Andrew McEwen is sitting in his office in downtown Beijing sipping coffee when his friend and writing partner Ed Jocelyn calls from somewhere along the route of the Long March.

The pair have a good chuckle and talk earnestly about Jocelyn's latest adventure. McEwen seems to be envious but perhaps he is just as happy not to be roughing it again somewhere in China's hinterland.

The two men spent 384 days walking barefoot over the same roads and paths the famous Red Army followed in 1934. That was in 2002 when they became the first westerners to retrace the steps of the peasant soldiers and their book on the adventure has become a best seller.

McEwen, a news editor, has been in China since his personal long march, while Jocelyn still has some unanswered questions about the Long March and is now following a different route.

HOW LONG WAS THE LONG MARCH

The Long March is recognized as a turning point in China's revolution. It turned out to be a brilliant military tactic that was part retreat and part planned maneuver. The Long March is actually four separate marches by four different divisions of the Red Army, each of which followed different routes.

The Long March was initiated in 1934 by the First Division of the Red Army which took just over a year to complete its 12,000-kilometer trek. The Second and Fourth Divisions disengaged from their respective battle fronts and began to march in 1934 and 1935. By 1936 all of the divisions were re-united in northeastern Shaanxi Province far in China's interior.

Conditions were extremely harsh and the battles and deaths of thousands extremely gruesome. The peasant army suffered the loss of thousands of comrades fighting both nature and a better equipped enemy, the Kuomintang or KMT. Of the roughly 86,000 men and women of the First Division who began the march, just over 7,000 survived. As a regrouped, toughened fighting force the Red Army fought on for another 15 years. With its new found might the Communists were able to negotiate an alliance with the KMT to defeat the Japanese, who had invaded from the north, before vanquishing the KMT which retreated to Taiwan.

It is a long, intriguing and complicated period of history that ends with the official "liberation" and founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

So complex is its history, the minutiae of the Long March are still being debated by historians, experts and the two modern-day trekkers from England.

"Those who don't know the Long March don't really know China, "says author McEwen, who says he marched the Long March because he was fascinated by what he calls the "founding myth" of China.

His trek raised almost as many new questions as it answered old ones.

As they reached their destination in Shaanxi province, McEwen and Jocelyn calculated they had walked 6,000 not 12,000 kilometers.

They also pose the ultimate question in their book titled, The Long March: The True Story behind the Legendary Journey that Made Mao's China. On the cover they ask "Did the Long March really happen?"

Even to some Chinese, the journey remains somewhat of a half-fiction. Map expert Yang Lang points out that a newly published official map of the Long March is full of mistakes. "If people follow this Long March route as the map describes, they certainly won't get to the end of the trail reached by the Red Army 70 years ago," he says.

Many historians argue the First Division's trek was a long circuitous march with many twists and turns and backtracking. The army looped its own route numerous times so experts conclude the March could easily have been 12,000 kilometers.

Professor Zhu Qingbao with the History Department of Nanjing University says the Red Army crossed the Red River four times to evade the KMT so some soldiers could have walked even further than the official distance.

"GENUINE" LONG MARCH

American journalist Edgar Snow's book Red Star Over China published in 1937 shocked the world which even then had trouble making sense of events. Snow was one of the few westerners to get inside the communist ranks to file newspaper reports. Writing about the atrocities he witnessed cost him his credentials as the KMT revoked his right to work in China. When he compiled his eyewitness event into book form he was accused in the west of exaggerating events. He died in 1972 maintaining that he had only written what he saw.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harrison E. Salisbury who wrote for the New York Times for 60 years, also lent credence to the history of the Long March. In the 1980s he and his wife came to Beijing to discover the "genuine" Long March. They embarked on a whirlwind round of interviews with surviving senior generals, widows of Party figures, archivists and historians. Salisbury's contribution to the annals of history is his book The Long March: The Untold Story.

WHY MISUNDERSTANDINGS OCCUR

Professor Xu Qinyuan with the China Communication University understands why some foreigners remain skeptical of the Long March.

"People's knowledge and understanding are largely dictated by their cultural and historical background,"she says, noting that now that China is a peace-loving, prosperous society, younger Chinese find it hard to relate to the Long March slogan to "hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope".

Professor Zhu Qingbao believes that ideological differences between China and western countries have created too much distrust. "Especially when western media carry so much negative information about China," he says.

The 43-year-old professor is frank and nobody's fool: he knows that some stories about the Long March have indeed been "exaggerated" but that doesn't take away from the event's historical significance nor the courageous sacrifices made by ordinary people of the day. The professor hopes to see more objective and authoritative books about the Long March.

Although McEwen may doubt the veracity of some of the tall tales of the Long March, his experiences along the route meeting village elders, interviewing survivors and taking in the battle grounds led him to an inescapable conclusion. "It is absurd to suggest the Long March was bogus because it was somehow less difficult than it ought to have been."

The Long March is not a fraud to Yang Jin, who broke down in tears as he described his final battle, when he charged across the dead bodies of his fallen comrades. It is not a fraud to Zhang Chaoman, who was strung up and tortured for helping the Reds cross the River of Golden Sands. It is not a fraud to my friend Alec Shen's grandfather, who marched as a teenage Red soldier. He was so tired that he fell asleep over his rifle during one skirmish. He was woken in the morning by the bugle call and nudged the comrade lying to his left: "Come on, wake up, we have to go." His comrade was dead.

Source: Xinhua