Our long march team was made up of eight boys and three girls averaging eighteen years of age. We started out from Bengbu on September 11, and crossed Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Hebei provinces. After forty-four days of walking we had covered a thousand kilometers and arrived in Beijing to be alongside our beloved leader Chairman Mao.
    Chairman Mao has said, "Our policy must be made known not only to the leaders and to the cadres but also to the broad masses." Vice Chairman Lin Biao has said, "The whole country should become a great school of Mao Zedong's thought." As Red Guards of Mao Zedong's thought, it was our glorious duty to disseminate his ideas.  We decided to organize our long march team to spread propaganda and to do our bit in the great cause of turning the whole country into a great school of Mao Zedong's thought.
    At the same time, we knew we had never been tested in revolutionary struggles, even though we all come from railway workers' families and have been brought up under the red flag. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution we learned that young people cannot become worthy successors to the proletarlan revolutionary cause if they have not tempered themselves in the storm of class struggle, integrated themselves with the workers and peasants, and remolded their world outlook. The long march, we decided, was a good way of tempering and remolding ourselves.
    These were the considerations that became decisive in our determination to undertake a long march. Before we left, we spent several days studying "The Orientation of the Youth Movement," "Serve the People", "In Memory of Norman Bethune," "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains," and some other writings by Chairman Mao. We armed ourselves with Mao Zedong's thought; his teachings unified our ideas and increased our confidence and courage.
    When the day for our departure arrived, we were all very excited. We made a pledge addressed to Chairman Mao: "Our most beloved leader Chairman Mao! The brilliance of your ideas is the light that guides us in heart and mind. We are resolved to fulfill your words, 'Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win Victory.' We shall not falter in getting to Beijing......
    To make a start is always difficult. The first day we walked twenty-seven kilometers. Many of our schoolmates suffered swollen feet and had to clench their teeth with cach step they took. Even when we stopped and rested, our backs and fect really ached. A few of us debated about going back home; whether to go forward or retreat became a question of revolutionary determination. It was a crucial moment. To solve the problem, we studied a passage in Chairman Mao Zedong's works in which he says, "How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary?... There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice."
    We took this as a mirror in which to examine out own ideas and decided that the purpose of our long march was to integrase ourselves with the masses, to learn from the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and to train ourselves as proletarian revolutionary successors who can truly stand all tests. "How shall we wage revolution if we can't even pass this first test?" we asked ourselves. "No!  We must keep on. To go forward means victory!" In this way we applied Mao Zedong's ideas and prevailed over the vacillating muck in our minds. We all became more confident than ever.
    We all carried knapsacks as well as gongs, drums, and study material. On the average we each carried a load of about fifteen kilograms. But we plucked up our courage and kept going, though the weather was very hot. At the time our clothes, and even our knapsacks, were soaked through with our perspiration.
    We sang. At any difficult moment we all sang the wonderful lines from Chairman Mao's poem: "The Red Army fears not the trials of a distant march; to them a thousand mountains, ten thousand rivers are nothing"; and we also sang: "We count the myriad leagues we have come already; if we reach not the Great Wall, we are not true men!".
    Each of us had a quotation from Chairman Mao Zedong written on a placard fixed to his knapsack. The one behind read it aloud in turn, and all of us took it up in chorus. It raised our spirits and helped to shore up our determination. For Chairman Mao's words brought to mind what the old Red Army did on its 12,500 kilometer Long March. It gave us fresh energy and the will to persist. Each step we took, we told ourselves, brought us a step closer to our great leader, Chairman Mao.
    Our journey from Xuzhou to Hanchuan presented us with another difficult test. That day we arrived at a small place where we had planned to eat, only to find the public mess hall closed. We could have asked the peasants to cook a meal especially for us but decided not to, since we knew that they were busy with farm work. We put on our regular propaganda performance and walked on, very thirsty and hungry. The weather was broiling. We felt almost completely exhausted. But we read aloud Chairman Mao's statement: "Give full play to our style of fighting-courage in battle, no fear of sacrifice, no fear of fatigue, and continuous fighting." We recalled that the Chinese people were hungry every day before Liberation. When the old Red Army on the 12,500 kilometer Long March crossed snow-capped mountains and marshlands, they were reduced to boiling their leather belts and digging up roots for food. They often went hungry. What did it matter if we missed our meals for one day? It was an opportunity to show our determination. Our revolutionary predecessors endured hunger for the sake of those to come. If we now tempered ourselves we could make a better contribution to the Chinese and the world revolution, so that the great masses in the world would not go hungry. This was the gist of our talk and our thoughts, and so we no longer felt hungry. In fact, we marched on with greater vigor, and, as we walked, we beat our gongs and drums and sang revolutionary songs. That day we kept our average of four propaganda performances.
    On the way we met a number of leading members of various institutions. With the best of intentions, they advised us to go to Beijing by train. We must have looked tired to them. Some of them even offered us train tickets, but, in every case, we refused. We felt that come what may, we would not give up our objective halfway. We persistes northward on foot to gain and exchange revolutionary experiences.
