From the Long March to China's path to modernisation

The Long March of 1934–1936 was a strategic retreat by the Chinese Red Army to escape encirclement by Kuomintang forces. Facing severe shortages of weapons and supplies, the troops crossed snow-covered mountains and remote grasslands while enduring repeated military engagements. The relentlessly arduous journey came at an enormous human cost.

China's modernisation today presents a different kind of challenge. As a country of more than 1.4 billion people, it must continue narrowing the development gap between urban and rural areas, strengthening domestic technological capabilities, transitioning toward a greener economy , upgrading its industries, and improving people's livelihoods. 

Of course, the circumstances are vastly different from those of the original Long March, and yet modernisation is an ambitious and enduring undertaking. The achievements of the past do not complete the journey, but merely serve to kick-start the next stage. 

Narrowing the gap between urban and rural development 

China declared extreme poverty eliminated in 2020. The next challenge is to consolidate those gains and find sustainable ways to improve rural livelihoods. For many villages, that means developing industries that can generate reliable income, a task that is more difficult than it sounds.

The river and flat terrain surrounding Duanting Village in Shanxi Province, northern China, make the area well suited to rice cultivation. But for years, growing rice was not a reliable way for local farmers to make a living. The traditional rice variety was vulnerable to disease and the region’s relatively cold weather. In 1997, villagers abandoned rice farming and switched mainly to corn, a safer crop but one that offered less room to increase the value of their produce.

In 2021, the village had a new head in office. Zhao Jibin, a local who had been working away in a larger city, returned to the village to run for the position. After winning the election , he set out to revive the local economy, starting with the industry that had once sustained the village: rice farming. 

He firmly believed that rice could bring farmers better returns than corn. The village’s terrain and access to river water were favourable, he reasoned, but simply bringing back the old variety would not solve the problem. What the village needed was a rice better suited to the local climate and more resistant to disease.

After learning that a variety adapted to Shanxi’s conditions had been developed, Zhao began testing it on a small plot. The results encouraged him to expand cultivation year by year. “In the first year, we planted two hectares. The area then expanded to more than 13.3 hectares in 2025,” Zhao said. “The amount we can plant now depends on how many rice seedlings the nursery can supply.”

But expanding production has brought its own challenges. The village needed proper facilities and equipment to protect what it had produced. In 2023, the village’s old, undersized warehouse could no longer adequately store the rice harvest. Some of the crop became mouldy, leading to losses. 

That year, the village applied for $100,000 in funding to build a new warehouse and purchase modern agricultural machinery. This helped put rice farming on a more promising footing.

Zhao also looked for ways to create income beyond rice cultivation. In 2024, the village introduced rice-crab co-culture, raising crabs in rice fields. The two complement each other: crabs feed on certain pests and weeds, while rice plants provide shelter for the crabs.

Setting up the new system required additional investment. The village applied for about $15,000 in funding to prepare the fields, including digging trenches for the crabs, installing barriers to keep them from escaping, and building tanks for feeding and disinfection.

The unfamiliar approach surprised some villagers, particularly older residents. “I never imagined rice and crabs could be raised in the same fields. Seeing 40,000 crabs released into the paddies really opened my eyes,” one villager said.

Zhao’s efforts also extended beyond the fields. To attract visitors, the village cleaned up the riverside and developed a camping area where families could enjoy the rural landscape, go crabbing in the rice fields and spend time outdoors.

The village has also registered a brand for its rice, promoting it as a local product grown with water from a nearby river. By combining farming with tourism, the village hopes to attract more visitors and encourage them to buy local produce. Zhao said the new activities had created more opportunities for villagers to earn income at home. 

Duanting’s experience reflects a broader challenge facing rural China: how to build industries that can generate stable, sustainable income. As young people leave for larger cities, many villages face a shrinking workforce. Limited resources, short industrial chains and uncertain returns also make it difficult to develop businesses that can withstand market risks. 

Yet across rural China, village leaders like Zhao, along with experts and other local actors, are exploring new ways to turn local resources into lasting sources of income. The work is underway, but building viable rural industries takes time, sustained investment and continued effort.

Developing a new way to bring rockets home

Technological innovation is essential to a country's long-term development, but breakthroughs in critical fields require more than adopting existing technologies. They depend on building expertise, developing technical capabilities and finding solutions to difficult problems. China's efforts to develop reusable rockets, for example, offer a glimpse of this process.

