THE SECOND LONG MARCH
Memoir from a Witness to China’s Transformation
The Book
The front and back cover photos were taken at the same spot 24 years apart.
China's Economic Revolution on a personal scale
Just two years after the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations, newlyweds Patti Isaacs and Gauss Rescigno lived in the Chinese city of Xi'an during the last days of a collectivized economy. Returning to Xi'an twenty four years later, Patti found a city transformed. Once slow, agrarian, and nearly rural in character, modern Xi'an had freeways, traffic jams, and a high-tech zone.
“When I arrived in China in 1981, people were still dressing uniformly in drab colors and baggy slacks. The polite form of address for everyone, even foreign me, was ‘comrade’. Nearly everyone worked for the government. Grain was rationed. I knew I was experiencing a way of life that was disappearing. ”
Author Patti Isaacs
About the Book
The Story of
The Second Long March
The Second Long March refers to The Long March, a military maneuver and cultural campaign that ultimately led to victory for the Chinese Communists in 1949. The title of this book by Patti Isaacs, published by Atmosphere Press in September 2022, reflects on modern China’s second revolution, an economic shift, as it was experienced by ordinary people. And like the conclusion of the original Long March, this story takes place in the northern Chinese province of Shaanxi.
Freed from the constraints of a purely collectivized economy and buoyed by the government’s unprecedented push to build infrastructure, the Chinese have embraced enterprise, innovation, and great cuisine with exuberance. But along with material wealth comes greed and inequality. Looking back on recent history, Isaacs’s former students voice surprising nostalgia for life under the old system.
