The Long March at 90: How a 1936 Retreat Tops China's Trending List Again

For much of this weekend, the top item on Weibo's trending list was not a scandal or a sports result but a three-character historical phrase: 我们的长征路 — "our Long March road." The driver is a music video titled 奇迹, "Miracle," released by People's Daily to mark the 90th anniversary of the Long March's end. The newspaper's post has been reposted more than 270,000 times; its lyric addresses the dead of the 1930s directly — "your names are carved into the country's rivers and mountains; your blood has become the brilliance of the stars."

The Long March is the founding epic of the Chinese Communist Party. In October 1934 the Red Army's main force broke out of an encirclement and slipped out of Yudu county in Jiangxi province; what followed was roughly two years and, by the count taught in Chinese schools, twenty-five thousand li — about 12,500 kilometres — of marching, fighting and starvation. The columns crossed the Jinsha and Dadu rivers, climbed the snow mountains and the grasslands, and converged in Shaanxi in October 1936, a minority of those who had set out. The retreat is the story through which the party explains both its survival and its claim to rule, and it is retold with more institutional muscle than almost any other date in China's political calendar.

That machinery was on display this week. Baidu's top board item pairs the anniversary with Xi Jinping's formulation that "every generation has its own Long March road" (每一代人有每一代人的长征路), the line that turns the historical march into a standing metaphor for national endeavour. People's Online ran a feature tracing the route back to Yudu, where Xi visited the departure monument in 2019. At decade marks, the commemoration arrives on schedule across newspapers, broadcasters and platforms at once.

This year's campaign also shows how state media and the creator economy now share the work. Among the posts keeping the phrase aloft is a three-part series by Gou Wenlong, a self-described "knowledge influencer" on People's Daily's creator platform, who spent the autumn filming a re-walk of the key sites; the final instalment took his audience to the Dadu River crossing in Sichuan, where Red Army fighters famously came under fire while crossing a chain bridge. "The Long March is not a past that has gone away, but a spark passed down from generation to generation," he wrote there — the campaign's framing, delivered in an individual voice.

For an international reader, the striking thing is less the history than the production: a music video, an explainer feature and a creator documentary arriving in step, occupying the top of a trending list on a schedule set months in advance. In cases like this one, the trending list functions as a public ceremony — a place where the country is seen to remember together, on a date the calendar fixed ninety years in advance.