'Long March' measures out a lot shorter

SHANGHAI, China - They slogged across rugged terrain for a year, fleeing Nationalist forces and forming the cornerstone of Chinese Communist legend - the "Long March" that turned Mao Tse-tung's guerrillas into folk heroes of the masses they would soon command.

Now, seven decades after the grueling trek, two Britons who retraced the march's route on foot are committing political heresy. Their conclusion: The journey was 2,500 miles shorter than the distance of 6,200 miles claimed by the Communist Party.

Ed Jocelyn and Andy McEwan said their findings showed the journey - during which Mao cemented his rule over the party that took control of China in 1949 - was 3,700 miles long.

"It was still a remarkable achievement in endurance and courage," Jocelyn told the Associated Press on Wednesday. "The fact that it's shorter than originally believed doesn't diminish that."

Not a chance, say Communist traditionalists.

"How could they possibly know the exact route and distance well enough to revise the figure?" said retired party historian Liu Binyan. "What kind of exact map could they have had?"

Jocelyn, 35, and McEwan, 37, completed their journey Monday after 384 days; the original march reportedly took 370 days. The two, who have worked as editors for English publications in Beijing, are neither geographers nor historians; they based their estimate on timed walks, maps and distance markers.

History books often say the 1934-35 Long March covered 6,200 miles; some accounts say it was as long as 8,000 miles.

Fleeing the forces of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Mao and his followers trudged through some of China's poorest, most remote areas, from Jiangxi province in the southeast to Shanxi in the north.

Conditions were harsh. Of the roughly 80,000 men - and 35 women - who began, only between 8,000 and 9,000 survived.

Calculating the march route's length has long been difficult. Under continual attack from Chiang's ground and air forces, the Communist army often broke up into different columns, dispersed over wide areas, backtracked, crossed the same rivers repeatedly or just got lost.

Without any known accurate measurements, Mao and the communists may have chosen 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) because it was a round number that boldly defined the scale of the event, Jocelyn said. Chinese governments have a history of using numbers in that manner.

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