Spring forward, fall back
Republics, as much as monarchies, need founding myths in order to legitimise themselves in the eyes of their subjects. For a long time, the image of Chairman Mao leading his rag-tag troops over 10,000 kilometers, across 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers, offered abundant proof of communist bravery, endurance and selfless idealism to the Chinese. Com- pared to Mao’s exertions, Gandhi’s Salt March, the central legend of Indian nationalism, looks like a public relations gimmick. The Long March was first mythologised by the American journalist Edgar Snow, who visited Mao at his safe base in north-west China in 1936, and whose largely admiring account of Chinese communists in Red Star Over China shaped international perceptions of them for the next few decades.