Initially the First Red Army, with its baggage of top communist officials, records, currency reserves and other trapping of the exiled Chinese Soviet Republic, fought through several lightly defended Kuomintang checkpoints, crossing the Xinfeng River and through the province of Guangdong, south of Hunan and into Guangxi.

In two days of bloody fighting, 30 November to 1 December 1934, the Red Army lost more than 40,000 troops and all of the civilian porters, and there were strongly defended Nationalist defensive lines ahead.

In January 1935, after the Red Army took over the city of Zunyi, a town of military importance in Guizhou, Southwest China, an enlarged meeting of the politburo of the CCP was held.

On the other hand, Liang Botai, Wu Liangping, Teng Daiyuan, Li Weihan, Wang Shoudao, and Yang Shangkun are also held to have attended by some sources.[who?

Mao's comparative distance from power over the past two years had left him blameless of the recent failures and in a strong position to attack the leadership.

Mao insisted that Bo Gu and Otto Braun had made fundamental military mistakes by using tactics of pure defense, rather than initiating a more mobile war.

The Red Army regained its military power, survived in Yan'an and ultimately defeated the KMT using a guerrilla strategy, and later through conventional warfare as it gained mass peasant support.