KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 16 (Bernama) -- China Global Television Network (CGTN) has released a new documentary, Breaking Through, marking the 90th anniversary of the end of the Long March this month.
Part travelogue and part history, the series retraces the route of the Red Army’s Long March, examining how and why it happened and its impact on China today, according to CGTN in a statement.
The documentary suggests the march’s most enduring legacy may lie not in the monuments along its route but in present-day endeavours, such as China’s commercial space industry and its homegrown electric vehicle battery industry.
The series draws parallels between these industries and the original march, saying both have been driven by the need to escape encirclement and break new ground, CGTN said.
In October 1934, facing serious military defeat, 86,000 soldiers of the Central Red Army set out on the march. After hundreds of battles and crossings of rivers, snow-capped mountains and swamp-covered grasslands, they reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935, with only about 8,000 surviving.
The Long March ended in October 1936, when the last of the Red Army’s forces arrived in the northwest and its three main columns converged.
American journalist Edgar Snow, who met Mao Zedong and other survivors of the march in China’s northwest, described it as “an odyssey unequalled in modern times”.
-- BERNAMA