary of the New Communist Party of Britain (NCP)
Daniel O’Brien, Vice Chair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGBML)
Stephen Perry, Honorary President of the 48 Group
The Right Honourable Lord (Neil) Davidson KC, Baron of Glen Cova, Labour Member of the House of Lords
Sir Mark Hendrick, Labour Member of Parliament and Vice Chair of the China All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)
Professor Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute, King’s College London
Keith Bennett, Co-editor of Friends of Socialist China
Kevan Nelson, International Secretary of the CPB
Dr Ali Al Assam, Committee member of Friends of Socialist China
Dr Francisco Dominguez, Committee member of Friends of Socialist China
George Korkovelos, Culture Secretary of the CPGBML

The Long March spirit: enduring legacy, modern drive, and global vision

In the following article, which was originally published in China Today, Keith Bennett explores how the Long March spirit – defined by perseverance, unity, sacrifice, truth-seeking, and deep ties with the people – continues to shape China’s development and global engagement. It starts by revisiting Edgar Snow’s 1936 journey to the Communist Party’s revolutionary base, highlighting how his classic account ‘Red Star Over China’ offered the world an unprecedented, first-hand portrayal of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Red Army, and the Long March, countering Western ignorance and distorted narratives. Snow’s vivid reporting revealed the CPC’s ideals, discipline, and commitment to national salvation, helping establish the Long March as an event of global significance in the fight against fascism.

The article emphasises Snow’s role as part of a broader tradition of international solidarity, alongside figures like the internationalist surgeons Norman Bethune from Canada and Dwarkanath Kotnis from India, who supported China in the bitter days of war.

Keith highlights the fact that the Long March spirit remains a living force in contemporary China, guiding such endeavours as poverty alleviation, rural revitalisation, scientific innovation, ecological civilisation, and major national development goals. It also informs China’s international role, for example through the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development, Security, Civilisation, and Governance Initiatives, which aim to build a community with a shared future for humanity, especially through partnerships with the Global South.

Keith concludes that commemorating the Long March means recognising its enduring values – conviction, discipline, and perseverance – which continue to inspire China’s modernisation and its vision of multipolarity, global cooperation and shared progress.

The Great Road – Zhu De, fifty years on

The following article by Carlos Martinez marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Zhu De – founder of the People’s Liberation Army and, with Mao Zedong, one of the leading architects of the Chinese Revolution’s victory.

Drawing on the classic accounts of Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow and Evans Carlson, it traces Zhu De’s journey from a tenant’s hut in Sichuan, through to the founding of the Red Army and the rostrum at Tiananmen Square – and asks what his life still teaches, half a century on.

Fifty years ago, on 6 July 1976, Zhu De died in Beijing at the age of 89. It was a year of terrible losses for the Chinese people: Zhou Enlai had died in January; Mao Zedong would follow in September. Of the three, Zhu De is the least remembered in the West – and yet the army he built, the People’s Liberation Army, remains the guarantor of everything the Chinese Revolution has achieved, and his life traces the arc of that revolution more completely than almost any other.

Red Virtue: origins in Sichuan

Zhu De was born in December 1886 into a tenant family in Yilong county, Sichuan, on an estate whose landlord was known locally as the “King of Hell”. By what Edgar Snow called “a strange accident of language”, the two characters of his name mean “Red Virtue” – a fact his parents could hardly have foreseen, “or they would surely have changed it in terror”.

His mother bore 13 children; the last five were drowned at birth because the family could not feed them. She herself, he recalled, “was so humble that she had no name of her own”. The clan pooled its resources to educate a single son who could talk back to the tax collectors – and so Zhu De, almost by accident, became literate, passed through the old examination system in its dying days, and entered the Yunnan Military Academy, where he joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary Tongmenghui (a radical secret society and precursor to the Kuomintang) and took part in the 1911 Revolution and the campaigns that destroyed Yuan Shikai’s attempted monarchy.