A rocket’s journey does not have to end when its first stage separates from the rest of the vehicle. In July 2026, China’s Long March-10B rocket completed its maiden flight, delivering its payload into orbit before a vessel at sea successfully recovered its first stage. This section provides the thrust for liftoff.

The achievement made China the second country, after the United States, to successfully recover an orbital-class rocket booster. The goal is to recover, refurbish and reuse the booster rather than discard it after one flight, potentially reducing launch costs by avoiding the need to build a new one for every mission.

Lou Luliang, the project's chief designer, highlighted the technical challenges involved. “Bringing the first stage back and landing it precisely so it can be reused is a challenge on top of a challenge. The recovery process takes about five minutes, during which the booster must slow from around 2 kilometres per second to a complete stop, which is quite tough,” Lou said. 

China has developed its own approach to rocket booster recovery. Operational recovery and reuse of orbital-class rocket boosters was pioneered by America’s SpaceX. Its Falcon 9 boosters reignite their engines to slow down before landing on deployable legs, either on land or on a sea-based platform.

China's Long March-10B, by contrast, is designed to use four hooks on the booster to engage with tensioned cables suspended above a recovery vessel. This hook-and-cable system would secure the returning booster without landing legs and could allow some tolerance in its final position.

It also offers a potential weight advantage. By eliminating landing legs, the rocket may carry less hardware, leaving more capacity for its payload. 

The concept may sound straightforward, but executing it requires precision at every stage. The booster must control its descent and reach the recovery area at the right position and speed. Meanwhile, the vessel must maintain its position amid wind, waves and currents, while the hooks and cables must work together to capture and secure the rocket. A failure at any stage could jeopardise the recovery, along with the opportunity to reuse a costly piece of equipment.

Ma Jianrui, a designer of the project, said the period from the start of the project to the first recovery was the shortest of its kind for the team. The compressed schedule reflects the pressure to turn an engineering concept into a working system.

As the booster was successfully captured by the recovery system on July 10 this year, around 100 team members monitoring the operation from the control centre burst into tears and cheered, “We made it!” The joy of a breakthrough, and sometimes the tears that come with it, hold a meaning that only those who have worked tirelessly to achieve it can fully understand. 

Breakthroughs rarely come easily. Each one is built on years of effort, repeated experiments and the determination to overcome setbacks. Behind the country’s technological progress are teams of people who dream big and keep searching for solutions, even when success remains uncertain.

The road ahead: A new Long March 

China’s modernisation remains a complex undertaking, with challenges still ahead. Chinese leaders have likened this process to a “New Long March.” Revitalising rural communities and developing new technologies are just two facets of this broader effort.

The challenges today differ from those faced in the past, but moving forward still calls for many of the same qualities: resilience in the face of setbacks, hard work in pursuit of difficult goals, hope for a better future and cooperation to turn shared aspirations into reality.

These efforts not only help shape China's future, but also create opportunities to share knowledge, advance technology, and address challenges that transcend national borders. 

The article solely represents the views of Chen Ziqi, a Beijing-based journalist with CGTN, known for covering cross-cultural and international stories.

Between 2020 and 2024, official figures show a gradual increase in membership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), with more than 80% of new members under the age of 35.

This raises a question: how does the CPC continue to attract the younger generation in today’s rapidly changing society?

One way to explore this is not through abstract policies , but through the lived experiences of foreign friends who came to China and witnessed its transformation on the ground in different periods.

Edgar Snow was the first international journalist to travel to the Communist Party of China’s revolutionary base areas in northern Shaanxi in 1936. A year later, he published Red Star over China, one of the earliest first-hand Western accounts of the Chinese Revolution.

Seeking to understand what the CPC was at a time when it was still little known or often mischaracterised as a gang of outlaws, Snow’s book reached a wide international readership and sold more than 100,000 copies in Britain after its publication.

By then, the Red Army had just completed its famous Long March, a two-year retreat across some of the most difficult terrain in China’s interior to escape encirclement campaigns by Kuomintang forces.

Along the way, more than half of the soldiers died from battles, hunger, and extreme conditions, as they crossed snow-covered mountains, swollen rivers, and vast stretches of rugged land with limited supplies.

Yet the movement continued to draw the faithful support of many who were often willing to lose their lives, even as the Red Army was poorly equipped and heavily outnumbered.

Snow’s arrival in the revolutionary base was welcomed by the party’s top leaders, who saw an opportunity to present their perspective to the outside world . He was given access and support by Zhou Enlai, later the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, who encouraged him to report openly on what he saw.

