US academic retraces Long March

William N. Brown, an American business studies professor at Xiamen University, is celebrating his bond with China that began half a century ago when he served on a United States Air Force base on Taiwan Island in 1976.

After leaving the military in 1981, completing his education and selling his business, Brown moved with his family in 1988 to the coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian province. Known for his academic work in business management and promotion of local culture, he in 1992 became the first foreign national in Fujian province to obtain Chinese permanent residency.

In 2019, President Xi Jinping congratulated him in a reply letter on the publication of his book, Off the Wall – How We Fell for China.

Marking his 50-year bond with the country, the 70-year-old recently embarked on a multimedia project retracing the historic Long March.

From October 1934 to October 1936, the Red Army, the precursor to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, marched across treacherous terrain to break the Nationalist Kuomintang regime's encirclement and regroup for the war against Japanese aggression.

With some marching as far as 12,500 kilometers while enduring hunger, thirst and cold, the Red Army carried out a daring military maneuver that changed the trajectory of the Communist Party of China and the history of the whole nation.

For Brown, however, the journey was deeply visceral. Having previously driven over 200,000 kilometers across every Chinese province — including a grueling 40,000-km road trip in 1994 when he noted road infrastructure was primitive — he still found the physical realities of the Long March staggering.

"I could not imagine walking through such terrain, in sweltering heat or freezing winters," Brown said. "Just reading about the Long March is interesting, but it's no more real than watching a historic movie. Even if the facts are correct, you still can't grasp the essence of the joys and sufferings."

While retracing the footsteps of the Long March this year, Brown was moved meeting the descendants of those who lost their sons and weren't able to find out where they had died until decades later.

"What most impressed me was that even though the Red Army troops, who averaged only 19, I hear, were starving and freezing, and lacked weapons, they never took advantage of the common people," Brown said.

Brown found that if the Red Army soldiers received food or clothing, they always found a way to pay for it.

"In all of history, I think there was no other 'march' as grueling as this, and yet the soldiers showed their love for China by their love for the people they met. It was not a slogan, 'Love China', but the reality of their love for the people," he said.

Later this year, Brown's latest book will be published, entitled Many People, One Dream: Bill Brown's Record of China's Shared Prosperity For All Ethnicities.

When revisiting the Long March sites, Brown was especially moved to learn more about how the Red Army treated the Yi ethnic group living near Yihai Lake in Mianning county in Southwest China's Sichuan province.

He found that the Yi people initially disliked the Red Army because they thought the Red Army "were just like the Nationalists (led by the Kuomintang regime) and the warlords".

"The Red Army could have destroyed the Yi, but instead they very patiently won their trust, helped them understand what they were fighting for — and the Yi made peace with them," Brown said.

"This is amazing to me that not just the Han Chinese but the minorities across China supported the Red Army because they all could see clearly that, if the Red Army failed, China would also fall — either to the Japanese or Chiang Kai-shek, or to the warlords or to the foreigners who wanted to divide China into tiny colonies as they did in Africa," he added.

In Brown's view, if the Red Army had failed to reach Yan'an, which is located in today's Shaanxi province and was home to a revolutionary base, "Japan would likely have conquered China, and then the rest of Asia".

"History is like a lot of little dominos falling, and something that seems insignificant now might loom much larger months or years later. So in telling the Long March story, I think it's important to help foreigners see what was really at stake," he said.