The hardest battle

By his mid-thirties Zhu De was a general in the warlord armies of the south-west: wealthy, decorated, and addicted to opium. The 1911 Revolution, he concluded, had been “aborted by republican compromise with foreign imperialism”; warlordism was a dead end, and he was part of it. So he walked away. He gave up his commands and his fortune, and broke his opium addiction alone – pacing the deck of a Yangtze steamer for a month, in what Snow called “the hardest battle of his life”, proof that “this man had more steel in his will than his acquaintances supposed”.

Then he asked to join the infant Communist Party. His reasoning was characteristically direct: if the foreign imperialists attacked this party with everything ugly in their vocabulary, “it was the party for Chu Teh” (Chu Teh being the older Western spelling of his name). Rejected in Shanghai by then CPC General Secretary Chen Duxiu – who could not believe a former warlord general capable of becoming a communist – he sailed for Europe, and in Berlin in late 1922 presented himself to a student organiser more than ten years his junior named Zhou Enlai. His old life, he said, “had turned to ashes beneath his feet”. He was admitted to the party he would serve for the remaining 54 years of his life.

Zhu and Mao: the birth of the Red Army

On 1 August 1927, after Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre of the Shanghai workers had drowned the first united front between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in blood, Zhu De helped lead the Nanchang Uprising – the date still marked as the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. When the uprising’s forces were shattered, it was Zhu De who held the remnant together through a desperate winter retreat, facing down the defeatists: “I refused to return to warlordism. I had chosen the road of the people’s revolution and I would follow it to the end.”

In the spring of 1928 he brought his survivors to Jinggangshan and joined forces with Mao Zedong. From that meeting the two men’s lives became, in Agnes Smedley’s memorable phrase, “like the two arms of one body”; the Kuomintang press, unable to conceive of them separately, called the Red Army the “Chu Mao Army”.

An army of a new kind

What kind of army was it? Its commander-in-chief spun, wove, planted vegetables and carried supplies like any soldier. “Chu Teh’s devotion to his men was proverbial”, Snow recorded in Red Star Over China: he “lived and dressed like the rank and file, had shared all their hardships, often going without shoes in the early days, living one whole winter on squash, another on yak meat, never complaining”. Corporal punishment – which Zhu De had campaigned against as a cadet – was abolished; officers and men ate the same food; after every battle, conferences were held at which any fighter could criticise any commander, Zhu De included.

A comrade who knew him in his Berlin years told Snow that “he always invited criticism; he had an insatiable appetite for criticism”. It was an army that opened prison doors, divided the land, taught peasants to read, and understood – in Zhu De’s famous conclusion – that “the peasants of China are the most revolutionary people on earth”.

The Long March and the war of resistance

On the Long March he marched farther than anyone, spending an extra year in the Tibetan borderlands – and refusing the disastrous ‘southern retreat’ tactic advanced by Zhang Guotao, a founding member of the party who later abandoned the revolution: “We had not made the Long March in order to stick in the high Tibetan–Chinese borderland while the Japanese continued lopping off province after province.”

Snow’s verdict was unequivocal: “For pure military strategy and tactical handling of a great army in retreat nothing has been seen in China to compare with Chu Teh’s splendid generalship of the Long March.”

As commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army he led the resistance behind Japanese lines, launching the Hundred Regiments Offensive in 1940 – and ordering, against every convention of that savage war, that Japanese prisoners be treated humanely, as “the sons and brothers of the toiling Japanese masses”. This was not sentiment but strategy: an army that could distinguish the enemy’s conscripts from the enemy’s rulers was fighting a different kind of war.

In August 1945, when Chiang Kai-shek ordered the liberated areas’ armies to halt so that the Kuomintang could harvest the victory, Zhu De’s reply entered history: “We consider that you have given us a mistaken order. We are compelled to firmly refuse the order.” Four years later he stood beside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum as commander-in-chief of the PLA at the proclamation of the People’s Republic. In 1955 he was named first among the ten marshals; from 1959 until his death he served as Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress – serving the people skilfully and without ostentation, until the end.