During his four-month visit, the journalist interviewed senior leaders of the CPC and villagers. He also visited military camps, schools, and local factories, recording his observations and conversations in his book.

Back then, China was still a predominantly rural society, where the vast majority of the population were peasants. To understand why many of them supported the Red Army, Snow often chatted informally with the locals, both young and old. Farmers were talkative and curious about farming practices in their country, and some even asked whether goat dung was used as fertiliser.

As he spent more time among them, Snow began asking his central question: why did they support this movement?

Many villagers started talking at once, recalling years of hunger and hardship before its arrival. They spoke of heavy taxes and land rents that once forced families to sell livestock, crops, and in some cases even their daughters.

In contrast, they described how the army helped ease burdens, taught them how to read and write, and worked to ensure people had enough food for daily needs in local communities.

From years on the brink of survival to more stable living conditions, some villagers referred to it as “poor people’s army, fight for the people’s rights,” a phrase recorded in Edgar Snow’s book. The depiction reflected the close bond between soldiers and civilians.

The sense of affection evolved into strong unity, as many farmers and even teenagers joined the ranks to defend their own rights. In his conversations with Communist commanders, Snow observed a sense of discipline and cohesion among the soldiers and a high level of commitment to collective goals during the revolutionary campaigns.

In his account of the crossing of the Dadu River, one of the most dangerous and fast-flowing rivers in China, Snow described a situation in which the Red Army could not afford failure, as defeat would likely have meant destruction.

The commanders understood the importance of rapid mobility, drawing lessons from earlier historical failures at similar crossings of the Dadu River. They also managed to build cooperation with local ethnic communities along the route, transforming potential hostility into an alliance. Alongside these decisions, small groups of soldiers voluntarily carried out high-risk operations at critical points, often under heavy fire, to secure passage for the larger force.

In Snow’s portrayal, it was this combination of effective military judgement and battlefield discipline that enabled the Red Army to succeed in what was widely regarded as an almost impossible crossing.

Snow’s observations also pointed to another dimension of the movement: the role of the young people. On his arrival in the base area, some of the first people he encountered were young couriers who brought him meals. He soon noticed that teenagers played an active role in daily operations, serving as messengers, scouts, orderlies, and nurses, many of whom would later become full members of the Red Army. He described them as “cheerful, energetic, and loyal—the living spirit of an astonishing crusade of youth.”

Taken together, Snow’s account offered a rare outsider’s view into a movement still little understood at the time. From villagers describing their reasons for joining, to young volunteers who devoted themselves to the rank and file, and commanders making rapid decisions under extreme wartime pressure, he observed a society shaped by hardship yet bound by organisation and shared purpose.

If Snow tried to understand a movement through the people he met in villages, Hansen Nico René found himself decades later observing a different kind of transformation from the inside.

In 2018, Hansen, a retired police officer from Luxembourg, arrived in Zhadong Village in Guangxi almost by chance. He had come to admire the region’s dramatic landscape, towering green mountains, mist drifting through valleys, and forests that seemed to fold into the clouds.

What he did not expect was that he would stay for eight years.

A notice calling for volunteers to help cultivate passion fruit, an effort tied to poverty alleviation, first drew his attention. Curious, he followed the path deeper into the village and soon met Xie Wanju, the village’s first Party secretary.

From their first meeting, Hansen noticed something that would stay with him: Xie was not a man who merely managed a village, but someone who worked in it, lived in it, and faced its challenges as his own.

Hansen said that sense of dedication made him realise how deeply a village could be transformed when its leadership was fully invested in its people.

Hansen still remembers one moment vividly. A transport vehicle carrying fertiliser became stuck on a narrow mountain road. With no machinery available, Xie rushed to the scene and joined more than a dozen villagers in tying ropes to the vehicle and pulling it forward by hand.

They looped the ropes over their shoulders and leaned into the weight, inching the vehicle forward step by step. With each effort, veins stood out on their foreheads as they shouted in unison, “One, two, three.”

It was exhausting work. Yet when the vehicle finally broke free, the group broke into broad smiles.

Hansen says Xie Wanju is devoted to improving the living standards of the area. But in Zhadong, improving livelihoods was never simply a policy goal, but a response to the constraints of the land itself.

