Russian reporter walks Loushan Pass footbridge, reflects on Long March

Halfway across the footbridge, Alina Salionova stopped and let herself feel it move.

The span is new and solidly built, but strung between two peaks above the deep valleys of Loushan Pass, it still shudders in a high wind. National flags snap overhead, flying in memory of the soldiers who died here.

"Even walking on this bridge makes me feel a little queasy," said Salionova, a reporter with RT. "But what feelings must the Red Army soldiers have had back then, as they overcame all of this?"

The question had been with her since she started up to the pass, a jagged notch in the mountains on the old boundary between Sichuan and Guizhou provinces. Steep and easily held, Loushan Pass has been a prized stronghold for centuries, famed in an old saying as a place where "a single warrior can hold the pass against 10,000 foes".

For the Red Army, it was a turning point. In January 1935, its troops seized the pass, helping clear the way for the Zunyi Conference, the meeting that established Chairman Mao Zedong's leadership over the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Red Army. Soon after, the Central Red Army left Zunyi and crossed the Chishui River, meaning to march north across the Yangtze River and join the Red Army's Fourth Front Army. But the Kuomintang massed its forces to encircle and destroy them.

Mao's answer was to double back. He led the Central Red Army across the Chishui River a second time and returned to Zunyi, where enemy defenses were thin. That February, in just five days, the Red Army retook Loushan Pass and then Zunyi itself, leaving more than 2,400 enemy troops killed or wounded, capturing 3,000 more and seizing large stores of supplies. It was the biggest victory the Red Army had won since the start of the Long March under Mao's command, and it lifted morale among the ranks.

Mao marked the moment with a poem, Yi Qin E · Loushan Pass, which Salionova had learned before her visit and could recite in the original Chinese. She had been struck by its image of the pass standing hard as iron, and of an army striding over its summit to begin anew.

Now she was standing on that summit herself. Today, the pass is a site of red tourism and revolutionary education, drawing visitors like her along its ridgelines and monuments. A guide told her how the soldiers had fought here in straw sandals and thin clothes, through frigid temperatures.

She kept returning to that — the cold, the thin cloth, the drop she had just crossed on a modern bridge that still unnerved her.

"What kept them going?" she said. "The courage to face death, the readiness for sacrifice, and the spirit of fighting for the future of the motherland — that is the Long March spirit."

Video by Chen Meiling/China Daily