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World Turned Upside Down

Towards the end of his longlife,   legendary Australian bushman    R.M. Williams shocked an    interviewer who  asked him, “Who was the greatest person of the 20th century?”

“Chairman Mao,” answered Williams, who had travelled in China before the Revolution. What he saw of the old society disturbed him so profoundly that he regarded its destruction as the most significant act of his time, irrespective of what happened next.

The ruins of that old society litter the Long March trail. As much as anything, our journey was a march down memory lane. This year’s official commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Long March have concentrated on the old soldiers and their experiences on the March itself. Ours was an effort to understand where the Revolution came from by listening to the stories of elderly peasants whose lives were turned upside down by the tumult of the times. There were Communist soldiers among them, of course, but there were also landlords, Kuomintang families and fighters, hunters, Tibetan priests and Living Buddhas. And despite vast differences in experience and perspective, their tales do knit together to form a coherent picture of a society that knew everything about class struggle except its name.

In Zhijiang County in western Hunan we nosed around a pigsty that was once the village gaol, located in the basement of the richest landlord’s home. Seventy years ago, Yang Chenglie was not just the wealthiest man around. His brother was head of the local government and Yang himself had several dozen men under arms and possessed the authority to throw peasants into his private prison without reference to any court. Over and over, we heard of abuses perpetrated by the men of property. In Qiaojiang, also in western Hunan, 77-year-old Chen Kaixiang recalled how his grandfather organised a gang of landowners to find and kill the peasants he blamed for giving his grain and swine to the Red Army. In Maogu in northern Guizhou, 74-year old An Deqiong told us how her wealthy father ran roughshod over the local peasants and murdered an injured Red soldier left in their care. In Kele, also in Guizhou, 83-year-old Zhang Qifang said he would have joined the Long March himself if he had been a little older, because his father had been murdered in a dispute with his landlord. We found only one Red Army veteran in Guizhou, 86-year-old Liu Jicheng, who returned to peasant life in Qianxi County in the early 1940s. I asked him whether the local landlord had been good to his family. Liu grinned as a man who had seen enough to make a joke of almost anything: “If he’d been good, I wouldn’t have needed to join the army, would I?”

The original Long Marchers aimed to tip this world on its head and 13 years later they did just that, bringing an end to a horrific period in Chinese life.

The son-in-law of a Long March commander once joked to us, “The Reds were China’s original outdoor enthusiasts.” There’s no doubt the Long March is one of the world’s greatest hikes. It’s not just the sheer distance; it’s the quality of the terrain and the diversity of the peoples along the route. Chairman Mao may have exaggerated some things, but when he wrote of the March’s “ten thousand rivers and thousand mountains” he wasn’t far wide of the mark. We encountered people from at least 15 different ethnic groups, some of whom even now could speak no Chinese. At times, we were grateful to meet anyone at all, as the trail works its way across mountains and prairies where you can walk for hours, even days without seeing a soul. In a lovely but lonely valley in Seda County in Sichuan, we made one false turn and ended up at least 150 kilometres out of our way.

Life on the Long March is so far removed from urban normality that it’s extremely difficult to switch back to city life. For the last year, my first task every evening has been to find water. Camped by a river, that’s as easy as stepping into the kitchen and turning the tap on, but at other times I had to cajole it out of nervous villagers for whom water was a precious commodity, their wells a two-kilometre trek away. Lost in the great mountains of Tibetan Sichuan, I had to divine it and then find my way back to camp in darkness; the batteries in my torch were slowly dying, water was leaking from a bag torn when I slipped and dropped it down a mountainside, even as my whole body shivered with fear and altitude sickness.

In the city, relationships can be bought and sold. There’s hardly a problem that can’t be fixed as long as you’re able and willing to pay. Things aren’t so simple in the far reaches of rural China. Waving cash at peasants while asking for help is a sure way to make them think you’re crazy. There’s no alternative to taking time to make friends, to talking about the weather and the crops, where you’re from or how much a plane ticket to England costs. In the end, you usually get what you need, and you realize it would take physical violence to make these wonderful people accept any money.

On the Long March, you’re either thrown back on your own resources or reliant on the goodwill of strangers; you’re either lonely or overwhelmed with company, always moving or planning the next move. There is no way of the mean, and that’s what makes the journey simultaneously so exhausting and so inspiring. Don’t ask me what I learned or how it changed me; I have no idea, but that will come in time. I do know I’d do it again like a shot, once I’ve had a good, long rest.