Ninety years of marching on with willpower and conviction

The spirit of the historic Long March continues to boost China's drive for national rejuvenation, inspiring the Chinese people to overcome hardships and secure new achievements in Chinese modernization.

Ninety years have passed since the survivors of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army completed their epic Long March, an incredibly tough odyssey across some of China's harshest terrain that reshaped the nation's modern history. What began as a strategic maneuver to evade encirclement became a celebrated feat of endurance.

Nine decades on, as China marks the anniversary of this achievement, the contrast between the Red Army that marched through snow-capped mountains and treacherous marshlands and today's People's Liberation Army could not be starker. Yet beneath all this hardware progress runs an unbroken thread: what ultimately defines a military's strength is not weaponry alone, but willpower and conviction.

In 1936, the Red Army finished its Long March with barely any heavy weaponry to its name. Soldiers marched on foot, carried rifles passed from hand to hand, and relied on captured artillery guns and improvised explosives against a better-armed adversary. Food, medicine and winter clothing were chronically scarce.

What held the force together was iron discipline, dedication to the revolutionary cause of liberating the people, and a willingness to sacrifice individual survival for a collective goal.

Victory was measured not in firepower, but in the ability to keep moving, keep fighting, and keep faith amid extreme difficulties.

Today, 90 years of struggle have forged a military at the cutting edge of global defense technology.

The PLA now fields the DF-61 intercontinental ballistic missiles; the J-20 and J-35 stealth fighters; and CNS Fujian, the world's largest conventionally powered aircraft carrier. Its inventory also includes advanced radars, a full spectrum of reconnaissance and combat drones, and futuristic tanks such as the Type 100. By every metric, the gap with the Long March era is immeasurable.

To casual observers, it may seem that modern weaponry has rendered the old ethos obsolete. But this misreads the nature of military power — advanced platforms extend reach and lethality, yet they do not replace the human factor that ultimately decides wars. Sophisticated radars cannot replace the judgment of an operator under pressure. Stealth fighters cannot fly themselves through contested airspace without calm, determined pilots. A carrier battle group is only as formidable as the sailors who man it, the officers who command it, and the shared purpose that binds them together.

That is why the Long March spirit remains relevant, even in an age of hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence. The qualities forged on that expedition — unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party of China's leadership, fearlessness in the face of overwhelming odds, endurance when supplies run out, and solidarity across ranks — are not relics of a low-tech past. They are the intangible backbone of any credible fighting force.

Modernization is not about replacing spirit with steel; it is about arming a steadfast spirit with the best hardware available.

The Long March endures not as a museum piece, but as a living standard. Hardware will continue to evolve. New missiles, new aircraft, new ships and new satellites will enter service and eventually be retired. What never fades is the resolve that carried an army across mountains and grasslands on foot — and that still gives purpose to every soldier, sailor and pilot who serves today.