Georeactor Blog<br>RSS Feed

Lianda and the Long March<br>June 24, 2026

Tags: bookshistoryseries<br>In 2018, former journalist Yang Xiao walked 1,000 miles from Changsha to Kunming. He was following a trek taken by hundreds students and a few adventurous faculty of three elite Chinese universities in 1938. In the face of the Japanese invasion, they united into one school (Lianda, 臨大, a shorthand for Provisional University) and moved their campus deep into the mountains of southern China.

They climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and sometimes slept side by side with coffins－even spending the night in a supposedly haunted house. They woke up at dawn and slept late, sometimes seeing off the threat of bandits in between. They sang, danced and played cards. One student, Liu Zhaoji, collected more than 2,000 folk songs along the way, and another, named Zha Liangzheng, would tear the page out of an English dictionary after he had memorized its content.

Photo from Wikipedia

When I first read about the journey, my only reference point was Mao's Long March a few years later. I wondered if that could be the inspiration? Instead, the common thread appears to be advances in technology and roads . Mass movements could now hire a few trucks to carry supplies and injured marchers, and buses over a few steep and snowy stretches, but there were not yet enough vehicles or reliable roads to carry hundreds of travelers continuously from start to finish.

Another wartime march took middle school students ~260 miles from Xi'an to Tianshui.

Just a few years later, the Japanese army's use of bicycle infantry in Malaya would be seen as cutting-edge.

In some ways the student march was seen as a patriotic action, and a way for urban, Han Chinese students to engage with rural communities over ~70 days. In a section maybe foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution, professors at both ends of the political spectrum believed that the students should do some national service in the countryside.

Young women at the schools and most faculty took a more conventional route, but found themselves traveling alongside other refugees through multiple ship and rail links (through Hong Kong or Hanoi). This was fraught with its own difficulties, and the route would be cut by the Japanese in 1941-42.

While Chiang Kai-Shek's government moved to Chongqing, and Mao's army was in Yan'an, the combined university would try to hold on through the bombs of one war and the upcoming rumblings of the next.

Why I was reading about Lianda<br>After reading about W. E. B. Du Bois's visit to Shanghai in Arise Africa, Roar China, I wondered if pre-war Shanghai had a place as a lost ideal cosmopolitan center, like 'Paris in the 20s'. The Wikipedia article on "History of Shanghai" says as much: "The Paris of the East, the New York of the West". The phrase originated with the travel guide, All About Shanghai and Environs. Same vibes as how people like to talk about Shenzhen today:

During this research I stumble on the story of Lianda as an intellectual meeting point. From Wikipedia at the time (removed due to NPOV):

Lianda became famous nationwide for having and producing many of China's most prominent scientists and intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize laureates Yang Chen-Ning and Tsung-Dao Lee

The go-to book on this, in both the 2018 article and some sources in the English-speaking world, is Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (John Israel, 1998). The book received a surge in popularity after a Chinese translation became available in 2012 (most GoodReads reviews are in Chinese).

Highlights from the book<br>China's three leading universities evacuated from Beijing and Tianjin in 1937. They spent one year in Changsha, where (pre-Pearl Harbor) a US flag would deter Japanese air raids. The art college campus was "a wonderful society of philosophers, writers, and scholars, all in one building." When Changsha fell within range of attacks, that began the march to Kunming.

Lianda was successful in combining the distinct cultures of each major university. This was a pivotal time for professors to consider maintaining Chinese values or embracing Western academia as modernization. An example would be the imposition of a final exam, which Lianda agreed to conduct but not grade.

The author mentions another wartime university "Xibei Lianda" established in the northwest, which failed in this tumultuous environment.

The conditions in the retrofitted buildings sound appalling, and wartime inflation stretched students' and professors' budgets. There were months when the Japanese would do air raids on any clear morning, mandating the careful scheduling of meals and classes.

The Nationalists initially did not press professors and students into wartime or patriotic education. Over time the regional government and education ministry shifted their attitudes, and students were required to take courses and attend speeches on Chinese values (particularly Sun Yat-Sen's Three...