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 was a daring military maneuver that laid the foundation for the eventual victory of the Communist Party of China (CPC). It was carried out by different divisions of the Red Army, each of which traversed China for thousands of kilometers along different routes from October 1934 to October 1936.
Zhou is an example of the booming tourism related to the Long March in recent years as China marks the 80th anniversary of its end on Saturday, and as the CPC presses ahead with its campaign on patriotism and ideology.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to make a speech on Friday to commemorate the Long March.
"By establishing Long March-themed museums and memorials along the route of the Red Army's expedition, such as the Zunyi Conference site in Southwest China's Guizhou Province, China is trying to produce good social benefits," an official with the State Administration of Cultural Heritage told the People's Daily.
The administration says that there are over 2,100 sites or landmarks associated with the Long March across China, covering 15 provincial areas, including East China's Fujian Province, South China's Guangdong Province, and Northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
In the 12th Five-Year Plan from 2011 to 2015, cultural authorities incorporated cultural sites from the Long March into a special protection plan, for which the government provided funding of around 680 million yuan ($100.8 million), reported the People's Daily on Thursday.
Red tourism bonanza
"Preserving historic revolutionary relics provides venues for education in revolutionary tradition and patriotism for the public, and especially the young. It also converts historical, cultural, and political resources into new economic growth points," said Cai Shuming, director of the Huining Red Army meeting site administrative committee in Northwest China's Gansu Province.
More than 1 million tourists visited Huining annually from 2010 to 2015, making it the largest site for patriotic education in Gansu, and netting earnings of over 1.1 billion yuan for the tourism sector.
According to the National Tourism Bureau, visits to many red scenic spots along the Long March route - which begins in Ruijin, East China's Jiangxi Province to Yan'an in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province - doubled during the recent National Day Holiday, although no exact figures were provided.
An employee from the administrative office of the Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Hall in Shaanxi Province, the end point of the March and an essential stop for Long March tourists, confirmed that the number of visitors this year had risen prominently compared to previous years, exceeding 20,000 during the National Day Holiday.
