Great foreign books on the Long March

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Long March, a strategic operation undertaken between 1934-36 by China's Red Army whilst being pursued by feudal warlords and hordes of Kuomintang troops, moving its headquarters and forces along the Yangtze River to the Shaanxi-Gansu Revolutionary Base.

Watching documentaries or reading books are good ways to learn about the history, but it can be even more interesting if you read something written by western writers. Here are four books we've selected for readers.

The Long March: The Untold Story By Harrison E. Salisbury

About the book: This book chronicles events before, during and shortly after the Long March, which was an heroic journey the Chinese Communist-led Red Army took in the mid-30s.

About the author:

Harrison E. Salisbury was born and raised in Minnesota. It's where he went to school and had his start in journalism.

Beginning in 1972, he made frequent trips to China and traveled extensively along the Sino-Soviet border, the extreme Northwest of China, Tibet, along the rocky road from Lhasa to Katmandu and in 1984, 7,400 miles along the Long March routes.

What the author said about the Long March:

"China's Long March of 1934 was no symbol. It was a great human epic which tested the will, courage, and strength of the men and women of the Chinese Red Army.

It was not a "march" in the conventional sense, not a military campaign, not a victory. It was a triumph of human survival, a deadly, endless retreat from the claws of Chiang Kai-shek; a battle that again and again came within a hair's breadth of defeat and disaster...No event in this century has so captured the world's imagination and so profoundly affected its future. It led in a straight line from the shadow river of the Yudu in southern China, crossed by the Red Army on October 16, 1934, to the proclamation by Mao, from the rostrum of Tiananmen Square in Beijing on October 1, 1949, of the People's Republic of China -that is, to the triumph of Communism in a land inhabited by one-quarter of the human inhabitants of the earth. "