"You can't understand the Long March from a bus window"

When China commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Long March victory on Sunday, Ed Jocelyn will be celebrating his own success in retracing the route of the Chinese peasant soldiers for the second time in three years.

The two-man team of 38-year-old British historian Jocelyn and his Chinese comrade Yang Xiao are in the final stage of a 5,000-kilometer trek along the route the Second Division of the Red Army took 70 years ago.

They started from Sangzhi county in central Hunan Province on Nov. 19, 2005, walked across the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan and Gansu, and are scheduled to arrive on Sunday at the finishing point of the historic route, Jiangtai Township in Ningxia, a Muslim Hui autonomous region in the northwest.

"You can't understand the Long March by looking out a bus window," says Jocelyn.

"Long March II"

Jocelyn has named his present trek "Long March II" because it is his second personal long march. In 2002 and 2003, he spent 384 days walking the paths of the Red Army's First Division with British news editor Andrew McEwen. The two friends crossed 10 provinces and regions in central, southern and western China .

"Andrew's health suffered during that trek and he could not join us for this one," said Jocelyn. This time he teamed up with Yang Xiao, a field equipment expert who outfitted their first expedition.

About 10 percent of the present route overlaps with the first, but this one is even more challenging and rewarding. It covers more grasslands and snow mountains and half of it winds through plateaus.

The team went through four Tibetan communities at an average altitude of 3,000 meters, including Shangri-La, believed to be the most beautiful place in China.

They took two sticks with them to scare away dogs, a lesson from Jocelyn's previous expedition.

They normally trek 20 to 35 kilometers a day. But one day they traveled 47 kilometers in mountainous Guizhou Province. Jocelyn's legs were badly strained and he could not fall asleep that night.

When the trekkers were really exhausted, they were not happy to learn a veteran Red Army soldier was just around the corner.

"We secretly wished he lived further away. That would have been a good excuse to spare us further trekking," Jocelyn grinned. He was even afraid to see beautiful landscapes because that meant stopping to take photos.

Hardship makes good stories

Yang Xiao avoids talking about the injuries and ailments they picked up along the way. The postings on their website www.newlongmarch2.com are almost always light-hearted and humorous, "even though hardship could make better stories," said Yang.

Once a reporter asked them if they got very dirty sometimes.

The pair answered half jokingly they would certainly be a smelly pair by the end of the trek. "Don't forget to wear a mask when you come to see us there," said Yang.

Once in a while, they would ask a villager for some hot water to wash their feet after a day's trekking.

Sometimes they got pleasant surprises from their friends: a parcel of food and wine might await them at the next town. But for an Englishman, football is more important than food.

Jocelyn insisted they check in to a hotel one Saturday during the World Cup to watch a retransmission on CCTV-5, the Chinese sports channel.

But when they did they were unable to get CCTV-5 on the hotel's TV.

McEwen texted Jocelyn each day with the latest scores. "I really hated telling him England had been eliminated."

Dos and don'ts

The new long marchers have to discover for themselves each day what to eat, where to stay for the night and how to make sure they are on the right track.

Very often they ate just one full meal a day. If they couldn't find a small inn to bed down in for the evening, they sometimes spent a night with villagers or slept in their tent when they were lost or too tired to plod on.

When the Red Army soldiers trekked the route they followed the dos and don'ts set by paramount leader Mao Zedong in 1928: obey orders in every action, take not a single needle or piece of thread from the people and turn in everything captured.

The new long marchers have rules of their own: never take a lift and never cover the same route a second time.

But when emergency struck they had no choice. In the first expedition, McEwen came down with diarrhea in Guizhou. Jocelyn also took a ride to provincial capital Guiyang for flu.

"It's not hard to imagine how tough the Long March was for the Red Army soldiers," said Jocelyn. "We might have died had we followed them then."

Despite his expertise in field work and survival skills, Yang Xiao felt he could never compare himself with the Red Army soldiers.

Hard as they tried to catch up with the peasant soldiers' schedule, they were almost always a few days behind, said Yang.

"I admire them and I revere the Long March legend," he said.

Heritage for the whole humanity

When American journalist Edgar Snow commended his 1937 book Red Star Over China to readers, he hoped they would get a sense of the spirit, power and enthusiasm that made the Red Army soldiers unconquerable.

These, he said, were the essence of human history and could not have been fabricated by any writer.

"In the Long March, the Red Army demonstrated a spirit that burst the limits of time and space to become the common heritage of the human race," said Xu Zhanquan, a specialist on Long March studies at the Military Academy of Sciences of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Wang Shuzeng spent six years on "the Long March", a nonfiction work of 670,000 Chinese characters published last month. He tried to interview surviving Red Army men, but very few of them could articulate their Long March stories at the age of 90.

"But almost every one can still heartily hum the songs they sang along the route," he said.

A veteran soldier simply told him "Our commander was a nice guy -- we had meals together".

An elderly villager along the route said the Red Army was good because "they gave my grandpa a horse".

So the Long March, Wang said, represents a spirit, without which human beings could not have achieved what they have today. "We must carry forward this spirit."

Long March history specialist Chen Yu was shocked when a college student asked him why the Red Army men had not brought enough instant noodles. "Don't you think they were stupid?" the boy said.

Source: Xinhua