For Zhadong, life had long been constrained by geography. Nestled among steep mountains with limited arable land and difficult access to outside markets, the village had once struggled with widespread poverty, with more than half of its residents living below the poverty line.

Out of necessity, local leaders had been searching for industries that could take root in such terrain, and passion fruit became one of the key experiments.

Hansen joined Xie in the fields almost immediately. Together with villagers, they loosened soil, planted seedlings, and built trellises under the oppressive summer heat. Many young people had already left for cities, so much of the labour fell on those who remained, working side by side with volunteers like Hansen.

The first harvest of passion fruit brought hope. The fruit grew well, and incomes began to rise. Encouraged, more villagers expanded cultivation. But agriculture rarely follows a straight path.

Pests soon spread through the fields, damaging leaves and threatening the harvest. An agricultural expert was called in, advising that preventive measures should have been taken earlier in the growth cycle. Now, it was a race against time.

Under pressure, Xie grew visibly concerned, not for himself, Hansen observed, but for the villagers whose hopes rested on the crop.

Without hesitation, Xie and Hansen worked alongside the expert to adjust the response: strengthening the plants with fertilisers, trimming affected branches, and reinforcing care routines to salvage what they could.

When harvest season returned, to help the fruit reach markets further afield, together with leaders from neighbouring villages, Xie helped establish online sales channels and live-streaming promotions to connect rural produce.

Beyond passion fruit, Xie and his team moved constantly between households, checking livestock conditions, helping build pig pens, treating sick animals with veterinary support, and studying market demand for local black pigs to ensure better sales. Each task, whether large or small, was approached with the same commitment: to make rural livelihoods more stable and sustainable.

Over time, the results became visible. In November 2020, Zhadong Village was officially lifted out of poverty. For many residents, it marked not an endpoint, but a turning point.

After that, Xie Wanju started working in another village called Lianhua in Guangxi, and Hansen chose to follow, continuing to support rural development efforts alongside him.

For Hansen, the years in Guangxi reshaped his understanding of what development can look like at the village level. What impressed him most was not a single project or harvest, but the example of a local leader who worked shoulder to shoulder with villagers, persisting through uncertainty, treating every setback as something to be solved together, and placing the village’s future at the centre of every decision.

They were different times and different settings - Snow’s journeys in the wartime base areas and Hansen’s years in a rural village in Guangxi – and yet a similar pattern emerges: people who come into close contact with China often encounter its society through everyday lives shaped by resilience, cooperation, and change.

Seen through these individual experiences, the question raised at the beginning returns in a quieter form, not as a statistic or a slogan, but in the ordinary moments where change is felt rather than explained.

The article solely represents the views of Chen Ziqi, a Beijing-based journalist with CGTN, known for covering cross-cultural and international stories.

A series of strong earthquakes struck multiple regions across the globe within 12 hours, with the strongest a magnitude 6.5 earthquake off the coast of the southern Philippines.

The USGS recorded 11 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or higher during the period, affecting countries across Asia, Oceania, Central America and the Caribbean. The events ranged from magnitude 4.6 to 6.5, highlighting the concentration of seismic activity along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," where tectonic plates frequently interact.

The largest event was a magnitude 6.5 earthquake that struck 34 kilometres west-southwest of Sarangani, Philippines, at a depth of 42 kilometres.

The quake occurred in a region that is among the world's most seismically active due to the interaction of the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. The USGS assigned the event a Green PAGER alert, indicating that widespread fatalities or major economic losses were unlikely.

The tremor came less than three weeks after a devastating magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Mindanao on June 8, underscoring the region's continued seismic activity.

Japan recorded two earthquakes exceeding magnitude 5 during the same period.

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck near Yokoshiba at a depth of 43 kilometres, followed later by a magnitude 5.7 event near Oshino at 50.9 kilometres depth, according to the USGS.

Japan sits atop the convergence of four major tectonic plates and experiences thousands of earthquakes each year, making it one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries.

Elsewhere, the USGS recorded:

Most of these earthquakes occurred along active plate boundaries, particularly around the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped belt that accounts for roughly 90% of the world's earthquakes and about 75% of active volcanoes, according to the USGS.

Why earthquakes cluster along the Ring of Fire

The Ring of Fire stretches around the Pacific Ocean through the Americas, East Asia and Oceania. Continuous movement of tectonic plates causes frequent earthquakes as plates collide, separate or slide past one another.

Countries such as Japan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand routinely experience significant seismic activity because they lie directly on these plate boundaries.