What his life teaches, fifty years on

What can we learn from such a life, half a century on? Three things, at least.

First, that revolutionary strength flows from the people or it flows from nowhere. Zhu De’s military genius – the guerrilla tactics that defeated four encirclement campaigns and were studied from Vietnam to Cuba – rested on a political foundation: an army that served the peasants could see with the peasants’ eyes, while its enemies “were afraid to advance after they sighted even one barefoot peasant watching them from a distance”.

Second, that people can change, profoundly and at any age. The warlord general who renounced wealth, rank and opium to start again at the bottom in his mid-thirties, standing to attention before a man ten years younger, is a standing rebuke to every cynic who says character is destiny. China’s revolution demanded the remaking of a nation; Zhu De began by remaking himself.

Third, that greatness and humility can inhabit the same person. Evans Carlson wrote that Zhu De combined “the kindness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a Grant, and the humility of a Lincoln”; his soldiers put it more simply – he was a peasant like themselves, and no officer dared curse or strike them while he commanded. The army’s affectionate nickname for him was “Chief of the Cooks”, earned the night he escaped assassination in a warlord coup by convincing the gunmen pointing revolvers at his head: “Don’t shoot me. I’m only the cook. Don’t shoot a man who can cook for you!”

A friendship across nations

It is fitting that his story reached the Western world through Agnes Smedley, the legendary North American revolutionary journalist who followed his headquarters through the war years and set down his life in The Great Road. She did not live to see it published; her ashes lie in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, following her death in the UK in May 1950, beneath a stone bearing Zhu De’s own calligraphy – a friendship across nations that itself embodies what both fought for.

From a tenant’s hut on the “King of Hell’s” estate to the rostrum at Tiananmen, no life traced the revolution’s road more completely. Mao’s own verdict on him, quoted by Xi Jinping at the 130th anniversary of Zhu De’s birth, stands as the best epitaph: his magnanimity was as vast as the sea, his will as firm as steel. Smedley called her book The Great Road; fifty years after his death, China is still travelling it.

References

Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (Monthly Review Press, 1956) – the definitive biography, drawn from Smedley’s wartime interviews with Zhu De.
Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (Victor Gollancz, 1937) – source of the accounts of Zhu De’s character, the Long March and the early Red Army.
Evans F. Carlson, Twin Stars of China (Dodd, Mead, 1940) – source of the “Robert E. Lee … Grant … Lincoln” comparison.
Xi Jinping, speech at the ceremony marking the 130th anniversary of Zhu De’s birth (2016) – source of Mao’s “vast as the sea … firm as steel” tribute.

What defines the CPC’s 105-year success? – a CGTN Dialogue

The following is a discussion from CGTN’s Dialogue programme marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Broadcast in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anniversary speech – in which he hailed the Party’s 105-year history as the “most magnificent epic” of the Chinese nation – it brings together Xia Lu, associate professor at the School of CPC History and Party Building at Renmin University of China; Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China; and Radhika Desai, convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

The panel discusses how to evaluate the CPC’s achievements and governing logic; the role of Marxism – seeking truth from facts, the mass line, and the Party’s capacity for self-renewal – in explaining its longevity and legitimacy; and the distinctiveness of Chinese modernisation. Radhika Desai argues that the Chinese revolution, following the Bolshevik revolution, set humanity on a path to socialism, and that amid a declining capitalism China has become an “ocean of stability”. Carlos Martinez stresses that China’s is a modernisation achieved without colonialism, slavery or war – shattering the Eurocentric assumption that to modernise is to Westernise. Xia Lu reads the Party’s six outstanding qualities through the lens of dialectical and historical materialism, and emphasises the mass line and the Party’s vigilance against detachment from the people.