Ninety Years After the Long March, China Marks Martyrs' Day on National Day's Eve
The day before National Day is Martyrs' Day, when China mourns the people who made the holiday possible. This year — the Long March's 90th anniversary — the mourning runs through a Zunyi documentary, a genetics lab, and 300,000 celebrity reposts.
On Wednesday morning, 1 October's fireworks still unfired, China will hold its 12th Martyrs' Day: a state ceremony at Tiananmen Square, where leaders and civilians will present flower baskets at the Monument to the People's Heroes. The holiday has been deliberately welded to the one after it since 2014 — as CCTV's report puts it, the nation mourns the people who made the state the day before it celebrates the state itself. This year the calendar carries extra weight: 2026 marks the 105th anniversary of the Communist Party and the 90th anniversary of the end of the Long March.
On Weibo, the top trending phrase of the day was a memorial formula — undying heroes, the mountains and rivers remember — carried by a People's Daily call to post in remembrance. The post was reposted more than 300,000 times within hours, most prominently by the pop star Xiao Zhan, whose own account reaches his tens of millions of followers: remembrance is one of the few observances where celebrity feeds and state media move as one.
The anniversary also arrived with a television companion. Guizhou Satellite TV began airing "Three Days in Zunyi" this week, a five-part documentary about the January 1935 meeting that Communist history books call the great turning point — the three days in a Guizhou town where, with the Red Army nearly destroyed, Mao Zedong consolidated the leadership that would carry the march to its end. A review that circulated widely praised the film's restraint: it tells the story of Chen Shuxiang, a 29-year-old commander who tore open his own abdominal wound rather than be taken alive at the Xiang River, without swelling music, and it lets a veteran's recollection carry the humour — hundreds of thousands of pursuers chasing the army across the Jinsha River, and collecting, in the end, one pair of worn straw sandals. Its most affecting detail is civilian: villagers along the Tucheng crossing pulled out door planks, and coffins, to build the pontoon bridges that got the army across.
The memory work now runs through molecular biology as well. A feature in ThePaper profiles Wen Shaoqing, who runs Fudan University's molecular archaeology laboratory and has spent a decade using DNA analysis to identify unnamed soldiers' remains and match them to living descendants — letting the bones, as the headline has it, speak for themselves, so that nameless martyrs become people with names again.
That is the quiet logic of the two-day sequence: Wednesday's ceremony honours the dead whose war made Thursday's holiday possible, and ninety years on, the state is still spending — documentaries, ceremonies, genetics labs — on making sure the dead have names.