The Long March

by Sun Shuyun

HarperCollins, $300

Superficially, Julia Lovell's The Great Wall and Sun Shuyun's The Long March have a good deal in common. Both are written by female scholars, equally at ease with English and Chinese. Both are concerned with modern perceptions of key aspects of China's history. And both are revisionist, seeking to persuade the reader of the harsher realities that may undermine conventional judgments of their subjects.

There the similarities end.

Lovell's book is disappointing at several levels. Its sub-title, 'China against the world 1000BC - 2000AD', advertises its over- ambitious scope up-front. But, even so, it should have two exciting and important stories to tell: the construction and re-construction of the world's oldest and greatest defensive fortification; and the damage caused to China by its perennial self-portrayal as the centre of the civilised world. Unfortunately, Lovell fails in both endeavours. The facts are manipulated to support a modish theory: that the Great Wall mirrors a more metaphorical barrier erected by successive Chinese governments to keep out foreigners and control its own people.

The reality is both more interesting and less simple. The Great Wall is the example par excellence of the type of frontier fortification built by many pre-modern societies to ward off the barbarians beyond. The Sinocentric view of the world is also a historical fact - but one due entirely to geography. It was a perfectly reasonable attitude in all periods up to the Ming, when China's increasing exposure to the more sophisticated and aggressive cultures of the west resulted in a loss of the dignity it was expected to enhance. Lovell's clumsy attempts to connect these two phenomena do not make for a coherent narrative. Instead, the successive chapters of her book read like a condensed, Reader's Digest version of The Cambridge History of China. Her reliance on secondary sources is marked.

There are tantalising glimpses of what Lovell might have produced had she been less preoccupied by her idee fixe. She is at her best when steering the general reader through the less-known Chinese dynasties: the warlords of the Jin, Yuen and Liao; the colourful figures at the fall of the Ming such as Zhang Juzheng, Altan Khan, Li Zicheng and Wu Sangui. There are also evocative passages about the life of the garrisons on the Great Wall itself - the hardships, frustrations and routine - notably on the Han fortifications discovered by Sir Aurel Stein. A bigger injection of this material would have been more helpful than Lovell's speculations about why most Chinese people now refer to the Great Wall, rather than the Long Wall (they don't), or on half-baked musings about the future of the internet in China.

This book ultimately fails because of the author's dislike of her own subject or, at the least, her failure to see it from the inside. Confucius and Confucian thought are repeatedly mocked ('the unctuously self-abasing nature of Confucian leadership'), as are many of China's greatest emperors (Taizong of the Tang, Hongwu of the Ming); the Imperial Examination system is dismissed as 'educational torture and Confucian thought control'; and, of course, the present regime fares no better ('the law, or what passes for it in the People's Republic') and so on and on. Edward Said warned orientalists about this sort of thing a long time ago, but it seems that Lovell wasn't listening.

It's a relief to turn to Sun Shuyun's delightfully idiosyncratic account of The Long March, one of the defining events in China's modern history, and of her own extraordinary retracing of the experiences and subsequent fates of some of the ordinary participants. Revisionist historians have recently launched an emotive attack on the received accounts of the March: notable is the venomously one-sided biography of Mao Zedong by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang. Sun is able to see clearly the Marchers' underlying heroism (not a fashionable word these days.)

She avoids anger and cynicism. She writes in a limpid, almost lyrical style of the realities of the march. She doesn't gloss over, but rather transcends the horrors masked by subsequent propaganda: purges, military blunders, treachery, hunger and confusion. She sees through these inevitable aspects of a world in chaos to the spirit of the Long Marchers themselves.

Her narrative formula is deceptively simple. In 12 terse, evocative chapters she chronicles the experiences then and later of a similar number of the marchers. Each chapter begins with a journalistic reconstruction of events: the dramatic execution of a corrupt official by enraged villagers; the machinations of the treacherous Chen Jitang, the warlord of Canton; Lin Biao's shaky crossing of the Luding River; Deng Xiaoping's harsh realism in his writing for the Red Star; the spontaneous celebrations when the three main Red Armies eventually met in Huining. (A minor cavil: there is, perhaps inevitably, more coverage of the First Army than the Second or Fourth, partly because of the nature of the records and partly because Mao's escape from Ruijin from the encircling forces of Chiang Kai-shek formed the grand opening of the drama that ended in the remote northwest of the country.)

Then, in each chapter, the author turns up in person, talks to the participants great and small, without preconceptions, on their own terms. These are the best sections of the book. The stories of the likes of Ma Fucai, Sangluo Propagandist Wu linger long in the mind.

Finally, there are historical summaries - concise, precise, non-judgmental. No sneers about 'a new state-sponsored religion', no politically correct adulation of the ghastly feudal theocracy then still prevailing in Tibet (but much compassion for individual Tibetans), no bogus comparisons with western thought systems. Instead, acknowledgement that the brutal reality of a revolution adds to the heroism of its participants.

Sun strengthens this unmodern perception with an intensive use of primary material (and excellent photographs) and by the inclusion of sensitive translations of revolutionary poetry, such as Mao's justly famous lines, written during a particularly desperate period in drought-stricken Shaanxi:

The Yellow River's swift current/ Is stilled from end to end./ The mountains dance like silver snakes/ And the hills charge like wax-hued elephants,/ Vying with heaven in stature./ On a fine day, the land,/ Clad in white, adorned in red/ Grows more enchanting.

One of the most sympathetic portraits in the book is that of Woman Wang, who fought with the First, Second and Fourth Red Armies (and the Western Legion, for good measure). Sun knows that Wang's ruthlessness in a just cause, her unshakeable loyalty after many years of undeserved ostracism, her continuing zest and essential humanity were and are a rare combination - even among the Marchers.