Breaking through is a phrase that resonates with many Chinese people nowadays. Facing current challenges, it connects them to an epic military expedition that took place almost a century ago.
"It is an odyssey unequalled in modern times." So wrote American journalist Edgar Snow 90 years ago, after meeting Mao Zedong and others survivors of the Long March in China's northwest.
In October 1934, facing serious military defeat, 86,000 soldiers of the Central Red Army embarked on a journey that forever changed China. After fighting hundreds of bloody battles, crossing roaring rivers, climbing over snow-capped mountains and trekking across deadly swamp-covered grasslands, in October 1935 they arrived in northern Shaanxi. But only some 8,000 of them had survived.