Long March tourism big earner for remote areas

Book editor Zhou Jun, 59, has spent the past decade inspecting and walking along the Long March routes, although in considerable more comfort than soldiers from the Red Army in the 1930s.

Since 2003, he has traveled across crucial parts of the Long March route, including the high, bleak grasslands of western China where many soldiers starved to death, and visited dozens of crucial points in their climb over the snow mountains of Sichuan Province, where many marchers froze due to inadequate clothing and shelter.

“I’m not trying to reenact the Long March because we can’t compare ourselves to the Red Army. I’m exploring those landscapes in person and trying to formulate ideas on how the events actually went,” Zhou told the Global Times.

The Long March