Lessons of the long march: What Mao’s playbook means for Xi’s leadership and Australia

This article appeared in Asialink Insights on November 4 2026.

When Xi Jinping welcomes Asia-Pacific leaders to the APEC Summit in Shenzhen — China’s tech capital bordering Hong Kong and the heart of its electric-vehicle, robotics, and AI industries — on November 18–19, Australian political and business leaders can expect familiar promises of openness. Those promises, however, must be read alongside China’s drive to strengthen its own technological capabilities.

Xi’s commemoration speech on the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Long March offered a clue: China wants the benefits of global exchange while reducing foreign leverage over its technological development. For Australian exporters, investors and technology partners, improving diplomatic relations will therefore coexist with Beijing’s determination to build domestic capabilities. Businesses need to assess how and in what sectors foreign participation will fit China’s strategic priorities.

Western accounts of the Long March (1934–1936) often emphasise the gruelling trek. For Xi, this is also family history: his father, Xi Zhongxun, helped establish Yan’an that became the heartland of Mao’s revolutionary leadership. A series of military retreats, the Long March was recast as the Communist Party’s founding story of survival through transformation. 

In his anniversary address, Xi distilled four lessons reflecting his governing agenda. First, the “Party’s correct leadership” justifies centralising command over science, supply-chain security and economic policy. Second, “unwavering revolutionary will” helps mobilise Party members and citizens through hardship. Third, “independence and seeking truth from facts” underpin technological self-reliance and tactical flexibility. Finally, “relying on the people” frames “common prosperity” and public support as the bedrock of regime resilience.

Compared with Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, technocrats who rose through the post-1949 bureaucracy and emphasised growth as a source of legitimacy under collective leadership, Xi is often portrayed as a custodian of Mao’s inheritance. He is one of China’s “princelings” (hongerdai)—the offspring of the founding revolutionaries such as Xi’s father. This helps explain why Xi uses Mao-style tools—centralised authority, anti-corruption campaigns, and ideological discipline—not to restore a 1950s planned economy, but to steel the Party against Western pressure while retaining a market economy.

Beijing’s high-profile commemoration of the Long March’s 90th anniversary is not an exercise in nostalgia. The leadership sees echoes of that predicament in China’s strategic environment today and the historical metaphor gives such challenges a purpose.

Years of foreign technology restrictions can be portrayed as obstacles to overcome; the implied message to advocates of concessions is that accommodation cannot secure access to critical technologies.

To counter anxiety over a weakening property market, sluggish consumption and technology sanctions, state media casts industrial innovation as part of a New Long March. That narrative can also justify directing capital from property speculation towards long-term, state-backed engineering projects: a space station that crowned a 30-year human-spaceflight programme, nuclear reactors, deep-sea submersibles and quantum computers. Semiconductor and AI restrictions can thus be framed as hardships that pale beside the Red Army’s ordeal.

The historical comparison has limits. In 1934, the Party was fighting for survival. The New Long March metaphor reveals an institutional tension: while the Long March demanded military obedience and sacrifice, cutting-edge scientific innovation requires different conditions in the silicon age. Creative freedom and patience in basic research cannot be provided by ideological pep talks.

Just as importantly, in Beijing’s playbook, “self-reliance” does not mean closing the door to the world. Xinhua pairs calls for independent innovation with promises of broader market access for foreign investors. The aim is to combine domestic technological resilience with greater influence over regional trade and global technology rules.

Universities offer a practical test. If Beijing wants research that produces breakthroughs over decades, funding and promotion systems must reward that horizon. Publication counts and short project cycles are poor substitutes for assessing difficult, potentially valuable work.

For Australian businesses, the implications vary across the value chain. A business supplying raw materials faces different choices from one developing processing capacity, licensing technology or seeking a research partner. China’s pursuit of domestic capability may create opportunities for collaboration while intensifying competition. Firms need to assess whether their advantage rests on a scarce resource, specialist knowledge, cost or temporary gaps in Chinese capability.

For Australian universities and technology firms, cooperation should be judged through concrete questions: who sets research priorities, who owns the resulting intellectual property, and whether researchers can share data, methods and findings across borders.

For Canberra, the priority is to make cooperation durable enough to withstand strategic disagreement. Australia should use APEC and bilateral talks to seek clearer commitments on reciprocal market access, regulatory transparency and the handling of trade disputes. Diplomatic success would mean that commercial cooperation can survive political differences.

APEC will showcase the opportunities China wants to offer the region. By invoking the Long March in Beijing and welcoming global leaders to Shenzhen, Xi Jinping is playing a two-handed game: using Mao-style mobilisation at home to shield China’s tech supply chains from Western sanctions, so that Beijing can champion regional trade and shape global tech rules from a position of strength. Australia’s task is to build partnerships whose value can endure that transition.