by Xinhua Writer Chang Ai'ling

    BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- When Li Shuiqing joined the Red Army at just 13 years of age in 1930, he was disgruntled with his company commander. The company, which had more than 100 soldiers, had to share a handful of rifles and dozens of spears and broadswords. Li was told, as a "Little Red Devil" - a tag given to all teenage recruits - he was too young to hold any weapon.

    "Stop grumbling. As long as we follow the Red Army, the whole of China will be ours!" the company commander told Li, in a futile attempt to shake the pessimism out of the teenager.

    The Communist Party-led army was only three years old at that time. Li was typical of its soldiers - mostly uneducated peasants or laborers who had no logistics or weapon supplies.

    THE PEASANT GUERRILLAS

    Over the next three years, Li and his fellow soldiers followed the Red Army in fighting against the troops led by the Kuomintang, then the ruling party of China. The Red Army managed to withstand four large-scale offensives by the Kuomintang troops, expanding rapidly to a force of more than 100,000 soldiers.

    But in 1934, the Kuomintang launched a fifth round of attacks and captured the Red Army's revolutionary base, which triggered the beginning of the Communist's two-year "strategic retreat", now universally known as the Long March.

    "The 12,500-km trek was full of hardships, bloodshed and do-or-die battles," said Li, then a company political instructor, charged with educating his troops in Communist ideology.

    When Li and his soldiers were crossing the wetlands in north Sichuan Province in August 1935, food was scarce to the extreme. Li gave each soldier five broad beans over the first two days. On the third day, they frantically sliced up one cowhide belt and boiled it to eat.

    "Hunger, disease and swamps killed thousands of my comrades, including my first company commander," Li said. Of the 86,000 men and women who joined the Long March, just over 7,000 survived. Li was one of them.