    We Red Guards are reserves of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. We knew we had to follow its example, the finest example of adherence to Chairman Mao's teachings. The army feared no trials, strictly applied the Party's policies, and maintained high discipline. We consciously tried to emulate it during our long march by applying the three main rules of discipline and the eight points for attention which Chairman Mao himself forrnulated for the Chinese People's Liberation Army long ago.
    None of us ever bought any sweets on the way or had any food other than our regular meals. We never wasted a grain of food and took great care of public property.  We washed our own clothes, did our own mending, and cut one another's hair instead of going to a barber. In short, we were very thrifty in our way of living. We made a particular effort to temper ourselves by plain living, especially in the matter of food.  The more we did so, we felt, the better we could remold our ideology. Guided by Mao Zedong's thought, we overcarne one difficulty after another and successfully stood the test we had set ourselves-the first real test in our lives.
    Chairman Mao said, "The Long March is a manifesto, a propaganda force, and a seeding machine." On our long march, too, a fundamental task was to spread Mao Zedong's ideas. And we persistes though we were often very tired. Altogether we gave some 120 performances in over a hundred villages and small railway stops. We estimate our total audience at more than ten thousand people. We also distributed four hundred pamphlets containing the decisions of the party central committec, speeches by party leaders, and editorials of the People's Daily and ten thousand leaflets and posters with Mao Zedong's ideas.
    Our first performances were, indeed, a test for us! Only three of us had any experience. We were afraid people would laugh at us, but we remembered Chairman Mao Zedong's words: "It is often not a matter of first learning and then doing, but of doing and then learning, for doing is itself learning." We decided we must "learn to swim by swimming," as the Chairman taught. There was plenty of enthusiasm once we arrived at our decision. We composed our items at odd rest moments and rehearsed them on the way, gradually mastering the art of putting on a show including choral singing, solo singing, ballad recital, dialogue, and singing combined with acting.
    One evening we arrived at a village where the people asked us to put on a performance. It was just one kilometer from the rallway station where we were to have a meal and test. We had been walking most of the day and were very tired, and what is more, we had missed our lunch and were very hungry. What were we to do? We held a discussion and decided to give the performance. What were hunger and fatigue to us compared with the joy of meeting the people's wishes and disseminating Mao Zedong's thought!
    We put down our knapsacks and performed whenever there was an audience.  One day, we put on a show for three housewives. Our persistence in spreading Mao Zedong's thought insured us of a hearty welcome everywhere from the revolutionary masses. One old worker said to us very sincerely after watching us perform: "You are really good Red Guards of Chairman Mao! We of the older generation feel more assured with such good successors growing up......
    One young worker at a Dengxlan railway station presentes us with his most prized possession-a smali plaster cast of Chairman Maotogether with a letter in which he wrote: "Though we are at different revolutionary posts, we are one and the same in our determination to give our very lives in defense of Chairman Mao and to carry the great proletarian cultural revolution through to the end. We shall safeguard our impregnable proletarian state whatever the cost. In presenting you with this likeness of our great leader Chairman Mao, I am sure it will give you infinite strength on your journey." These deeply felt words greatly moved us, and thereafter wherever we stayed, we placed the statue in the most conspicuous place. Indeed, it always gave us fresh strength....
    At Fengtai station near Beijing, we went to see the nationally famous engine, the "Mao Zedong Special," and had a talk with members of the crew. It was a great experience, for they are fine students of Chairman Mao's works. What they told us opened our minds and made us all the more determined to study Chairman Mao's books and work for the revolution, and especially to study the three much-read articles and use them in remolding our ideology. We decided we would devote the whole of our lives to becoming truly reliable successors to the proletarian revolutionary cause.
    All along the way the workers and peasants showed great concern for our well-being. Very often a rallway worker's wife would insist on doing our washing and mending. Keeping close to the railway line all along our route, we had many indications of the deep class comradeship of the workers. It brought to mind the popular verse: "Great as are Heaven and earth, they are not as great as the good brought by the party.  Dear to us as our parents are, they are not as dear as Chairman Mao. Fine and good as many things are, none is as fine as socialism. Deep as the deepest ocean is, it is not as deep as class comradeship." Our hearts were linked by this class comradeship with the hearts of these people whom we had not met before.
    Our forty-four-day trek gave us the chance to learn how excellent traveling on foot is as a means to gain and exchange revolutionary experience. For it tempers your proletarian ideology, steels your willpower, and helps you to revolutionize your thinking. We learned a great many things we could not get from books and also gained personal experience of many things we had read about. In particular, we have deepened our understanding of the brilliant thought of Chairman Mao.
    Of course, we have taken only the very first step in the 10,000 li long march that lies before us, the first step along the glorious road which Chairman Mao has shown us.  We need to improve out creative study and application of Chairman Mao's works and to continue to temper and remold ourselves in the furnace of the great Cultural Revolution. We must revolutionize ourselves and become young militants who are really reliable successors to the cause of the proletarian revolution, for that is what Chairman Mao expects of us.

(EBREY, Patricia (ed.), Chinese Civilization, New York: The Free Press, 1993, pàgs. 450-457)