Fan Changjiang, a journalist for the reputable Ta Kung Pao newspaper in republican China, was a loyal communist and proud of it. He once boasted that “in newspapers and books published legally under Nationalist rule, I was the first person to call [the Communists] the Red Army ... and not bandits, and to announce that the Red Army was marching north to fight the Japanese, not fleeing like cowards.”
That was in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that would seize power in 1949 was still a fledgling group of rebels being suppressed by the Nationalist Chinese authorities that governed China at the time. Fan was referring to the Long March, a massive CCP retreat from its embattled territory in southern China.
